# Common errors and omissions

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To ensure a high score on your Internal Assessment in IB Psychology, you need to avoid errors and include essential information in your report. You will find some suggestions below:

**Introduction**

* Explicitly state the relevance of your aim. The relevance needs to be more than just replicating a study. Explain the broader implications and applications of the aim of your investigation.
* Your research and null hypotheses are the two of the most important sentences in your report. Reports that operationalise the IV and the DV most successfully use the word “significant”.

**Exploration**

* When you explain your choice of participants, describe both the target population and your sample and why those participants were suitable.
* In the context of controlled variables, explain how you either controlled for participant variability (independent measures) or the order effect (repeated measures design).

**Analysis**

* Do not include more than one measure of central tendency and dispersion.
* Interpret the results of both your descriptive and inferential statistics.
* Check that the number of tails of your hypotheses and your calculation match.
* The means do not provide any support for your hypothesis. Only inferential statistics enable you to reach a conclusion about your hypothesis.
* Provide the working of inferential statistics. This [site on stats](https://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/) is highly recommended.

**Evaluation**

* Do not evaluate in terms of ecological validity. You are asked to evaluate your experimental design, not the experimental method.
* Modifications should be explicitly linked to an identified limitation.