Video Games & Social Media
Oscar Mendez
City College of New York
Lab Report 1: Middle School Students’ Social Media Use
Florence Martin, Chuang Wang, et al, conducted a report/survey on middle school students on how they feel and use social media as well as the dangers that come from using social media such as digital fingerprints, creeps, hackers, etc. With this survey conducted, it is meant to inform the school as well as parents about the issues of social media and the need to implement cyber-security education for the sake of these childrens safety when going through the web or simply using it for school.
Lab Report 2: EFFECTS OF VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES ON AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, AGGRESSIVE COGNITION, AGGRESSIVE AFFECT, PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL, AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR: A Meta- Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature
Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushm, found that televisions and movies lead to aggressive behaviors in humans as TV’s and Movies began implementing more violence into their work. The research relates to these events and connects it to Video Games and their implementation of violence and how it also leads to aggressive behaviors and unwanted physiological behaviors that poses a threat to today’s world (School Shootings, Murder, etc.).
I will be discussing how these two Lab Reports are formatted, their similarities and differences from each other and whether they follow the “Technical Communication” textbook, Writing Lab Reports format.
Title
As we may already know, Titles are short, sweet, and eye catching for the reader to pick up and read. In the Textbook, “Technical Communication,” Titles should be informative for readers to interest them, use words and abbreviations that the reader is familiar with, and use keywords when they are looking for something to pick up and read. Although most lab report titles do follow this format, some can be quite ridiculous to come across, like Lab Report 2’s title, where the title is quite long, bolded, repeats the word ‘AGGRESIVE’ in the title, and quite literally, mentions everything that was conducted and found in their study onto their title. This title happens to follow the Technical Communication Title format as it is good for readers who are looking for a report mentioning Aggressive behavior, and physiological connection to video games and uses a keyword for readers to pick up and read, the word being aggressive. However, unlike Lab report 1, Lab Report 2’s title is the opposite, as it is short, and misleading since there is no explanation to the use of social media on middle schoolers whether it is a good thing or a bad thing or even if a discovery was found. This title does not follow the format from the textbook since it’s not informative and does not contain any key words for readers to look for in the title. As you can see, Titles are short, informative, and understandable for readers to look but to further understand more of their work, the reader must read the Abstract to see an actual summary of what the writer has done throughout this whole report.
Abstract
Similar to the conclusion, the textbook best summarizes this section as the summary of the writer’s work mirroring the lab report’s structure from introduction all the way to conclusion. Lab Report 1’s Abstract clearly tells the reader what they found in their research, the idea of theirs as to why it was conducted, and the conclusion from this research on how K-12 school students use social media. While the abstract appears as it’s own body in Lab Report 1, the abstract body cannot be found in Lab Report 2, does not provide any statistical evidence to back up their claim, and no conclusion was made from their work but instead a vague explanation from their research being found to prove their claim like “A meta-analytic review of the video game research literature reveals that Violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults.” While Lab Report 1 follows the Technical Communication textbook format in that it shows statistical evidence, conclusion, method, and easy for readers to see if it peaks their interest, Lab Report 2 does not follow the format for the reason being that the author formatted his work as a General Article rather than a Lab Report format where in a General Article, you are free to write in your own style while also providing topics and bodies explaining/relating to your work. While the abstract certainly tells the reader about their report, the introduction tells the reader the purpose of this lab report and what they wish to gain from conducting this report.
Introduction
As mentioned before, the intro sets the reader up for what the writer has, letting the reader understand their claim, information behind why the report will be done, and how the experiment will be approached and conducted. Lab report 1 has 3 paragraphs separated for the intro stating their claim on the first paragraph “As students are increasingly engaged in technology and cyber learning at very young ages, there is a heightened concern for their safety”, providing background information to the topic in the second paragraph “Many have expressed concerns that this use may have negative impacts on various areas of teenage life.”, and their approach to the experiment in the last paragraph “To investigate this issue, Dowell, Burgess and Cavanaugh (2009), surveyed 404 middle school students on their engagement in online risky behaviors.” On the other hand, Lab Report 2, does not have it’s own body for Intro but instead it has loads of information across the page, ranging from definitions, analysis from other sources related to the writers claims, and discoveries from other sources. While the two formats differ from each other, the Technical Communication textbook would find both Lab Reports to be well formatted as they do establish their work being important, question the study, “include a concise review of previous research” and “describe how your study extends the knowledge in your field or overcomes a weakness in previous studies.” Knowing the reasons to the writers work can prove interesting but the more interesting part of a lab report is the experiment.
Methods & Materials
This section covers the necessary needs on the approach taken to prove your claim by providing answers and results related to your question/claim from the start. Lab Report 1 provides the participants being used” Five hundred and ninety-three middle school students (6th to 8th grade) from two schools”, how the survey will be conducted “collect information about the participants’ use of social media and their opinions towards cyber safety”, and the procedure “Descriptive statistics were used to report the frequency and percentage of the categories participants chose as responses to the multiple-choice questions.” All these pieces to conduct the experiment allow Lab Report 1 to show their targets, surveys, and what to be gained, meaning their research is considered a primary source. Lab Report 2 is different from Lab Report 1, as it uses previous research that were conducted in the past as their methods and materials while also sticking to their claim with these supporting researches found online, “If a research report did not contain enough information to calculate an effect-size estimate, we contacted the authors and requested the missing information.”. Lab Report 2 does not actually conduct an experiment but instead gather information from other experiments and grab details that support their own claim. The reason for this format chosen by the author from the two Reports are to explain their own claim in unusual ways as Lab Report 2 stated that there were “2000” entries about video games and violence but 35 proved useful while Lab Report 1 does not state how many there are that relate to their issue, they may as well be the very first ones, or a primary source since the experiment is being conducted for the first time and cannot be found elsewhere. The Technical Communication textbook does approve both formats for this section as they do explain the tools used, the procedures, and chronological order for their experiments. After gathering all the evidence needed from their experiments, the results section lets us readers know if the evidence found prove their claim or not.
Results
The results section is the chance to prove the writer’s point as to why they created this lab report and to prove other viewpoints on this topic that go against them in a later body. Lab Report 1 provides loads of questions answered by their participants giving them the answers needed to back up their claim, asking questions like “What bothers middle school students the most about using social media?” or “Do middle school students accept friend requests from people they do not know?” allowing for their claim, the need of cyber-security for kids, to be backed up with the answer/results they got. As stated before, the formatting is different but the gathered evidence from other sources supporting the claim allowed for multiple diagrams to be formed, as well as statistical data, and other bodies of categories supporting the claim. After all evidence has been gathered, the Technical Communication textbook says that the Results section should “summarize the data relevant to the question or hypothesis you discussed in your intro” but Lab Report 1 fails to summarize their evidence as this section only shows their data collected and no summary or connection to their claim stated from the beginning whereas Lab Report 2, each section inside the results body restates their claim with the gathered evidence while also explaining the evidence found and summarizing it for the reader to understand what the evidence means to them and how this connects to their claim. Note that after being able to gather your results, explaining how these results or evidence is crucial to claim stated before.
Discussion
The writer in this section must explain the relevance of these results related to the claim, useful or not, the writer will have to explain. Lab Report 1 makes effective use of all their results, explaining what the results gathered mean categorically, and how the results reveal an issue for middle schoolers using the web, “Private information vs. Privacy”, “Gender distinction”, “Age and befriending strangers on social media”, etc. Alternatively, Lab Report 2 does not quite do the same with having multiple other sections explaining their results but instead a singular paragraph summarizing all the data found, the connections to the claim, a small summary of each data found, and explains how certain data found was not used therefore explaining why, “The type of re-search missing from the video-game domain is longitudinal research. Given the similarity of the processes activated by various types of media and the similarity of findings in the extant literatures on video-game and TV-movie violence, it would be very surprising if repeated exposure to violent video games did not increase long-term aggression”. Interestingly, both formats for the discussion section are well suited for the Technical Communication textbook format as they explain their results well enough to show how it relates to their claim and how certain data/results were not used.
Conclusion
Finally, the Technical Communication textbook says that the section summarizes the main points of the report, goes over the research, and explains what to be accomplished from this, while also trying to be persuasive to get readers to understand you. Lab Report 2 does not have a conclusion section, interestingly enough, the discussion section was the summary where the author effectively used all their evidence in a persuasive manner but fails to connect to the claim stated from the beginning, “these results clearly support the hypothesis that exposure to violent video games poses a public-health threat to children and youths, including college-age individuals.” On the other hand, Lab Report 1 does have a conclusion that reiterates what was said from the beginning and before while also being persuasive, “This study was conducted as a needs…”, “It is essential to educate the students…”, and “The results of this study will benefit teachers, technology directors, parents, and school administrators to identify social media use among the middle school students. The results may also provide support to guide and inform instructional practices with the curriculum.”
Overall, both lab reports have their own formatting style to best fit their information while also being able to stay on topic, deliver the information needed, and to let the reader gain something out of their work. While the Technical Communication textbook does allow the writer to understand how to write a lab report, the formatting does not necessarily need to be similar or meet its requirements to be considered a “lab report” but instead to formally address what the author wishes to tell its readers what they are talking about as a starter.
References
Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature. Psychological Science, 12(5), 353–359. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40063648
Martin, F., Wang, C., Petty, T., Wang, W., & Wilkins, P. (2018). Middle School Students’ Social Media Use. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 213–224. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26273881
