Video Game Violence Article Activity

This assignment is based on a research article on Video Game Violence. Some of the questions in the assignment are specifically about the article. Other questions, especially some about causal structures, regression results, and scatterplots, are more abstract and are not specifically about the article.

Here is the link to this article on Video Game Violence. This assignment is based on the Introduction and Study 1.
Materials
- The assignment is on TopHat and the TopHat version is the most updated and simplest. You can also see an older version:
- See this MS Word Document and this powerpoint.
- Answers to assignment: Answer Key
- Class recording

Activity Info

Objectives
- practice reading an article
- practice identifying causal structures from text
- practice identifying causal structures from statistical findings
- practice mapping the relationships between causal structures, statistical results, and scatterplots
What Students Should Be Able To Do After This Activity
- this homework gives practice doing a variety of the skills learned over the past couple weeks of class, particularly with regards to causality and regression
- students should be able to do the multi-part questions relating causal diagrams, regression choices and results, and scatterplots
Prerequisite Knowledge
- what it means to control for a variable
- when to control for a variable and when not to, and why
- how to read a regression table
- how to draw a line of best fit overall and for groups individually
What Students Struggle with
- All of these skills are difficult and require practice
- This homework introduces a new way of testing their ability to decide which statistical test to run, how the test would come out, and what the correct causal structure is, using a multiple choice format, and students also struggle with this format. It is important to teach them this format because it will be used for the test.