NARRATOR:
You will hear two psychology students, Susie and Luke, discussing an assignment about sleep and dreams.
NARRATOR:
First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 24.
NARRATOR:
Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 24.
SUSIE:
So, Luke, our next psychology assignment has to focus on sleep and dreams.
LUKE:
I have just read an article explaining why so many dreams disappear from our minds shortly after we wake.
LUKE:
Most of mine are not especially interesting, but the writer's argument was that remembering every dream could make us confuse imagined experiences with events that really happened.
LUKE:
Forgetting them therefore acts as a kind of safeguard.
LUKE:
I had always thought the problem was simply that our memory had too little capacity for all that information.
SUSIE:
That was my assumption, too.
SUSIE:
What is your view of the claim that dreams can tell us what will happen in the future?
LUKE:
Belief in that idea appears in cultures all around the world.
SUSIE:
True, and many people can describe a dream that later seem to come true.
SUSIE:
But one explanation is that thousands of our dreams never match later events, and those are ignored or forgotten.
SUSIE:
We only notice the rare cases when something we see or do in real life brings an old dream back to mind.
LUKE:
Exactly, so the match is really down to chance.
LUKE:
I also read about segmented sleep.
LUKE:
According to the theory, people centuries ago would wake during the night, talk or have something to eat, and then return to bed.
LUKE:
I decided to try it.
SUSIE:
What made you do that?
LUKE:
Apparently it can improve creativity, though I am not sure why.
LUKE:
I stopped after a week because the routine simply did not suit my lifestyle.
SUSIE:
Young children often nap during the day, of course.
SUSIE:
Some students here carried out a study last term to discover the age when preschool children should stop.
SUSIE:
They spent a long time selecting an appropriate research method, but the data showed no clear pattern, so they could not reach a firm answer.
LUKE:
We should think about our own assignment now.
LUKE:
In the previous one, I found the final stage difficult, because we had to judge how successful our work had been and explain that judgment.
LUKE:
I also had some trouble producing the action plan.
SUSIE:
Planning was fine for me, but I lost marks on that self-assessment stage as well.
SUSIE:
My biggest difficulty, though, was the statistical analysis.
NARRATOR:
Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 25 to 30.
NARRATOR:
Now listen and answer questions 25 to 30.
SUSIE:
Shall we work through the plan for this assignment?
SUSIE:
We need to begin with a research question.
SUSIE:
Is there a relationship between the number of hours someone sleeps and the number of dreams they remember?
LUKE:
Next, we have to select our participants.
LUKE:
Would about 12 students be enough?
SUSIE:
Should we recruit other people from the psychology department?
LUKE:
I would rather choose a different subject area.
LUKE:
What about history?
SUSIE:
History students might have some interesting dreams.
SUSIE:
We could also consider literature students.
LUKE:
I do not really know anyone studying literature.
SUSIE:
We will drop that suggestion.
SUSIE:
Then we need to choose our methodology.
SUSIE:
Observation is one possibility, but it does not seem suitable here.
LUKE:
No, I think it has to be self-reporting.
LUKE:
We could ask the participants to complete the questions online.
SUSIE:
Since they need to respond immediately after waking, while they are still half asleep, paper would probably be more practical.
LUKE:
We must also consult the ethical guidelines for this kind of investigation.
SUSIE:
Yes, because the study involves humans, and research with people is governed by particular rules.
LUKE:
I checked those rules for an earlier assignment.
LUKE:
One section deals with assessing risk, and another says that any unnecessary stress for participants must be kept to a minimum.
SUSIE:
Let us hope the study does not give them nightmares.
SUSIE:
After collecting the data, we will analyze it and calculate the correlation between our two variables, sleep duration and the number of dreams.
SUSIE:
Then we can display the findings visually in a graph.
LUKE:
The final step is to reflect on the research and evaluate it.
LUKE:
That all seems fairly straightforward.
NARRATOR:
That is the end of part three.
NARRATOR:
You now have one minute to check your answers to part three.