Almost all the psychological research reports, that is, empirical papers, will elaborate the significance of the research in the foreword, usually with such a summary: "it can be seen that this study has important theoretical and practical significance." At the same time, the significance of the study will be demonstrated in the discussion part, and it will be expressed again like this: "in a word, this study has important theoretical and practical significance."

So, after this kind of echoing statement and emphasis, can it really show that a research is of great significance?

Obviously, there are certain criteria for judging whether a research is meaningful, especially important. For example, the importance of research problems, the originality of research methods, the breakthrough of research results, etc. I think the core here is the importance of research issues - if research issues are not important, even if there are pioneering research methods, it is difficult to have breakthrough research results. Therefore, the key to judge the significance of a research is the importance of the research problem.

The importance of research questions has two meanings: first, the research question itself is important, for example, students' learning problems; second, the basic level of research is important, for example, students' learning motivation. Philosophically speaking, the first meaning of the importance of research problem is that the research problem belongs to the main contradiction, not the secondary contradiction; the second meaning of the importance of research problem is that the research problem belongs to the main aspect of the contradiction, not the secondary aspect of the contradiction. Therefore, for a specific research field, if the research is not the main contradiction or the main aspect of the contradiction, then the corresponding research is difficult to say that it is of great significance.

Here, I propose a quantitative index to determine the significance of psychological research - in fact, it is to borrow an existing statistic.

At present, in the field of psychological research, there is a lot of controversy about the traditional statistical significance test. Some experts also put forward some improved indicators to analyze the data, such as effect quantity. In short, effect quantity is the effect of independent variable on dependent variable. In order to facilitate comparison, the effect quantity can be standardized. American psychologist Jacob Cohen put forward two commonly used effector indexes D and η 2 (the square of η), and set three levels: large, medium and small, with corresponding values of 0.2, 0.5, 0.8 and 0.1, 0.3 and 0.5 respectively. It can be considered that if the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable is large, then it can be judged that the corresponding research has grasped the main contradiction or the main aspect of the contradiction, and the corresponding research is of great significance; if the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable is medium, then the corresponding research is meaningful; if the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable is small So, the corresponding research is of little significance.

Jacob Cohen found that the effect amount in psychological research is usually small or medium, rather than large. This is easy to understand, because the factors that affect any kind of psychological attributes are extremely complex and numerous, and researchers often can only select the important and / or meaningful factors he / she thinks to investigate. In particular, the factors investigated may not be the important or main influencing factors, so such independent variables can not have a large effect on the dependent variables.

For example, the study of students' learning problems, examine the factors that affect academic performance. Even those who don't know psychology know that academic performance is related to students' intelligence, effort, school, family and social environment. Of course, psychological research can be investigated from these aspects, but it certainly will not study so many factors at the same time, and tends to study psychological variables, such as learning motivation, academic emotion, self-efficacy, teacher-student relationship, academic anxiety, self-esteem, depression, etc. In this way, the actual investigation of the researchers is only a part of the factors that affect academic performance, and even only those factors that the researchers pay special attention to. It is conceivable that the effect of each of these factors on academic performance is unlikely to be large.

At the same time, the study is likely to find that the effect of learning motivation and Academic Emotion on academic performance is greater than that of self-efficacy and teacher-student relationship on academic performance. Even so, researchers are more likely to examine the impact of self-efficacy rather than learning motivation on academic performance. The reasons are more complex and will not be discussed here.

The problem is that whether the researcher is investigating the impact of learning motivation or self-efficacy on academic performance, he / she should say that his / her research is of great significance. Nowadays, the effect quantity can be easily obtained through statistical software or manual calculation. If learning motivation can explain 30% (η 2 = 0.30) of the difference in academic achievement (statistical term is variance), and self-efficacy can explain 4% (η 2 = 0.04) of the difference in academic achievement, then the research on learning motivation can be called of certain significance (or even of great significance), while the research on learning motivation is of great significance In fact, the study of self-efficacy is of little significance, although, in the statistical significance test, we will find that self-efficacy can significantly predict students' academic performance.

Based on this, we can view or calculate the effect of any study, and judge its research significance according to the standard given by Jacob Cohen. If so, I think many papers, especially dissertations, will have to rewrite the expression of research significance.