Psychological Science: Psych Research Methods

Principles of research methodology, including design and reporting. Prepares students to understand and evaluate psychological research in a variety of areas of psychology. Credit not awarded for both PSYS 2002 and PSYS 2000. Prerequisite: PSYS 1400.

Prereq: PSYS 1400; Asynchronous online

This course is meant to enhance your understanding of the scientific method and help you appreciate how the scientific method help us figure out what’s true, what might be true, and what’s fiction. After taking this course you will: 1) understand key scientific concepts and terminology, 2) learn about and identify major methods of research and their strengths and weaknesses 3) critically evaluate scientific claims reported in journals, textbooks, or popular media. To be a good clinical psychologist, individuals must learn to be empathic, nonjudgmental listeners, as well as knowledgeable critical thinkers (good detectives and good strategists). Some comments from students who took the course last summer: @ Professor Benito always answered very quickly to any questions I had regarding the course. The online textbook was easy to navigate, and the blackboard assignments were very straight-forward technology wise. I really enjoyed this course @ Taking this summer course was the best decision for me. I had very few problems with the learning platforms used for this course and when I had questions, Professor Cepeda-Benito was very informative! @ Online class, set-up made it pretty straightforward. @Very knowledgeable and easy to work with

Online courses are attractive because you can work at your own pace and they also give you flexibility if you have other things to do while taking the course (i.e., you can skip one day and catch up at a later time). However, this flexibility is a double edge sword, for students may procrastinate allowing assignments to accumulate and become overwhelming. My plan is to give you some flexibility and some structure so that you make progress without excessive procrastination, and without "binge" studying episodes (which disrupt learning). Here is how it will go (most of the time): • Every week we will cover 2 textbook chapters, with assignment deadlines at 11 pm every Wednesday (first chapter), and Saturday (second chapter). • Each deadline has a 12-hour grace period — which means you can turn in your work up to 12 hours late without penalty. • Students who turn in all of their assignments on time for any given deadline period (by 11:00 pm of the day the assignment is due) will receive a 1% bump for all the assignments due by the deadline. • Conversely, assignments turned in after the 12-hour grace period will received a 10% penalty (only for the specific assignments that are late). • Turning in assignments within the grace period will be neither rewarded nor penalized. I've taught online courses for four years now and my students report the structure provided above helps them keep up with the material and obtain good grades. The students also like that online materials make the learning process relatively easy for the assignments prepare them to take the quizzes and the online format allows them to learn at their own pace. They know when they are ready to take the quizzes.

10% Open book group activities. 35% Each chapter requires to complete practice quizzes, learning curves (similar to quizzes), and online research in action assignments (a problem is described and the student needs to identify the important elements of the problem or propose viable solutions). All the above are also open book. 55% blackboard quizzes--3 attempts per quiz--only highest score counts.