Feedback from TRU F2F Psychology faculty
Hi Gail
I have had a quick look over this and it looks very thorough.
My one comment at this time is with respect to the practical research component and ethics – I see you have made a note about that, and I’m just wondering if you have spoken to Debbie Krebs in the research office about it? Even with naturalistic observation, the students would still have to apply for ethical approval for their research, and I suspect this will not fly because of the distance of the supervision. It places a heavy burden on the instructor to have to apply for ethics for multiple different projects.
In the Psyc3190 class I have students design a project in small groups, and they collect data in class (on their classmates). We have blanket ethical approval for this but we are under tight constraints (I gave many examples of the types of studies that we typically run) and I am actively engaged with the students at all stages of the process, and supervise even the data collection process.
Have you considered using any canned psychological experiments available online? These are often available for the student to try (as a participant themselves), and then there is access to other classes’ data so that the students have some data to look at, (even though their statistical analyses will be limited because they have not learned about statistics in this course). For example, see: http://opl.apa.org/
It would be possible for the instructor to apply for ethics approval for, say, a small selection of these studies, and then the students could choose which one to use for their project. Perhaps one aspect of their research report would be to suggest a variation on the original study that would advance research knowledge in this area (that way they still get some practice at research design).
Another way to do this, so that students can have the experience of designing a study from scratch, is to have them go through the design process and then invent some data. This also tests their ability to have some understanding of what a dataset might look like (i.e., scores are not perfectly reliable, the average from the experimental group might be higher than the average for the control group but that does not mean that everyone scores that way, and so on) and still allows them to then reflect on the flaws in their own design when they write up the final research report. However, I think that at the second year level this is challenging – the students, having just completed intro psych, have such limited knowledge of any specific subject area that they struggle to think of a research question. Then their topics end up being so different that it is hard to mark them objectively. Again here, it might be easier to discuss a key research study and then have the students design a follow-up study to answer unanswered questions (and then invent the data).
For the “archival” research option, that is not as relevant to psychological science as a research method so I wonder how useful it would be for them to complete a project using that approach.
I hope this feedback is useful. Best,Catherine
Catherine N M Ortner, PhD Department of Psychology Thompson Rivers University
Thank you Catherine for your thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions. These are early days and we are certainly considering a few options for the research component of this course. • For the naturalistic observation study, the idea would be to obtain course-level REB approval for the project with rather specific parameters. • Having said that, the APA's online psych lab + other online resources like GoCognitive.net that host simulations or even the IAT are also possibilities. • The archival option would very much be relevant to psychological science - this could take the form of, for example, tests of a priori hypotheses using James Penebaker's online LIWC tool that analyses changes in speech or even tweets over time or across different segments of the population. • The option of "inventing data" is what PSYC 2111 at TRU-OL currently does, but this endangers the articulation of the course (e.g., at last year's articulation meeting UBC advised that their new senate policy restricts transfer credit for Research Methods courses taken at other institutions to only those that involve actual data collection). Aside from this, though, I would argue that there are skills and experiences picked up while actually collecting the data that would be otherwise missed. Farhad and I will certainly consider your suggestions though - they are much appreciated. Two of the challenges with designing this particular course is that there is no cohort (so students cannot use one another as participants) and the students may be quite isolated (hence the archival option). Thanks again, Rajiv
Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Faculty Fellow, BC Campus Open Textbook Project Director of Research, Resources, and Special Initiatives, STP Early Career Psychologists Committee Associate Editor, Psychology Learning & Teaching
