“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

Course
Goals

PSY 202 is one of the few explicitly-required courses for the Psychology major at Wheaton College. This is because no matter what aspect of Psychology you may practice after your graduation, all of what you will have learned about that area of Psychology has been based at least in part on quantitative research. To truly be a psychologist, one must understand how knowledge in the field is generated.

The goal of this course is to introduce you to the concepts, methods, and controversies of quantitative methods in the field of Psychology. One way to do this is just by talking about it, but as the Chinese proverb above suggests, that is not a very effective means of education.

Far better to practice what you learn! Thus, PSY 202 is an intensive, hands-on course in research methods. You'll get to try your hand at some of the methods we discuss, thereby generating some new knowledge while you are learning, and hopefully having some fun!

Specific Goals:

Some of the course goals are specific to the department of Psychology. If you make satisfactory progress in this course, you will:

• understand the conceptual paradigms that shape psychological research
• understand fundamental elements of quantitative research methods in psychology
• recognize how paradigms and methods are related to issues of human diversity
• recognize and analyze ethical issues in quantitative research
• understand how statistics are related to research techniques
• be able to summarize and critique methods and results of published quantitative work
• be able to develop research proposals based on published quantitative studies

Generic Goals:

In addition to these discipline-specific goals, the course has 3 more generic goals, described in turn below:

*IMPROVING YOUR COMPUTER LITERACY. You are now living in the 21st century--the age of technology. That means that you need to be computer-literate: to know how to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, electronic mail. One of my objectives in this course is to help you to become familiar with computer technologies, so that you are ready for the new century! Improving your computer literacy is one of the goals of Morgan's PSY 202. Thus you will be asked to subscribe to a class email list, to check your mail regularly, to use the class Blackboard site as a resource, to use the text publisher's Internet worksite for practice and study, to post assignments using electronic mail, to collect and analyze data using a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel), to collect data using the Classroom Performance System, and to write up the results of your studies using a word processing program (Microsoft Word).

For this course, you MUST subscribe to the class listserv, psych202@wheatoncollege.edu. The listserv will be used to post announcements, study guides,news, and other information relevant to this course. All information posted to the list is considered valid class material for use in exams and quizzes. You can also use the list to have discussions about topics we cover in class, to ask questions of your classmates, instructor, or TA, or to form study groups.

You can subscribe to the class listserv now by clicking on this link. Leave the subject heading and the body of the message blank. You should get a confirmation message back from the listserv (a listserv is a computer, by the way--not a person!), to which you must reply in order to be subscribed to the list. Follow the instructions provided by the listserver in order to be subscribed to the list. NOTE: If you use an email account outside of your Wheaton account to do this (a gmail or Comcast account, for instance), you need to contact the Wheaton Systems Administrator (Brian Gibson: bgibson@wheatonma.edu) to ask to be subscribed to the list. Once subscribed, you need to check your email at least once a day, to look for announcements, study guides that your classmates might post, or other course information. REMEMBER: Material posted to the list is fair game for testing.

*IMPROVING YOUR CRITICAL THINKING. As a college graduate, you will be expected to be a good thinker. Yet rarely in any of your college courses will you be explicitly offered some help on how to think. Contrary to what you may believe, good thinking doesn't come naturally! It isn't all in your genes--it has to be learned. Good thinking is essential for you to be an effective citizen of this planet, and especially for you to be an informed consumer of information in the era of hypermedia (and hype!) A second set of goals for this course, then, includes improving your critical reasoning, and teaching you to be more objective in your considerations of the behavior of those around you.

*IMPROVING YOUR CAREER-RELATED SKILLSETS. I go to LOTS of conferences, all over the country. At them, I often meet people in business who hire graduates with Bachelor's degrees from places like Wheaton. I'm always very interested in talking to these people (from companies like Exxon, GTE, Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, the Educational Testing Service, etc.) because I want to be sure that (in addition to the best liberal arts education money can buy) my students have the best shot at obtaining jobs with these powerful employers. What is most amazing to me is that time after time, no matter WHO I am talking to, or what kind of company they represent, they always ask for the same 4 things. Yep--that is right. They don't seem to care what your major is, or what your GPA might be. But they DO care about these 4 things. Over and over, they tell me that what they want in a potential employee is someone who:

• Can solve problems

• Can work effectively and collaboratively with others

• Can communicate well both in writing and orally

• Has learned how to learn, in such a way that he or she is not afraid of learning new things, and can do so relatively rapidly.

The third goal of the course is to improve your job prospects for life after Wheaton, by improving your skills in those areas indicated by potential employers as most desirable.

The course is divided into four units. One of these (Unit II) is devoted to searching and using the quantitative research literature in psychology. This unit culminates in a brief research proposal at the end of the semester. The other three units address fundamental principles and practices in quantitative research methods. Within each unit we will learn how to use research methods to ask questions and how to apply statistical techniques to answer them. Each of these three units is followed by an exam.