The purpose of this course is to give you a thorough grounding in the empirical research techniques that we use in psychology. For historical reasons, we call this course "experimental" psychology, but we don't restrict ourselves to true experiments. Survey research, naturalistic observation, and quasi-experiments will also be covered. We'll also give some attention to non-empirical issues; deeper theoretical question in psychology often cannot be evaluated on the basis of empirical data alone. You will get a good deal of practice in writing about your studies—good, clear scientific writing is the goal, not just conformity to the stylistic norms of psychology journals—and in critical thinking about the claims that researchers make.

This is a tough, labor-intensive course. I don't have an attendance policy, because I don't think adults need one. It does not follow that skipping classes is a good idea. There is no textbook. All course materials will be presented in lecture and on Canvas.

Regular attendance at class and lab and timely work on the written assignments are necessary for success in this course. You will be helping to conduct 3 laboratory studies and writing them up: you will be drafting the front sections of your final project (Introduction and Method); you will be preparing an application to submit to the Institutional Review Board; and you will producing a final report of the entire project. (In addition, if you can get us a draft of the Results and Discussion sections for comment a few days before you turn in your final paper, this is likely to be beneficial for you.) Written assignments that are late will have 5 points out of 100 deducted for each day past the due date. It's critical to stay on schedule when there is so much for you to do and for us to grade. If I haven't arrived—or Katie hasn't arrived—within 15 minutes of the scheduled time for a class or lab to begin, you are free to leave.

Instead of tests, there will be a daily quiz, consisting of 1 to 3 questions. (With three class days in most weeks, we will do "daily" quizzes two days out of three, on the average.) You may drop 6 daily quiz grades for any reason (including absences); the daily quiz average will be based on the remaining 21 or 22 quizzes. The volume rules out make-ups, and daily quizzes will not be returned to you; grades for the quizzes will be posted on Blackboard. The final project counts as our final exam.

Your grade will be determined on a contract basis. To receive a grade of A, B, C, or D in this class, you must turn in your IRB submission by the date specified in the schedule below. Each of the other assignments will then count toward your final grade as follows.

Learning objectives for this course:

• Be able to distinguish accurately between the kinds of empirical studies that allow inferences to be drawn about what causes what, and those that do not.
• Be able to identify what makes a hypothesis testable, and the difference between testing and proving.
• Be able to recognize the differences between a typical problem of psychological measurement (e.g., measuring anxiety) and a typical problem of physical measurement (e.g., measuring weight).
• Identify the two key ethical principles in any kind of research with human participants, showing how they govern what kinds of studies should be done at all, and what kinds of procedures should be used.
• Become adept at quoting, paraphrasing, and citing correctly from a variety of media sources, using APA style and its associated norms.

Laptop policy:

Laptop computers are helpful in this course, and are necessary to do the data analysis in our labs.

If you bring a laptop to the lectures, please use it for class-related purposes, such as taking notes and access course materials. If I notice that you are playing Solitaire on it, viewing Snapchat or Instagram, or IMing, I may ask you not to bring it back to our next class.

We will be using the SPSS grad pack for statistical analysis. It runs on both Macs and Windows machines. The Psychology Department will provide licenses that are good through the end of August 2017; you will receive these during the first week of classes. If you have a different stat package already installed on your computer that you like, you are welcome to use it; however, our consulting ability is limited to SPSS, plus the other stat packages that one of has recently used (SAS-JMP and SOFA).

Cheating policy:
Cheating means providing or accepting information on a quiz (quizzes are meant to be your individual work). Or not being the sole author of your writeups (we encourage you to discuss the writeups and your final project with others, but the actual writing on your lab writeups—and the actual data collection, analysis, and writing on your final project—must be yours alone). If you decide to cheat, we will take action against you according to University policy.

You should bring your laptop to each lab. We put our data files together using Excel, which we also normally use to find means and standard deviations. For more advanced analysis, we are using the SPSS "grad pack," which runs on both Windows and Mac OS machines.

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