Syllabus

BCSC 205: Syllabus

Fall 2024

Time & Location

Mondays & Wednesdays, 3:25 PM – 4:40 PM
Room 104 LeChase

Personnel

Instructor: Daniel W. Mruzek
Office: Meliora Hall Room 323
Office Hours: 9:30 AM on Thursdays and by appointment

Instructor: Karl S. Rosengren
Meliora Hall, Room 406
Office Hours: After class on Wednesday and by appointment

Olympia Mathiaparanam
Office: Meliora Hall 421
Office Hours: Thursday 11 to 12 and by appointment

Preparation for this course

Students enrolling in this course are expected to have an introductory background in general psychology or human development, and a basic familiarity with statistical methods. Past research experience is not necessary.

Course Description

This course provides students with knowledge and laboratory experience in designing and conducting research to address real-world problems proposed by University and Community Partners. This course will guide you through the process of conducting research in psychology and related fields. Much of the course involves working as part of a 3-person team of researchers to address a real-world research problem. This process will involve meeting with the research partners, conducting detailed background literature searches and summaries, coming up with a specific research question, deciding on methods to address the research question, conducting data collection or archival data preparation, conducting statistical analyses, and reporting your findings at a final research symposium and in a final written report in the form of a formal journal article.

Even though the partners will present particular topics of interest to them, you and your group will need to generate a specific empirical question, devise your own data collection methods to address this question. The final research symposium will take place during the time of our final exam and many of our partners will attend. Along the way, you will have learned the basics of experimental design, statistics, scientific writing, and presentation to an audience of both your peers and practitioners and experts in a variety of fields.

Much of the work, particularly in the middle third of the semester as you conduct your group projects, will involve working on your own and with your group outside of class. Use this freedom appropriately! Resist the temptation to procrastinate or overly depend upon the efforts of your fellow research team members.

Because this is an upper-level writing course, you will produce a formal paper in the format of a journal article, as well as several other smaller writing assignments. In addition, you will make several class presentations sharing your project and related results with the rest of the class. Overall, you will gain general experience with the process of carrying an idea from its inception to the completion of an empirical piece of research.

Course Learning Objectives

At the end of the course you should be able to:

  • Demonstrate proficiency with regard to the terminology and concepts involved in psychological research, especially with regard to experimentation
  • Obtain research articles relevant to a psychological topic via the online databases (PsycINFO, PubMed, Google Scholar), and synthesize this research
  • Formulate hypotheses and design research to test these hypotheses
  • Effectively communicate the results of your own psychological research by writing clear, persuasive, appropriately formatted APA-style research reports
  • Critically evaluate research results reported by others

Readings

Gorvine, B., Rosengren, K. S., Stein, S., & Biolsi, K. (2017). Research Methods: From Theory to Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Recommended

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.

A very good alternative to the APA Publication Manual is the reference tool developed at Purdue University in their Online Writing Lab (OWL)

Requirements and Grading

  1. Class Participation. Do all the readings in advance and participate in both online (on the Blackboard Discussion Board) and in-class discussions. We will call on you if we don’t hear from you on a regular basis. You are expected to come to class and participate fully in group work and discussions. We will be taking attendance (5% of your grade).
  2. Discussion Board. You are required to complete short reflections on various ethical issues related research on the Discussion Board and respond to two of your classmates’ reflections. We expect each of your reflections to be substantive in nature (i.e., contributes a unique thought, observation, or question to the discussion). A separate handout will describe these assignments in greater detail. We will give these out in class and you will have a few days to complete them and then respond to your classmates. Teams of 2 or 3 will be assigned to provide a brief summary (~15 minutes) of the class reflections You will receive one point for each reflection and two points for leading a discussion (10% of your grade). The presentations will occur on a number of Wednesdays throughout the semester.
  3. CITI Training. You are required to independently complete the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Ethics Training basic modules. This is an online ethics training required for all researchers conducting research with human participants. You will not receive any class credit for any assignments until you complete your CITI training. If you have already completed this training as part of working in a research lab you do not need to complete it again, as long as it has been completed within the last 3 years. You will need to hand in documentation that you have completed this training. Due 9/9
  4. Quizzes (30% of your grade): Over the course of the semester, we will have a series of brief quizzes at the beginning of class. These will be offered most Mondays and will be based primarily upon the reading.
  5. Group Research Project (55% of your grade). This project will include a number of separate components that you will complete over the course of the semester, culminating in a presentation of your research to the entire class and our University and Community Partners.
    1. Annotated Bibliography (5% of your grade). Due: 10/7/2024
    2. Draft of Introduction and Methods (5% of your grade). Due: 11/4/2024
    3. Draft of Results (5% of your grade). Due: 11/20/2024
    4. Final draft of the Research Paper in APA format (20% of your grade). These reports will be shared with our University and Community Partners. Due: 12/11/2024
    5. Final Presentation (20% of your grade). During Final Exam Time.

Weekly reports: Once groups have been formed for the out-of-class project, each group will be expected to send a short email by 8pm EST on Mondays of every week to update your instructors on your progress. Only one email per group is necessary and should cover what the group did towards the completion of the project during that week.

Group peer evaluation. It is important that all members of the group participate in some way in the development of the research question and in the collection and analyses of the data. Each student will be asked to fill out a peer evaluation form. This evaluation will be considered during grade assignment.

One of the main ideas behind the advanced writing requirement at the University of Rochester is to provide students with feedback regarding their work so they can improve their writing. At any time during the semester, feel free to bring us earlier drafts of any of the written assignments, and we will provide you with comments to help you improve it. These earlier drafts will not affect your grade.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The College has a new policy on Academic Honesty. Please review it online