Syllabus

BCSC 205: Syllabus

Fall 2023

Time & Location

Monday & Wednesday, 3:25 – 4:40 PM
Room 104 LeChase

Personnel

Instructor: Daniel W. Mruzek
Office: Meliora Hall Room 323
Email:
After class Monday 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
Email: omathiap@UR.Rochester.edu
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, human development, a basic familiarity with neural and cognitive foundations of behavior, and a course in statistical methods and design. Students with this background obtained through courses other than those prerequisites listed above may consult one of the instructors for permission to enroll.

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 cognitive development, and related fields. Much of the course involves working as part of a team of researchers to present information about research design and methodology. Each student will also work as part of a 3 researcher team to address a problem presented by a community or university partner. Even though the partners will present particular topics of interest to them, you and your group will generate a specific empirical question, devise data collection methods to address this question, collect the data, analyze the data, write a journal article style report, and present your findings in a class "conference" at the end of the semester. Many of our partners will attend this final conference. 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.

Also, this course will give you some of the flavor of academic research in the field of psychology as a profession, and is good preparation for those considering graduate school in psychology or cognitive science. 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 a number of 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 if you plan to publish psychological research

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. ISBN-13: 978-1433832161

Additional readings will be added over the course of the semester. These will be posted on Blackboard.

Library Research Help

The research guide for Psychology may be useful and can be accessed online

If you need research help for this course/assignments, River Campus Librarians may be able to help.

Find help accessing library resources off-campus. You can also ask for help at the Q&i Desk in any of our campus libraries or chat with a librarian online via the “Online Chat” link on the library website.

Purdue University maintains an excellent resource for writing in general and formal writing in psychology more specifically.

Laptop Policy

We understand that many scholars prefer to take notes on their laptops during class and there are times that it will be useful for scholars to use laptops in class for their research projects. However, we have found that the use of laptops in class can be distracting for other class members, as well as the scholar using the laptop. Laptop use often takes away from active participation in class – especially with respect to class discussions. For this reason if you desire to use your laptop to take notes in class you must send us an email asking for permission and we will require that you sit in a particular location in the classroom. If we find that members of the class are using their laptops inappropriately (e.g., email, online shopping, online poker, videogaming) we will restrict the use of laptops to times when research teams are actively working on their research projects.

What you can expect of us

We are committed to making this course not only an educational experience, but a fun and positive experience as well. To that end, just as we expect for each of you to make efforts over the course of the term to communicate your needs and concerns to us, We will endeavor to give you regular feedback and make ourselves available to you. In addition to the time that we spend together in class, we will do our best to make ourselves available to you for help and consultation outside of class time, and we hope you will avail yourself of our office hours.

Please check the Blackboard website frequently for updates, announcements and information about the course.

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 on Research Ethics.
    • Forum discussion. You are required to complete short reflections on ethical issues related to research on the Blackboard 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). Information describing these assignments in greater detail is available on Blackboard. On Wednesday, a prompt will be posted on the discussion forum on the course Blackboard page, outlining an ethical dilemma. You will be expected to write a brief reaction to the dilemma by Friday at 5 p.m. of the same week and then comment on two of your classmates’ posts by 5 PM Sunday. There will be 8 discussion questions posted over the course of the semester (8%).
    • Leading class discussions. Additionally, over the course of the semester you will be expected to lead (with two of your classmates) a 15-minute discussion about the class responses to the ethical dilemma forum post of the previous week. You will have a chance to select the week for which you will be responsible. Your major role as discussion leader is to help stimulate class discussion beyond the forum posts. You should use the reflections posted on Blackboard for each week as a guide, but you may go beyond them to organize and formulate your own questions and issues for the discussion. You are highly encouraged to use PowerPoint for your presentations (2%). 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. 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 9/11/23 at 5 PM.
    You will not receive any class credit for any assignments until you complete your CITI training.
  4. Almost Weekly Celebrations of Learning (aka – quizzes). Expect a short 10 minute Celebration of What you Learned from Readings most Wednesdays! These will be short multiple choice questions based on the readings. (30 % or your total grade).
  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: 10/02/2023
    2. Draft of Introduction and Methods (5% of your grade). Due: 10/31/2023
    3. Draft of Results (5% of your grade). Due: 11/30/2023
    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: 12/16/2023
    5. Final Presentation (20% of your grade). Due: These will occur during the time scheduled for the final exam.

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 taken into account 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