Recommended reading:

American Psychological Association. Concise rules of APA style. Washington DC: APA, 2005.

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 won'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 in psychology; deeper theoretical issues 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. You will also be making a poster presentation of your project, after you have collected and analyzed the data.

This is a difficult, 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 (except for the book on proper style for writing research reports, which is recommended rather than required) will be presented in lecture and on Blackboard. 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 version of the entire project, both as a compete report and as a research poster. (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 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 Brandy 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, during every class except our very first (Thursday January 8). You may drop 4 daily quiz grades for any reason; the daily quiz average will be based on the remaining 24 quizzes. The volume of daily quizzes 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.

Cheating policy:
Cheating means providing or accepting information on a test (tests 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. Brandy and I will also bring our laptops to the labs, and if yours is in the shop, you may be able to borrow mine. The statistical software that we normally use in Psych 310 is Minitab, which is available to all Clemson students. Please be sure to download the latest version. Unfortunately, Minitab is available only in a Windows version; if you use a Macintosh you'll need Boot Camp or Parallels desktop so you can run Windows on your machine. If you would like to use another statistics program, such as SPSS, you are welcome to do so but you will need to obtain a copy yourself (and statistics programs are rarely available cheap...).

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