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welcome to PS 206
applied research design and analysis. I'm the professor for the course and my name
is Laura Swart.
Please do all the tasks
in the folder of items that are due before the term begins,
including reading the syllabus for my contact information, office hours and all
the rules
we'll be following in the class. Please have all the text books before the term
starts. This includes the APA manual, required.
the SPSS textbook, required.
You can't do your homeworks without it.
And the same book we used for PS205.
PS 205 is a prerequisite for this course. You must pass it
before you can take this class.
This is an all- online class. There will be frequent meetings.
if you took PS 205 from me
you noticed in that class it was much content delivered via short videos.
this class is different. Instead in this class most content is delivered
in meetings. You have two options to attend.
Attend them live on line is they're happening over your computer
(recommended) or
watch the video of the meeting by the deadline,
the recording. In this class
if you do not attend the meetings
using one of those two methods you will not
pass the class. You cannot
skip the meetings and have any hope of passing the class.
in fact attendance is so important
and is mandatory so if you skip meetings
you will need to be dropped from the course.
You're going to, with a
team, do an entire research project this semester using
as participants the other students in the class.
You're gonna need to choose a topic
right out of the gate for the research. you're welcome to look ahead to the week
one folder
where I have placed a video of someone giving a talk.
It's a different video for each team. The purposes the videos is to give you a
research idea for a topic, hypothesis.
And you need to choose just one hypothesis one independent variable and
one dependent variable.
Your research design
must be something that you can implement using your class mates as
participants. You probably can't study gender
because it's probably very few men in the class. You probably can't study autism
because that's probably not something that occurs enough in the class.
Choose something that's doable. Keep it simple.
Limit it to 1 hypothesis 1 independent variable,
1 dependent variable. I'd like you to look ahead at the video so you can be
thinking
about whether you want to use the topic in the video for your
research project that your team does? Or do you want to do something else.
You need to decide that going out to the gate. Decide what you'd like to have as
the topic so you can
present it to your teammates, and get that ironed out. Please put on your calendar
three meetings per week for this class.
Again, they may be attended live or via recording, starting
March fourth. That's when our meetings begin. Starting on that day
we're going to have every Monday at 7:30 a meeting of the entire class online.
We'll also have every Tuesday at 7:30 a meeting of the entire class
online. We do this
because nobody wants a three hour meeting. One of meetings is usually
a general meeting and the other is usually in SPSS lab.
The third meeting that will happen most weeks will be with your team;
the time of that will be determined just as soon as your team forms.
You may either use a discussion board with deadlines for all the postings
as a way of meeting or you may use
the Blackboard collaborate software for you meeting and you record
that meeting for any absentee members.
right now I want you to, well
I should say soon as your team is formed, you might be watching this video before that.
As soon as your team forms you need to set up that meeting with your team and I
must be present for the first meeting.
because we need to go over your team plan and start choosing your research topic.
okay so don't wait on communicating with your teammates and getting that set up.
And make sure your meeting time with your teammates is a time when I'm
available the first week
because I need to be there.
It is not allowed for your team to meet
during the general class meetings which happened Mondays and Tuesdays at 7:30.
Because your classmate are research participants
you must never ever discuss your research project or topic or ideas
that you're gonna do with your team. you must
never discuss them in a general class meeting.
Aave those communications for private communications with teammates
or for team meetings.
We avoid discussing our research topic with the whole class because
the rest of the class will be the participants in the research.
We want to avoid demand characteristics.
Recall from PS 205 demand characteristics are
when your research participants think you want a behavior,
and they give you that behavior, not because
it's a natural behavior they would normally perform, only because
they think you want them to do it.
To avoid that we don't discuss our research topics
with the entire class until after the entire classes participated in our
research project together.
After that there will be a debriefing session.
Finally let's talk communication
it's vitally important in this course you check email every single day.
It's expected that you keep up to date
with any of those communications and must be your DeSales email account.
Finally it's very important that you never ever leave
unanswered email question from your teammates.
well really any question from your team, even if it's in a phone call
or discussion board or meeting.
Let's say get an email and a teammate it is asking a question of the whole team.
Every single member is expected to respond.
Don't leave them hanging. Email them back promptly
even if it's just to say "I really don't care,
go ahead and decide" or even if it's just to say
"I'm not sure, here are my thoughts."
One last thing: even though this is the week before class
please feel free to call me particularly if you get stuck
on getting all the tasks done better in the folder
where everything needs to be done the week before our first meeting.
My office hours are listed on the syllabus and so is my telephone number.