PSYC 311 - Research Methods and Statistics I

(3 credits)

The purpose of this community engaged course is to introduce students to the process of carefully and ethically planning psychological research, culminating in evidence-based recommendations made to team-specific and course-wide community partners. Students will learn how to identify and use common descriptive and inferential statistics as they quantitatively reason about experimental, field experimental, survey, quasi-experimental, nonexperimental, and correlational research. Emphasis will be placed on understanding research variables, threats to internal validity, other basic research design issues, critical reading of research articles, and objective data interpretation. Hand-calculation of descriptive statistics, supplemented by Excel and SPSS software instruction, will be required as students learn to apply introductory statistics in the context of studying human participants. An APA-style research proposal will be the final project for this course. Students are recommended to take MATH 101 or higher math prior to enrolling in this course. Prerequisite:

PSYC 101

. Fall