Psychology - Cognitive (73) This project is creating and disseminating a set of empirically-validated materials for teaching psychological research methods using formal instruction supplemented by examples. The psychology major continues to be popular among undergraduate students in liberal arts and pre-professional programs. The psychological research methods course is important for teaching critical, scientific thinking skills that are applicable to real-world problem solving. Investigators of cognition and instruction know that formal instruction must be supplemented by many varied concrete examples in order for transfer of skills outside the classroom to occur. However, a review of educational materials indicates that a validated collection of such examples is not available for research methods instruction. Thus, the specific objectives of this project are to (1) implement a set of instructional modules for learning by examples, (2) use the technology of the world wide web to provide students with unrestricted, asynchronous access, and (3) gather experimental evidence supporting the application of learning by examples in the research methods course. This proof-of-concept is creating three modules (on confounding and control of variables, statistical inference, and interactions among variables). Each module contains several examples culled from various psychological research literatures and presented to students as lengthy abstracts containing methodological flaws that need to be discovered and repaired. The effect of training on the examples is being assessed in a pretest-posttest nonequivalent groups design that allows generalization across classes and instructors and the assessment of modes of delivery (web vs. face-to-face, and individual work vs. group activity).
