Undergraduate students in two research methods courses are being provided with a computer lab to give them direct exposure to research methods. The computer lab is used by research design students to simulate experiments that illustrate fundamental design principles. The lab is used by research applications students to perform replications of some important recent experiments in a number of fields of psychology, and to select individual final experiments from a large number of studies already in the literature or to create variations of those studies. The equipment consists of a network of 12 stations and a controller/file server as well as additional hardware and software to conduct and simulate the experiments. Undergraduates can gain hands-on experience with some of the most important psychological experiments while learning the principles of research and research design. This should help them learn problem solving and probabilistic reasoning as well. Students should learn more and be more enthusiastic about research as a result of using this lab. The university will contribute an amount equal to the award.
