Our department is convinced that students will learn more about the science of psychology if they can enroll in a greater number of laboratory-based courses than the two we currently offer. We also believe that increased laboratory experiences will provide our students with more active involvement in substantive areas of the discipline, which should lead to increased mastery of the material they are learning. To accomplish these goals, we are interested in adding computer-driven laboratory components to several courses, beginning with the perception course. In order to do so, over the next eighteen months we will develop a set of twelve computerized visual and auditory laboratory exercises. These exercises will serve as the core of the laboratory component of the perception course, which will change from a 3-credit non-laboratory course to a 4-credit laboratory course. Because of the increased student demand on our undergraduate computer facility that will be created by the laboratories and because of the computer-intensive nature of some of the laboratory exercises, we need to increase the number and power of the computers to which students have access. In addition to the perception course, the improved facility will support the laboratory component of the experimental psychology course and allow us to add laboratory components to the statistics courses and the cognition course in the near future. Students would continue to use the facility for statistical analyses in a range of courses. We believe that many faculty who teach perception would be able to make use of the exercises that we develop--even if their courses do not have a specific laboratory component. We will announce the availability of these exercises in several places, including TIPS (the Teaching in Psychological Science list serve) and use the World Wide Web and various electronic media to disseminate the laboratory exercises that we develop.
