Participation Requirements for All Students in Psychology 1000 Courses

STUDENTS MUST READ THIS DOCUMENT IN ITS ENTIRETY AND ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR UNDERSTANDING ITS CONTENTS

We believe that participating in research is an integral part of Psychology. By participating in research at this level, we hope you will both learn something about how psychological research is done and will perhaps be inspired to conduct some psychological research during your undergraduate career. In accord with this belief, the University Senate approved a Psychology Department recommendation that research participation should be required in order for students to pass PSY 1000. An alternative assignment is provided for all those who object to participating in research. This assignment will be described at a later point.

Amount of Participation. The student must participate in two hours of research by the end of the semester. Your participation will be clocked in half-hour units, so that you will be required to accumulate four such units. These half-hour units will be referred to as Credit Units. You will receive one credit unit for each half-hour of participation or fraction thereof. So, for example, one credit unit will be awarded for 20 minutes of participation, two units for 35 minutes, etc. Be mindful that experimenters also are involved with final exams. Therefore, do not wait until the last minute to participate.

The Process. In order to participate, you must first become aware of what studies are being conducted. Your instructor will make you aware of any available studies either in class or via e-mail. After you sign up, you will be contacted by an experimenter and a mutually agreeable appointment will be set up. Your role as a participant will be explained to you when you show up for the appointment and you will be asked to sign a consent form.

Becoming Aware. Brief summaries of all the studies being conducted will be circulated in class or via e-mail when the study becomes available. A sign up sheet will be disseminated in class or the interested student will contact the experimenter directly. The summaries will provide the experimenter’s name, telephone number, the number of credit units, and will describe any sensitive issues touched-on in the study.

Signing Up. Sign up for those experiments that interest you the most, though keep in mind that most often there are only one or two studies being conducted each semester and that these are sometimes announced midway through the semester. If you have participated in the available experiments but the time spent in these does not reach the required four credit units and there are no other experiments available, you will have already fulfilled your research participation requirement.

When you sign up please print your name and class on the sign up sheet attached to the summaries. Do not put down your telephone number. We do not want it displayed publicly. Experimenters will obtain your telephone number through your professor’s class roster. If the sign-up sheet already identifies the location of the study (typically, it will be MAH 204; The Psychology Lab) and a time, please be sure to go to the appointment at the agreed upon time and place.

The Consent Form. The consent form will contain a complete description of the procedure of the study. It also will outline your rights as a participant. With regard to your rights, we are committed to protecting your privacy and well-being as a research participant. You have a right to an explanation of any study before you agree to participate in it. In addition, everything that you say or do during a research project will be strictly confidential. If, for some reason, you suddenly decide that you would rather not continue with the testing session, then you are free to leave without penalty. This means that you will nonetheless receive the full number of credit units that were promised when you signed up for the study.

After the Session. You will receive both a verbal and a written explanation of the study at the end of the testing session. However, some researchers prefer to withhold a written explanation until after the entire study has been completed. If this is the case, you will be given the opportunity to request that a written summary be mailed to you at a later date or the summary will placed on-line and you will be given access to the proper URL. There will be a provision for the request to be made on the consent form.

At the end of the semester, the experimenter will provide each instructor with the list of students who have participated.

Participant Pool. The Participant Pool consists of all students registered for Psy 1000 classes. Everyone in Psy 1000 is in the pool because of being registered in that class. Remember, you have to participate in the research process or carry out the alternative assignment (see below). Failure to do so will result in a deduction of half of a grade. Thus, for example, if a student earns a B+ in the course, but s/he has not fulfilled the research requirement or its alternative, then the student will earn a B for the course.

Please be assured that the actual experiments in which you participate have been approved by a University-wide ethics committee. This committee is known as the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Our aim is to insure that the research participation requirement will be of educational value to the student.

Miscellaneous. Education is a two-way process. Just as you learn from us, we learn from you. You are encouraged to give the experimenter any feedback or suggestions you may have as to, for example, how the experimental procedure might be improved. Please do not be afraid of asking questions that might seem foolish or making comments that might seem silly. You may have insights that were not considered previously that could be of value to the experimenter.

Research Participation in the Absence of Actual Studies. If by the fourth Monday in the semester no studies have been announced, then the research requirement may be fulfilled as follows: You may go to http://opl.apa.org/Main.aspx, select an experiment to participate in it on-line and write a paper describing the experiment. This paper must have a minimum length of two single-spaced pages and the description must contain a brief summary of what the experiment was about and its procedure, including the identification of the independent variable/s, dependent variable/s and study hypothesis. You may also provide some other background information about the origins of, and purpose of the experiment.

Alternative Assignment. If you do not wish to participate in actual research due to lack of time or for ethical reasons, you may read the following article at http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/xap13122.pdf and write a two-page (minimum length), single-spaced summary of its contents. You must describe what the studies were about and provide some details about each study’s procedure, including the identification of the independent variable/s, dependent variable/s and hypotheses. You may also provide some other background information about the origins of, and original purpose of the experiment or its implications.

You are not to use direct quotes in any of these written assignments. Also, you must paraphrase and/or summarize these articles as per the following guidelines: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/cheating%20and%20plagiarism.html.

Research is never conducted in a vacuum. It usually involves combining information from the past in such a way as to create new ideas, followed by testing the validity or utility of those ideas. This is the excitement of research. Our hope is that the written assignment will be interesting and instructive.

Grading. There will be no grades given for participating in research or for submitting the alternative assignment. However, at the discretion of the instructor, all papers may be submitted to Turnitin, which is an on-line plagiarism detection software. Any paper that shows more than 15% of text that has been copied verbatim from other sources will not count towards the fulfillment of the research requirement. In addition, the student’s final grade will be reduced by half (see above), and the matter will be referred to the Dean.