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PSY 458 - Experimental Psychology - Course Description | |||||||||
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Center for Perceptual Systems
Psychology Home
UT Home
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This course will provide students with an overview of experimental designs likely to be encountered by students pursuing graduate study in psychology. The development of critical thinking will be emphasized. Students will conduct several research projects, including the final project which will be of their own design. Students will perform statistical analysis on the data and write papers in APA format on the research projects. Three short exams covering basic experimental design, statistical knowledge and the assigned readings will be given. Two things we spend a lot of time and effort on are: -Writing: Scientific writing has communication, not entertainment, as its primary goal. This gives some students an astonishing number of problems. We will work on style and organization, and students will be held to high standards of grammar, punctuation, etc. -Conceptual understanding of statistics: A statistical test is not a mysterious box that takes data as input and produces Truth as output. We will strive to understand the difference between the result of an experiment and the result of a statistic. The required textbooks are: -Statistics for the Behavioral and Social Sciences by Aron & Aron - The Publication Manual of the APA (5th edition) - The Elements of Style, Strunk & White (4th edition)
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