East Carolina University Department of Psychology
PSYC 2101: Earning Extra Credit Through Research Participation
You may earn up to three points of extra credit, added to your final P score at the end of the semester, by participating in approved research in the Department of Psychology. Three points is almost a third of a letter grade, so this could really help get over the threshold for that grade you want.
The first step towards earning these extra credits is to register in the Sona System, which is used to track research participation in our department. Go to my page Using Psychology's Research Participation System. Follow the instructions in my Short Tutorial, which covers the basics of getting registered in the system, signing up for studies, etc. Most of my help files are designed for students in PSYC 1000, but may be of some help to you too. Do note that you will not receive credit for participating the start of semester or end of semester surveys, as these are for the exclusive use of students in PSYC 1000.
There are two ways that you can earn these credits:
Participation in approved research earns one credit for each hour of participation. Reading an approved research article and passing a quiz on its content and posting a summary of the research in BlackBoard earns one-half of a credit. You may earn some credit by actively participating in research and some more credit by reading articles -- it does not have to be all one or the other.
If you elect to earn credit by reading a research article you must not only pass a quiz on the content of the article but also post in BlackBoard (Discussion Board, Extra Credit Research Articles) a summary of the research article. Start a new thread with a title that indicates the authors and date of publication of the article. Post in that thread your summary of the article. To receive credit for reading an article it must not have already been previously summarized in BlackBoard.
The summary should include all of the following components:
Identification of the article as it would be listed in an APA-style Reference List. Who or what were the subjects? What were the two variables studied, and how were they measured or manipulated? Was the study experimental or observational? In your words, what did the analysis show? Quote the author's summary statement, the statement in which the results of the statistical technique were presented. Summarize, as best you can, any part of tabular or graphic presentation which is necessary to understand that statement. Critique the statistical presentation. Was it well done, or were there errors? Should the author have provided some additional statistics to clarify the results?
Here is an example of such a summary:
Citation: End, C. M., Worthman, S., Mathews, M. B., & Wetterau, K. Costly cell phones: The impact of cell phone rings on academic performance. (2010). Teaching of Psychology, 37, 55-57. DOI: 10.1080/00986280903425912 Subjects: The subjects were students at Xavier University. Variables Studied: (1) whether or not the student was interrupted by a ringing cell phone while watching an educational video, and (2) whether or not the student later correctly answered an exam item about the information that was being presented at the time of the cell phone interruption. Design: Experimental. The researcher randomly assigned subjects to groups and manipulated whether or not they were interrupted by a ringing cell phone. On the following examination, each of the critical items was identified as having been correctly or incorrectly answered. Conclusions: Interruption by cell phones interferes with students’ learning. Quote: Participants in the ringing condition scored significantly worse than the participants in the control condition on the first disrupted item, 2(1, N = 71) = 8.54, p = . 003, and the second disrupted item, 2(1, N = 71) = 6.83, p = .009 (see Table 1 for percentages).
Critique: The results are reported in good style. It would, however, have been nice if strength of effect estimates had been provided. As you know, I am fond of odds ratios for that purpose, so I shall calculate them here. For test item 1, the odds of correctly answering the item were 94.9/5.1 for those not interrupted and 68.8/31.2 for those interrupted by the cell phone. This yields an 94.9 / 5.1 odds ratio of 8.44 . The odds of correctly answering the item were more 68.8 / 31.2 than 8 times higher in the uninterrupted group than in the interrupted group. For test item 2, the odds of correctly answering the item were 79.5/20.5 for those not interrupted and 50/50 for those interrupted by the cell phone. This yields an odds ratio of 79.5/20.5 = 3.88.
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