Unpacked Content
Knowledge
Students know:
- The role of the scientific method in understanding phenomena.
- The basic steps of the scientific method.
- How to calculate measures of central tendency.
- The importance of following ethical guidelines when conducting research.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Cite evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary descriptions of research.
- Provide an accurate summary of primary and secondary descriptions of research, identifying the essential elements of the particular research being conducted.
- Analyze primary and secondary descriptions of research to determine whether the research conducted best suited the question posed.
- Decipher key terms or jargon used by psychologists when writing up research for publication and public consumption.
- Evaluate whether a researcher's or participant's biases influenced the outcome, description of, or conclusions drawn for the research.
- Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information to determine if the research conducted was accurate and representative of the population being studied.
- Cite supporting or contradicting evidence for various research descriptions.
- Integrate research findings to explain a particular psychological phenomena.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- The scientific method plays a role in understanding behavior and mental processes.
- Different research methods are appropriate for different empirical questions about behavior and mental processes.
- You can conduct research using different methodologies.
- Simple statistics can be calculated using data collected from research.
- Different statistics derived from research can be interpreted.
- There are important ethical guidelines for working with human and non-human participants in research.
Vocabulary
intuition
hindsight bias
- overconfidence
- belief perseverance
- self-serving bias
- confirmation bias
- hypothesis
- theory
- naturalistic observation
- case study
- survey
- correlation
- correlation coefficient
- direct correlation/positive correlation
- inverse correlation/negative correlation
- random sampling
- random assignment
- experiment
- independent variable
- dependent variable
- confounding variable
- double-blind procedure
- control group
- experimental group
- mean
- median
- mode
- normal curve
- skewed distribution
- range
- standard deviation
- p-value
- statistical significance
- ethics
- informed consent
- debriefing
- anonymity
- confidentiality
