Individual Work

Exams

There will be 3 exams in this course, each worth 100 points. Because there are often legitimate excuses for missing or doing poorly on a test, you will be allowed to drop your lowest score. If you miss a test, that will count as your lowest grade. The remaining 2 tests will be worth 30% of your final grade (15% each). Exams questions will be drawn from lecture, discussion, and course readings. Exams will not be cumulative.

Independent Research Proposal

For your final project, you will write a 10-page individual, APA-style experimental research proposal on any topic in psychology. You will not collect data for this paper. Rather, the purpose of this assignment is to give you the experience of:

  1. Searching the literature on a topic of interest to you and identifying scholarly work in this area
  2. Synthesizing this literature and summarizing it in your own words to build a logical rationale for your research question
  3. Articulating hypotheses based on what is known from prior research
  4. Designing a study to test your hypotheses, and
  5. Identifying and describing the appropriate statistical procedures given the study hypotheses and proposed variables

These must be typed (12-point font), double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, and include a minimum of 5 references in APA style.  References must be primary sources (e.g., scholarly journal articles) and/or scholarly books and the majority should be current (i.e., from the last 10 years). There will be several dates throughout the semester to help you develop each section:

  1. Topic
  2. Introduction, including a thorough literature review and statement of hypotheses
  3. Methods: proposed data collection and analyses
  4. Discussion
  5. Abstract

Finally, you will present your research proposal to your classmates.

In-class assignments

Throughout the course, we will engage in various activities that provide further insight and understanding into the course material that lectures do not necessarily provide. For these assignments, you will typically be asked to engage in a demonstration, complete a worksheet, etc. You will submit each of these activities at the end of each lecture. If you put in effort, you will get full credit. If you do not put in effort but you attend the class, you will get half credit. If you do not complete these assignments at all, you will get zero credit. The activities will count for a total of 20% of your final grade

Attendance

You are strongly encouraged to attend the course lectures. An attendance grade serves as an incentive for you to come to class. While I do my best to make sure the lecture notes are thorough, I do a lot of verbal explaining of the concepts covered in this course, and this is information that you will miss if you do not attend class.

Group Work

You will work in small research teams (3 students per team) to complete 3 research projects throughout the semester. These research projects are designed to provide you with the experience of planning a research study, collecting and analyzing data, and writing a formal summary. The summary should be relatively brief (2-3 double-spaced, typed pages) and include a statement of the study rationale and hypotheses, methodology, statistical analysis plan, results, and discussion. Although you will work in groups to collect and analyze data, you must submit individual summaries.

Assignment Breakdown

WorkTotal %
Exams30
Independent Research Proposal
1. Topic
2. Introduction
3. Methods
4. Results & Discussion
5. Abstract
6. Presentation		30
In-class assignments20
Group Projects15
Attendance5

Grading

We will follow CUNY’s grading system.