Learning Goals and Objectives: Psychological Methods
Learning Objectives: Psychological Methods
Enduring Understandings
- Psychology is a science which benefits from principles of the Scientific Method.
- There are many methods through which psychologists deepen their knowledge, each with particular strengths and weaknesses.
- Results of psychological research must be looked at in light of the method used to come to the result.
- Research must be conducted with ethical considerations at the forefront of the experimental design.
Essential Questions
- How do we separate truth from fiction as psychologists and consumers of psychological research?
- How do we design experiments that deepen understanding while adhering to ethical guidelines?
Core Skills
- Evaluate the research design of an experiment and identify its strengths and weaknesses in drawing causal inferences.
- Design an experiment to test a hypothesis.
- Identify ethical concerns in a real or imagined experiment.
- Distinguish science from psuedo-science.
Foundational Knowledge
- Describe the principles of the scientific method and explain its importance in conducting and interpreting research.
- Differentiate laws from theories and explain how research hypotheses are developed and tested.
- Discuss the procedures that researchers use to ensure that their research with humans and with animals is ethical.
- Differentiate the goals of descriptive, correlational, and experimental research designs and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each.
- Explain the goals of descriptive research and the statistical techniques used to interpret it.
- Summarize the uses of correlational research and describe why correlational research cannot be used to infer causality
- Outline the four potential threats to the validity of research and discuss how they may make it difficult to accurately interpret research findings.
- Describe how confounding may reduce the internal validity of an experiment.
- Explain how generalization, replication, and meta-analyses are used to assess the external validity of research findings.
Many of these objectives (particularly the foundational knowledge items) were taken from the Stangor text (CC-BY-NC-SA). See course credits for more information.