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.