Faculty Response, Mount Holyoke College

1.The course that I will focus on is Experimental Methods in Psychology.
The goals of the course are for the student to learn how research is planned,
carried out, communicated and critiqued. This course focuses on developing
general research skills that can be applied within any area of psychology.
These skills include knowledge of experimental
design, statistics, report writing, and ethical standards of research.
I use a wide variety of techniques to teach this class. They include lecture,
mock experiments, and small group discussions. In addition, there is a
four-hour lab component associated with the class. The main purpose of
this lab time is for the students to review research articles that are
related to their interests, formulate their own experiment, collect and
analyze data, and to write up a research paper.

2. The kinds of resources that I do use (or would like to use in the
future) include SPSS, data bases (e.g. ICPSR), web of sciences, and j-store.
I would also like to modify the course web-site so that we could include
on-line tutorials and perhaps quizzes. In addition, since the students
work on group research projects, it would be great if we could create a
sort of "chat space" for each group. The members of that group would be
able to get into that chat space, ask questions of their group members,
set up meetings, and post results of their study.

3. I would like to do more collaborative work with both the librarians
and the information technologists.

4. The resources I am considering devoting to its future development
are: time and student support.

Kathy Binder