8 Lab classes | I-C

Note

I-C: This chapter is compulsory independent reading.

Important

You will have weekly 90-minute lab classes. The lab classes will take place in room A20/21 in the Psychology building. Lab class attendance is compulsory and will be monitored.

Please note that room A20/21 is equipped with iMacs. Thus, it is not required that you bring your own laptop to these meetings. However, we would recommend to bring your own laptop if you own one. If you use your own laptop in lab classes, you can make sure that everything works on your own machine. This is important as you will likely use your laptop to complete assignments.

Please note that what room A20/21 does not have is recording equipment. Labs will therefore not be recorded.

8.1 Days and times

All first year psychology students have been allocated to one of six lab groups:

Group	Lab	Lecturer	Demonstrators
1	Tuesday, 9am	Jan	Aditi and Rachel
2	Tuesday, 10.30am	Jan	Patricia and Rowan
3	Wednesday, 9am	Jonathan	Emily and Vicky
4	Wednesday, 10.30am	Jonathan	Sofya and Vicky
5	Thursday, 9am	Jan	Courteney and Prerita
6	Thursday, 10.30am	Jonathan	Jacob and Nimisha

Your teaching timetable should tell you when your lab classes (labelled “Practical” in the timetable) take place.

Swapping groups

Please also note that you cannot usually change your group. However, under exceptional circumstances, we may allow students to switch groups. Note that you can only change to another group if there is someone in that group who is prepared to switch groups with you, or if someone has dropped out of the course. The reason for this is that we are aiming for equally sized lab classes as our computer labs will be very full. Students can change their group only once and only at the beginning of Semester 1, and changes need to be authorised by the module convenor.

Please post on the Group swap forum on Moodle if you would like to swap groups. If you have found another student who would like to swap with you, please with the following details for you and the other student:

Name.
Student ID.
Current group allocation.

In addition, please copy the student with whom you would like to swap into your email.

8.2 Module content in brief

This module focuses on key competencies for conducting experimental research in psychology. Lab 1 focuses on a number of preliminaries, in particular setting up your computer for the future lab classes.

The remainder of the module is going to follow a prototypical research process: We will start with questions relating to psychological research in general and experimental design in particular (Labs 2-4). Then we will move on to implementing experiments using computer software (Labs 5-8). Next, we will conduct data analyses (Labs 9-14) and finally we are going to focus on how to write a study up (Labs 15-20). The next paragraphs describe these steps in more detail.

Labs 2 to 4 are an introduction to scientific thinking in psychology, ethics and experimental design. This includes criteria that characterise good research (e.g., reliability and validity) and problems that might occur when conducting an experiment (e.g., the presence of confounds).

Labs 5 to 8 will focus on learning how to use PsychoPy, a piece of software developed here at the University of Nottingham that we will use to present stimuli (e.g., text or pictures) on a computer monitor and to record responses using a keyboard.

Labs 9 and 10 will focus on data preprocessing. In an experiment, a participant will typically respond multiple times to the same experimental condition. This is done to increase the reliability of the measurement. When we preprocess the data, we typically exclude incorrect trials and reject trials with unusually fast or slow response times (RTs). Once this has been done, we average individual RTs on a per-condition basis (alternatively, we might decide to compute medians). In addition, we usually also compute accuracies or error rates.

Once we have the mean RTs and accuracies for each participant, we can calculate statistical measures for a group of participants. This will be the focus of Labs 11 and 12. We will look at missing data, data cleaning, outliers and summary measures such as the mean and the standard deviation.

Labs 13 and 14 will focus on inferential statistics. For example, we will ask if an RT difference between two conditions is actually statistically significant (i.e., very unlikely to occur by chance). In our labs, we will focus on t-tests and correlation tests.

Labs 15 to 20 will focus on writing lab reports. When you write a lab report, you will need to bring together the skills learnt in all the previous labs: You will need to understand an experiment implemented in PsychoPy, you will need to describe the design of the experiment in the Method section of the lab report, you will need to include descriptive and inferential statistics in the Results section, and you will need your knowledge about research and experimental design to critically analyse your own research as well as the research done by others in the Introduction and the Discussion sections.

8.3 Module content in tabular form

Table 8.1: Overview of autumn semester topics

Teaching Week	w/c	Lab	Topic
1	30-Sep	1	Introduction
2	07-Oct	2	Psychological research basics
3	14-Oct	3	Ethics
4	21-Oct	4	Experiments
5	28-Oct	N/A	Careers week
6	04-Nov	5	PsychoPy I
7	11-Nov	6	PsychoPy II
8	18-Nov	7	PsychoPy III
9	25-Nov	8	PsychoPy IV
10	02-Dec	9	Data preprocessing I
11	09-Dec	10	Data preprocessing II

Table 8.2: Overview of spring semester topics

Teaching Week	w/c	Lab	Topic
1	27-Jan	11	SPSS basics
2	03-Feb	12	Descriptive stats
3	10-Feb	13	Inferential stats
4	17-Feb	N/A	Volunteering week
5	24-Feb	14	Inferential stats
6	03-Mar	15	Lab reports
7	10-Mar	16	Lab reports
8	17-Mar	17	Lab reports
9	24-Mar	18	Lab reports
N/A	31-Mar	N/A	Easter break
10	28-Apr	19	Lab reports
11	05-May	20	Lab reports

8.4 Workload

How much time per week should you spend working on PSGY1001? It is of course difficult to give a general answer to this question, but we thought we will give you an idea of the time the University expects you to work for this module. The University assumes that 1 credit translates into approximately 10 hours of effort. Thus, for a 20-credit module like PSGY1001, you would be expected to put in roughly 200 hours of effort. The whole academic year has about 36 weeks. Thus, as a very rough estimate, you would be expected to spend around 5 1/2 hours per week working on PSGY1001.

Another way to think about workload is this: Let’s assume a full-time working week has 36 hours. Per semester, you are enrolled on 60 credits. You complete 10 PSGY1001 credits in autumn and 10 in spring. Thus, PSGY1001 represents 1/6^th of your workload each semester. 1/6^th of 36 hours is 6 hours. Thus, we arrive at a very similar estimate using this approach.