Lab Manual for Psychological Research

"The Lab Manual for Psychological Research is designed to allow instructors to choose from assignments that give students practice with knowledge and skills learned in a research methods course. The manual contains four major components: (1) exercises that connect to specific concepts in the course, (2) exercises geared toward the development of a research project, (3) APA-style exercises that become progressively more complex, and (4) exercises helping students learn how to avoid plagiarism. The intent is to provide exercises on various aspects of a methods course that instructors may choose to assign to students. Exercises that work well as class activities are now available in the Instructor's Resources. A solution key is posted on the instructor website at edge.sagepub.com/mcbride5e. Exercises in the first component cover major course concepts such as design types and data collection techniques, literature reviews and library research, reading journal articles, identifying variables, ethical guidelines, participant sampling, and descriptive and inferential statistics. In the second component, a research development project is included that can be assigned to groups or individuals and completed throughout the course as students learn the steps in designing research studies. This component includes assignments related to choosing a research topic, conducting a literature review, developing a method, analyzing and interpreting results, and presenting the project as an oral or poster presentation. These assignments progress through the topics in the course and thus can be assigned at different points in the course after different topics have been covered that allow students to continue in their development of the project. The third component includes APA-style exercises that begin with simple APA guidelines and progress to evaluations of short articles for APA-style violations. Finally, the manual includes and exercises on plagiarism to help students understand what is and isn't plagiarism and how to avoid it in their writing. The guide to different types of plagiarism is now available in the Instructor's Resources"--