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Enhancing Quantitative Instruction for Psychology Majors

Department of Psychology
College of Arts & Sciences Curriculum Development Awards
(A competition jointly sponsored by the College and Tools for Transformation)

A major feature of Psychology's recently formulated strategic plan is a comprehensive revision of the undergraduate program. In our revised curriculum plan, we intend to stream majors and non-majors separately once past the introductory Psych 101 course and a natural-world Psych 202 Biopsychology course. An important aspect of the changes is separate 300-level survey core courses for majors in areas such as animal behavior, developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality. The methodology course Psych 209 is to be a required prerequisite for these 300-level core courses. With the program changes for the BA and BS degrees we also revised the format and content of Psych 209 and the required statistics courses that follow Psych 209: Psych 315 for BA degree students and Psych 317/Psych 318 for BS degree students. Weekly hands-on, computer-lab sections have been added to these four classes.

The specific focus of this project is to improve these root quantitative and methodology courses for psychology majors with emphasis on Psych 209 Fundamentals of Psychological Research and Psych 315 Understanding Statistics in Psychology. Specific goals are:

To improve coordination and communication among instructors of methodology/ statistics/ laboratory courses and with the instructors who use these classes as prerequisites in upper-division courses.
To develop a shared website for psychology methodology/statistics courses. This website will serve many purposes. It will house materials which Psych 209 instructors and students can reference (e.g., examples of summaries of scientific articles, electronic workbooks for the computation of basic descriptive statistics, and tutorials) thereby improving articulation of multi-section courses. It will also be a site to which students can return at later times in their undergraduate careers and to which distance learning students can turn for course materials.
To develop materials and activities for TAs to use in the weekly computer lab sections added in Psych 209 and Psych 315.

The number of students influenced will be high. Approximately 450 students graduate with undergraduate psychology degrees each year (roughly 10 percent of degrees granted in the College of Arts & Sciences).

Contacts:	Michael D. Beecher Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology beecher@u.washington.edu
	Beth Kerr Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Psychology bkerr@u.washington.edu
	Laura Little Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology llittle@u.washington.edu
Allocation:	$27,544
Date Funded:	June 2001

Tools for Transformation Funded Proposals