Chapter 3 Menu

Chapter 3 Overview

• Chapter outlines
  • Conventional chapter outline
  • Detailed Powerpoint outline
• Key issues
• Key terms
• Professor-oriented summary (Talking points, visuals, and some humor)

Lectures

• Lecture 3.1: Generating research ideas
  
• Lecture 3.2: The nature of scientific progress
  
• Lecture 3.3: Getting Ideas from existing research
• Powerpoint lecture/Chapter outline
• Bonus powerpoint lecture (password is the first word on page 3 of the Instructor's Manual)
  

Chapter 3 section of the student website

Handouts

• Handout 3.1: 9 ways to tap your intuition
  
• Handout 3.2: 21 ways to get research ideas from published research
  
• Handout 3.3: 6 powerful strategies for generating research ideas
  
• Handout 3.4: Checklist to help students evaluate their hypotheses
• Visual showing how asking simple questions can lead to research that will build on an existing finding
  
• Web Appendix on theory and how theory can be used to generate research ideas
• Detailed Learning Objectives for Chapter 3
  
• Crossword puzzle
• Completed crossword puzzle (password is the first nonhyphenated word on page 3 of the Instructor's Manual)

Student Projects

• Generating hypotheses
• Student reports

Class Activities

• Class demonstration/exercise (in Powerpoint®) that you can use to make two important points: (a) a good study is designed not to find evidence for a hypothesis but to rule out hypotheses and (b) the value of using comparison groups to rule out alternative explanations for a finding.
• Link to a PBS online video of therapeutic touch (therapeutic touch is discussed on page 47 of the text).
• Activities involving theory
• Have students use a website that allows them to simulate performing experiments on social facilitation (social facilitation was discussed in Chapter 3 of Research design explained). Students get to select values of the independent variables, look at simulated data, and generate conclusions.
• Take advantage of role models
• Have students evaluate research hypotheses
• Discuss how science progresses
• Develop a psychology of humor
• Have students get an overview of the steps in the research process--from generating ideas to communicating the results-- by doing this CyberLab activity.
• To emphasize that not everything on the web is true and to stimulate some research ideas, show students the following link discussing the Internet rumor that Cambridge University scientists had discovered that scrambled words were as easy to read as unscrambled words.
• Jon Mueller (March 27, 2007) suggests showing  this "educational" film  from a series on "Psychological differences between the sexes" and then having students do  research to test these claims. Jon (November, 2007) also suggests having students go to "Dr. Z's 20 hints about resisting unwanted influences on you, " pick one hint from the list," and "design a test of it."
• To introduce--in a light-hearted way--the idea of looking for mediating variables, you could show the first few minutes of Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein." In the opening scene, the physician (Dr. Frankenstein) shows how to use pressure to interfere with basic reflexes. (The scene also is good for discussing a wide range of ethical issues. You could note that, because the doctor was not doing research but a class demonstration, the physician did not have to answer to an IRB. You could also ask students whether they thought that medical studies and psychological studies should be reviewed by the same body [the IRB].)
• Give students one of the following reading assignments--and a useful handout to help them understand the reading.
• Have your class read this student-friendly adaptation of a great article (a senior project published in Psychological Science) that is on an interesting topic (aggression), has an interesting measure of aggression (how much hot sauce the participant adds to someone's water), and that helps students understand mediating variables. For more instructions about how to use this article in class, click here.
• Library tour