RDE Chapter 10 Main Menu

Chapter 10 Main Menu

Chapter Overview
Lectures
- Lecture 10.1: The Simple Experiment
- Lecture 10.2: Statistics
- Lecture 10.3: The Field Experiment
- Powerpoint lecture/Chapter outline
- Bonus powerpoint lecture (password is the first word on page 3 of the Instructor's Manual)
Chapter 10 section of the student website
Handouts
- Handout 10.1: The logic of causality
- Handout 10.2: Reading about a simple experiment
- Handout 10.3: Designing a simple experiment
- Handout 10.4: Advanced handout for entertaining exercise
- Handout 10.5: Statistics and the design of the simple experiment
- Handout 10.6: Implications of choosing a significance level
- Handout 10.7: Diagram of simple experiment, emphasizing differences between internal and external validity
- Detailed Learning Objectives for Chapter 10
- Web Appendix on Field Experiments
- Crossword puzzle
  - Completed crossword puzzle (password is the first word on page 3 of the Instructor's Manual)
Activities/Discussion Topics
- Have students read a published simple experiment
  - An article describing the results of several simple experiments showing how making people use slightly different pronouns can have big effects on how they feel about others (includes handouts to help students understand the article).
  - An article showing that people do worse on a task when they think the audience is a friend than when they think the audience is a stranger (includes a handout that helps students understand the article)
- Have students participate in and/or analyze data from this online, eyewitness testimony simple experiment
- Have students participate in and/or analyze data from this online simple experiment on question wording. This activity is a good way to help students understand the relationship between surveys and experiments.
- Use this detailed, 2-page guide from Dr. Jennifer Tickle, to reenact parts of the Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) study in which the participants who were primed with words associated with the elderly walked more slowly than those who were not. Note that if you e-mail Dr. Tickle, she will provide you with the stimulus materials you need.
- Videos
  - Online videos
    - Short (2 min) video of one control group participant and one experimental group participant from an experiment showing that the presence of others can prevent one from escaping from a dangerous situation.
    - Malcolm Gladwell's presentation on how one psychologist's application of the experimental method to food (a) revealed results that were quite different from survey and focus group data and (b) dramatically changed American life.
    - A short video on "spoon bending" that you can use to emphasize the need for a control group.
  - Regular videos
    - PHE-102: Research methods: This 28 min video from Insight Media (http://www.insight-media.com) uses an article on the impact of video games (Anderson, C. A., & Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 772-790) to cover many research issues. For this chapter, the most relevant issues are (a) the importance of experiments, (b) the defining characteristics of experiments, and (c) hypothesis generation. The following links allow you to download the Anderson and Dill (2000) article in pdf format; APA's press release summarizing the article, Science Daily's summary of the article, Newsmax's summary, and APA's general statement on what research says about the effects of media violence on aggression.
- The difference between descriptive and causal questions
- Statistics
  - Basic statistical concepts
  - Understanding the concept of error term
  - The implications of statistics for the design of a simple experiment
  - Help students understand effect size by having them use computerized tools that calculate effect sizes for them
    - Effect size calculator that converts t, F, Chi Square, and other statistics to effect sizes from Larry C. Lyons and Wendy A. Morris
    - An interactive Excel spreadsheet if you want to help students understand how different Pearson rs correspond to different effect sizes.
  - Using the computer to analyze data and more ("more" includes [a] showing students how to conduct an SPSS analysis, [b] showing students how to write a Results section, [c] demonstrating the t test's robustness, [d] power analysis, and [e] conducting experiments).
- Practice random assignment
- Interpreting and critiquing simple experiments
- Designing and refining simple experiments
- A fun activity with a point: Letting the class design an experiment
- Field Experiments
  - Discuss issues involved in conducting field experiments
  - Design field experiments

Back to Research Design Explained Home Page