Location:
- Home
- Undergraduate Advising
Academic Goals
Departmental Learning Goals for Psychology 332: Laboratory in Animal Learning
The goals of this course are:
- To give you the opportunity to apply your knowledge of experimental design and methodology, data analysis, statistics, and scientific writing.
The application of this knowledge will help you to:
a. gain an appreciation for what you have learned about psychology in other courses and how that knowledge was constructed
b. gain an understanding, through personal experience, of what it takes to carry out each step of a research project (e.g. generating questions, designing experiments, collecting data, analyzing data and drawing conclusions, and communicating results)
c. gain a practical understanding of data interpretation and summarization
d. use your statistical knowledge to analyze data and interpret the results of your analyses and use appropriate technology (e.g. MS Excel or SPSS) for data collection, management, analysis, summary, and presentation.
- To give you a basic understanding of learning theory and the types of variables that influence performance. This understanding will benefit you in all areas of psychology.
- To increase your understanding of scientific writing by giving you experience as an author. You will write article summaries as well as an APA formatted paper about your research project. In this paper, you will interpret your data in relation to your hypothesis, summarize your findings so others can understand it, and relate them to the broader literature on animal learning.
- To increase your ability to convey your ideas orally as well as in writing. This is one of the most important goals in science and in almost every job. You will give a presentation proposing your research project and present a poster summarizing your experiment.
- To gain experience working in groups and practicing tolerance for multiple individual perspectives. This will help you to develop your communication and organizational skills and prepare you to be a good community member.
- To learn about the ethical care and use of animals in research and apply these by designing a research project.
