Introduction: Designing and conducting an intervention study is an arduous task for students that requires strong teaching and mentoring practices from psychology instructors. Statement of the Problem: Most research methods textbooks simply describe how an intervention is incorporated into a research study design (Johnson & Christensen, 2016),…

Research has shown that plagiarism is on the increase in higher education. Some state that this is due to poor knowledge rather than intentional cheating. Other researchers explain that plagiarism is on the rise due to increased competitiveness in college and easy access to work that has already been completed. In this study, we show how a 2-hr…

Coursework in statistics and research methods is a core requirement in most undergraduate psychology programs. However, is there an optimal way to structure and sequence methodology courses to facilitate student learning? For example, should statistics be required before research methods, should research methods be required before statistics, or…

A detailed rubric initially designed as a scoring instrument for grading APA-style empirical research reports was tested for its ability to help students improve their scientific writing skills. Students who used the rubric while preparing their reports wrote a higher quality report than did students who did not. Students also improved the quality…

Promoting undergraduate engagement is an important and challenging obstacle at large research-focused universities. Thus, the current study evaluated whether a peer-led program of student-geared events could improve engagement among a diverse group of psychology students early on in their degrees. We randomly assigned interested second-year…

We examined how writing cover letters to the instructor influenced final papers in research methods courses. After receiving instructor feedback on drafts of each section of an American Psychological Association style research paper throughout the semester, students in two classes wrote cover letters to the instructor explaining how the instructor…

The current study empirically tested the effectiveness of a modular approach to integrating professional development across an undergraduate psychology curriculum. Researchers conducted a two-group, between-subjects experiment on 269 undergraduate psychology students assessing perceptions of professional preparedness and learning. Analysis…

This study contributes to the service learning (SL) literature by providing new empirical evidence of learning from a problem-based SL research project conducted in a developmental research methods course. Two sections of the course taught in a traditional manner were compared to two sections of the course taught with an integrated SL project…

Misconceptions of psychological phenomena are widespread and often not easily eliminated--even among students completing college-level psychology courses. As part of a research methods psychology course, students developed public-service-announcement-style posters as part of a psychology myth-debunking campaign and presented these to students…

We developed a two-semester series of intensive (six-contact hours per week) behavioral research methods courses with an integrated statistics curriculum. Our approach includes the use of team-based learning, authentic projects, and Excel and SPSS. We assessed the effectiveness of our approach by examining our students' content area scores on the…

Over 5 semesters and 10 sections, students in a 300-level research methods course used clickers to respond to knowledge-based and opinion/attitude questions about clicker use, the effectiveness of assignments, self-confidence regarding skills and abilities, and more. Changes during the semester and student answers to questions about pedagogy and…

The scoring instrument described in this article is based on a deconstruction of the seven sections of an American Psychological Association (APA)-style empirical research report into a set of learning outcomes divided into content-, expression-, and format-related categories. A double-weighting scheme used to score the report yields a final grade…

This article describes an innovative neuropsychopharmacology laboratory that can be incorporated into any research methods class. The lab consists of a set of interconnected modules centered on observations of methamphetamine-induced behavioral changes in mice and is designed to provide students with an opportunity to acquire basic skills…

To address the issue of plagiarism, students in two undergraduate Research Methods and Analysis courses conducted, analyzed, and wrote up original research on the topic of plagiarism. Students in an otherwise identical course completed the same assignments but examined a different research topic. At the start and end of the semester, all students…

Undergraduate psychology majors (N = 51) at a mid-sized private university took a statistics examination on the first day of the research methods course, a course for which a grade of "C" or higher in statistics is a prerequisite. Students who had taken a problem-based learning (PBL) section of the statistics course (n = 15) were compared to those…