PL2131 RESEARCH AND STATISTICAL METHODS I

Module Description
This module is aimed at equipping students with the critical thinking and analytical skills necessary as a foundation for evaluating or carrying out empirical research in psychology. It is an essential module for psychology major students. It consists of two sections: the first deals with the design of psychological research; the second covers basic descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. Students will be taught how to design their own empirical study, to carry out appropriate statistical analyses on the data collected so as to draw valid conclusions, and how to write up their findings. Ethical aspects of psychological research are covered.

Lecture Topics
1) Introduction
2) Scientific Methods I: Non-experimental Design
3) Scientific Methods II: Experimental Design
4) Descriptive and Inferential Statistics
5) Hypothesis Testing
6) Effect Size and Statistical Power
7) Sampling Distribution and Means
8) One Sample and Dependent Sample t-test
9) Independent Sample t-test
10) Correlation and Simple Regression
11) Chi-Square Tests
12) Research Ethics and Report Writing

Good module to take if you are good in statistics. This is a core module for psychology students. I feel that the department could have split the arts students and the rest of NUS students into two separate module (like DSC1007 and DSC1007X). I think it is very unfair that they have to compete like this with the rest.

Workload
Two two-hours lecture
Lectures were taught by Prof Mike Cheung. He is very passionate in his teaching. Clear and easy to understand. He will also share jokes at the end of the class.

4 tutorial sessions in the semester
My tutorials were taught by some postgrad student. You will be learning a lot of PSPP. It is a free alternative to SPSS.

Textbook is compulsory. I bought it and found it quite helpful

Lectures were not webcasted.

Assessment (AY12/13 Sem 1)
20% Homework Assignment
30% Closed book mid-term MCQ test
50% Open book final exam

2 homework assignment 10% each. Very easy. Involves using PSPP to deal with the data and find solutions to some questions.

You can find past year papers in the NUS library if i'm not wrong.

Following are the instructions and tips provided by the Prof:
- Open book. Textbooks and other written materials allowed.
- 2 main questions with several parts
- Penalties if answers are irrelevant.
- Remember to bring calculator

Extra notes to readers: I have textbook. Download it from my Dropbox.