Chapter 10 Main Menu

• Chapter Overview
  
  • Chapter Outline
    
  • Powerpoint lecture/Chapter outline
    
  • Professor-oriented summary
    
  • Key Terms
    
  • Key Issues
    

• 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 nonhyphenated 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 nonhyphenated 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 read an analyze data from a recently published simple experiment
  • Kevin McIntyre's Open Stat Lab. has links to articles and the actual data from three recent experiments published in Psychological Science.
  • Have students participate in and analyze data from online experiments
  • 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 also helps students understand the relationship between surveys and experiments.
  • Videos
    •     Show the clip from Mythbusters testing the hypothesis that yawning is contagious (you can purchase it from the Apple iTunes store for $2.00 from this link or you can rent the Season 3, March 9, 2005 episode from Netflix) and have students discuss it (for specific instructions and a student handout, click here). If you want to have students actually do the statistical analysis that the Mythbusters should have done, click here.
    • Short (7.5 min) video from Penn and Teller showing the power of placebos and the need for a control group
    • Short (1.1 min) video of a social psychology "experiment." Have students state the independent variable, the dependent variable, and the confounding variable.

     

  • Practice skills for conducting and critiquing simple experiments by having students
    • Practice random assignment
      
    • Interpret and critique simple experiments
      
    • Designing and refine simple experiments
      
    • Design an experiment to address this unusual hypothesis (a fun activity with a point)
    • Practice distinguishing between descriptive and causal questions--and explaining why the distinction matters

    Field Experiments

    • Discuss issues involved in conducting field experiments
      
    • Design field experiments
      

    Statistics

    • Basic statistical concepts
    • Explain the central limit theorem (Adopters should use this CLT powerpoint powerpoint
      
    • Assign this interactive Excel spreadsheet if you want to help students understand how different Pearson rs correspond to different effect sizes.
      
    • Understanding the concept of error term
      
    • The implications of statistics for the design of a simple experiment
      
    • 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, and [d]conducting experiments).
      

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