Psychological Research Methods: A Practical Approach

I know I said the Teacher Guides were the “third and final” post in this series of Psychology Lesson Elements and Delivery Guides but I may have been caught up in the moment and hence guilty of slightly over-exaggerating things, vis-à-vis the finality angle.

In other words, I’ve found another OCR Resource that both complements the preceding stuff and which, if you teach Research Methods, either as part of OCR or some other Specification – that will be everyone, then – you will probably find useful.

A Handbook of Practical Investigations provides 14 ready-made Research Examples students can carry-out – online or within the classroom – broken down into the following areas:

  • Laboratory experiments x 2
  • Repeated measures design experiment
  • Laboratory experiment using independent design
  • Self-report methods (questionnaires) x 3
  • Self-report methods (interviews)
  • Observational methods x 3
  • Correlational methods x 3
  • Each section provides a research scenario such as the following for a laboratory experiment:

    “You are asked to design a practical project to investigate whether chewing gum improves concentration. Your project must use an experimental method, must have an independent measures design and must collect quantitative data.”

    Hint: your project could measure concentration by giving participants a page of text to read, and asking them to cross out every letter ‘e’ they read in a fixed time of 30 seconds.

    You will need: Several packs of chewing gum, photocopied page of any text/book.

    The scenario is followed by a series of questions students are required to answer about the research they’ve done. This covers things like the method and procedure of the research, advantages and disadvantages of their design, ethical problems and how they can be resolved and the like.

    If there’s nothing in the provided examples that particularly tickles your fancy you can, of course, provide your own for your students to carry-out, based on the principles outlined in the Handbook.

    And if your students need a little extra preparation before embarking on any, or indeed all, of the research examples, you might want to check-out the following short films, created specifically for A-level / High School Psychologists, that are available to rent (one week) or buy “at very reasonable prices”:

    Experimental Methods

    Experimental Design

    Ethics and Ethical Issues

    Correlations

    Laboratory Experiments

    Non-Experimental Research Methods

    Naturalistic Observation

    Sampling

    Self Report Research Methods

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