Resources for a Research Methods Course
Stats Resources
STEP
Demos of e-prime experiments (Author: MacWhinney & Schunn, Carnegie Mellon U.)
Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences (Author: Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, Columbia U.) A very clear set of lessons on statistical methods. It requires no background knowledge.
VassarStats (Author: Richard Lowry, Psychology, Vassar College) A user-friendly tool for performing statistical computation, plus a textbook companion site (free). Quite useful for nonparametric stats such as LogLinear analysis and Fisher test
WISE Web Interface for Statistics Education (Author: Claremont College): good tutorials in a variety of topics, including signal detection theory.
Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics Contains a number of useful public domain applets for demonstrating concepts in statistics.
Effect size calculator (Cohen's d)
Mozart Effect: for research methods
Does drinking promote sexual behavior? In addressing this question, this Current Direction paper highlights the difficulty in assessing causality and in ruling out third variables.
Is Alan Iverson really the best player? How do you know? Check out this 2-page commentary by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker, on the difficulties of attributing causality when there multiple factors are correlated
Videos: Discovering Psychology (click here to view chapter 2 online, 30 mins). Hosted by Phil Zimbardo, this program examines the scientific method and the ways in which data are collected and analyzed — in the lab and in the field — with an emphasis on sharpening critical thinking in the interpretation of research findings. With Dr. Christina Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Daryl Bem of Cornell University. Updated.