Attitudes and Approaches towards Research and Statistics Methods

Attitudes and Approaches towards Research and Statistics Methods


A common attitude between students and Research Methods and Statistics classes have been shown to professors that students do not typically enjoy and retain information from this required course for all Psychology majors
in college.  The phrases that students have used were “why is this course required”, “this course is so boring” and every student’s favorite “we don’t need this material in the workforce”. Professors who taught this specific course noticed these types of comments were frequently being made by students and that they were uninterested in the material, but what professors decided to do was extra ordinary.
  In the article, Ciarocco, Lewandowski, and Van Volkom (2013) decided to take matters in their own hand, they did an experiment with 70 students enrolled in a scaffolding and multifaceted Research and Statistics Methods course, they hypothesized that “students in an active learning version course of Research Methods and Statistics will demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of Design Knowledge and Statistics Skills than students in the traditional learning condition. They tested students who were in a systematic lecture class and compared it to students who were able to be mostly active in the lecture course. Even though there wasn’t a big difference in the active learning course rather than the lecture only course, results were still higher for being active in class.  The second article, Stansbury and Munro (2013) as well did an experiment with students who were taking the same course at different semester times but instead they used a gaming approach. They tested the effectiveness of video games for instruction to establish if this non-traditional teaching manner would have students more involved and knowledgeable.  The students were to play Dance, Dance Revolution with the score being their statistics that was being measured. The results for this were very high. Students retained more information and did not mind being involved in the class.  
Like numerous experiments there are short comings, depending on the type of trials being tested some glitches are not always avoidable. In the, Ciarocco', Lewandowski Jr.', and Van Volkom (2013) article, I established that the Internal validity was extremely weak. Seeing that the students were able to decide on the time, semester and professor they desired for their class, there was no way to fully rule out confounds in these trials. There were multiple professors instilling this course material each semester, and every professor has a different teaching style. Some professors educate directly from PowerPoints whereas some professors use a PowerPoint as a teaching tool to guide them through a lecture while also showing some enthusiasm toward the material. Last but not least, the classes were taught during the Spring and Fall seasons.  I have found that when students return from summer break they are more inspired about classes and passing them whereas Spring semester students are looking forward to Spring break, graduation, and Summer break.  Since the researchers were not able to randomly assign students to conditions and choose when they took the course this led to many open circumstances and that could create a dilemma causing many confounds.  Even though data was collected the instructors may have had more eagerness or given more effort in teaching the subject, an instructor’s attitude and teaching style play a vast role on a student’s performance and how well they attain the material.
Because there were confounds found I believe if this course was offered only in the Fall, this could perhaps exclude some confounds. With this course being offered only in the Fall I feel that students would be more focused and maybe do better. Also, every class should have some type of active learning available, whether some courses have more activities is strictly up to the researchers but testing if more hand-on approaches worked better could also help remove problems.
Methods
Participants
The participants that were used for this study came from a large university and two classes learning the exact same material were compared. These two separate classes were taught by the same professor, teacher assistant, and also had the same study opportunities as each other.   The participants were an active face-to-face group (20 females, 5 males) with a mean age of 26.25 years (SD=8.76) and the lecture face-to-face group (21 females, 8 males) the average age was 21.2 years (SD=4.76). The active face-to-face course was held in Spring of 2016 while the lecture face-to-face was held in the Fall of 2015. These two groups had mixed ethnicities in both semesters; there were Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Asians and Others.

Materials/Apparatus
The materials used for the study were, a pre-test, post-test and lastly an assessment on satisfaction with the class. The initial data was collected on the first day of lab using multiple choice, fill in the blank, and calculation problems seeking what we recalled from the pre-requisite class taken before this Research Method and Statistic 3530 course.  The second assessment is the final exam, which will be evaluating how much we retained throughout the course. Lastly, a Likert scale was used to retrieve feedback and data on the level of satisfaction of learning in this course. The satisfaction assessment consisted of questions, utilizing a 5-point scale ranging from 5 – “strongly agree” to 1 = “strongly disagree. Tests were provided in the Fall of 2015 and also in Spring of 2016.


Procedure
The control group in the study was the students who received a standard method of learning, meaning they were not hands on group. They did not make up experiments and have an opportunity to play games and recall what worked best for students.
The experimental group in the study was my class that took PSYC 3530 an online, active learning formatted class. Being in this particular class we were able to have lectured online, having access to see our professor and ask questions like students would in a regular face-to-face course. With taking this online course, my class has an advantage; we are able to re-watch lectures as many times as needed verses someone who is only meeting face-to-face. We also made up experiments and were able to tell what worked best for us and helped us learn all this new and difficult material.












References
Stansbury, J. A., & Munro, G. D. (2013). Gaming in the classroom: An innovative way to teach                                                                                                                                        
factorial designs. Teaching of Psychology, 40(2), 148-152. doi:10.1177/0098628312475037
Ciarocco, N. J., Lewandowski, G. W., & Volkom, M. V. (2012). The Impact of a Multifaceted                                      Approach to Teaching Research Methods on Students' Attitudes. Teaching of Psychology, 40(1), 20-25. doi:10.1177/0098628312465859