This book presents University of Maryland student research related to Grand Challenges and psychology. Present topics primarily address global health grand challenges, but we expect it to expand as the research included in this book expands and evolves. Each research project presented in this book was pre-registered and has an Open Science Foundation project which allows public access to the research pre-registration, materials, data, analysis code, and poster. Topics covered include psychological grit, risk-taking behavior, optimism, and motivation.

This resource was created at the University of Maryland (UMD) for instructors who want to teach, students (and instructors) who want to learn, and researchers who want to use R for statistical discovery and analysis. While this is a textbook, it is largely based on hands-on examples with video walk-throughs to take you through accessing R and RStudio, the basics of R and progressing to analyses with step by step templates and video support. The goal is to build confidence with programming early on and demonstrate best coding practices from the start.