Learning R

(View Complete Item Description)

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.

Material Type: Textbook

Authors: Dr. Amanda Chicoli, Dr. Tracy Tomlinson, Emily Forgo

OpenPSYC

(View Complete Item Description)

OpenPSYC was created by Drs. Scott Roberts, Ryan Curtis, and Dylan Selterman while at the University of Maryland to serve as a free alternative to a textbook for students in PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology. Designed to help students explore psychological theory, research, and practical applications of psychological science. After completing this course in psychology, students will be able to: - Explain patterns of thought and behavior in the context of psychological theories and provide scientific evidence to support their ideas. - Describe the basic ethical principles that should guide scientific research on the thought and behavior of living organisms. - Demonstrate analytical skills by critiquing psychological claims and designing valid research that could test their hypotheses. - Apply psychological concepts and research findings in a way that improves their own academic, personal, and professional life. Each module is structured around key prompts -- Learning Objective Questions -- and followed by links to the articles, videos, and interactive demonstrations students will need to answer those questions.

Material Type: Full Course, Homework/Assignment, Module, Textbook

Authors: Dylan Selterman, Ryan Curtis, Scott Roberts

Numbers Don't Lie (But People Do): Introduction to (Ethical) Statistics

(View Complete Item Description)

This resource was created for Introduction to Statistics students at the University of Maryland, and is designed to help you explore psychological theory, research, and practical applications of statistics. After completing this course in psychology, you will be able to: - Explain how to use and interpret descriptive and inferential statistics in an ethically responsible way. - Describe the difference between descriptive (central tendency, dispersion, correlation) and inferential statistics (single, multiple, logistic), and know when to use each. - Demonstrate analytical skills by critiquing research and media claims. - Apply statistical concepts and methods in a way that improves your own academic, personal, and professional life. Each module is structured around key prompts - Learning Objective Questions - and followed by the links to articles, videos, and interactive demonstrations you will need to answer those questions. After studying the readings, videos, and presentations you should be able to answer the learning objective questions in detail without any notes in front of you. If you practice doing that regularly, you are well prepared for any assessment that your instructor can give you!

Material Type: Full Course, Homework/Assignment, Textbook

Authors: Amanda Chicoli, Ben Jones, Brian Kim, Tracy Tomlinson

Principles of Social Psychology

(View Complete Item Description)

Have you ever had trouble teaching the various topics of social psychology and fitting them together to form a coherent field? Dr. Stangor felt like he was presenting a laundry list of ideas, research studies, and phenomena, rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge. He wondered how his students could be expected to remember and understand the many phenomena that social psychologists study? How could they tell what was most important? It was then that he realized a fresh approach to a Social Psychology textbook was needed to structure and integrate student learning; thus, Principles of Social Psychology was born. This textbook is based on a critical thinking approach, and its aim is to get students thinking actively and conceptually Đ with a greater focus on the forest than the trees. Yes, there are right and wrong answers, but the answers are not the only thing. What is perhaps even more important is how students get to the answers Đ the thinking process itself. To help students better grasp the big picture of social psychology, and to provide you with a theme that you can use to organize your lectures, Dr. Stangor's text has a consistent pedagogy across the chapters.

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Charles Stangor

Addressing Grand Challenges Through Open Science Research

(View Complete Item Description)

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.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading, Textbook

Authors: Amanda Chicoli, Emily Forgo, Tracy Tomlinson

Introduction to Memory and Cognition

(View Complete Item Description)

How are we so good at recognizing faces and objects? How do we selectively attend to relevant pieces of information (and why do we sometimes fail to do so)? How do we remember what we learned in class (and why do we sometimes forget)? How do we comprehend sentences, make decisions, and solve problems? These are all questions asked in the field of cognitive psychology, which focuses on the internal mental processes involved in representing concepts, remembering, reasoning, language processing, decision making, and problem solving. More specific questions include: Is it safe to talk on a hands-free cell phone while driving? Is eyewitness testimony reliable? How can you better remember information? What are the pitfalls that lead to bad decisions, and how can they be avoided? This site is a set of always-in-development open educational resources (OER) related to the field of Cognitive Psychology. The content has mostly been adapted from various other sources (with support from the Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative - thanks!) in order to serve as the textbook for Introduction to Memory and Cognition PSYC 341 at the University of Maryland, College Park. As OER they are completely free for students (and anyone else) to use and/or revise/redistribute. The goal of these materials (and the corresponding PSYC 341 course at UMD) is to promote a good understanding of current theories and debates that motivate research in cognitive psychology, understand which research methods are appropriate to address different questions in the field, and have an improved ability to understand and discuss this knowledge through class participation and assignments. We hope to do this in a way that allows you to see the relevance of cognitive psychological research and theories to your own lives. If you are an instructor of a class related to cognitive psychology, these materials are free for you to use / adapt as you like – please see the GitHub README for some basic info on how to adapt these materials for your own purposes. If you are neither a student nor a teacher, well, I’m not sure why you’re here, but I hope you find this useful!

Material Type: Textbook

Author: L. Robert Slevc