I designed the course for graduate students who use statistics in their research, plan to use statistics, or need to interpret statistical analyses performed by others. The primary audience are graduate students in the environmental sciences, but the course should benefit just about anyone who is in graduate school in the natural sciences. The course is not designed for those who want a simple overview of statistics; we’ll learn by analyzing real data. This course or equivalent is required for UMB Biology and EEOS Ph.D. students. It is a recommended course for several of the intercampus graduate school of marine science program options.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the different research methods used by psychologistsDiscuss the strengths and weaknesses of case studies, naturalistic observation, surveys, and archival research

After reading this module, you will be able to:Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of archivall research and case studiesDescribe longitudinal, cross-sectional, and sequential research designs

After reading this module, you will be able to:Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of archivall research and case studiesDescribe longitudinal, cross-sectional, and sequential research designs

This unit covers basic research methods in an easily accessible way, and includes research tips and pros and cons for each method. It also takes learners through a step-by-step approach to planning research.

During the early days of quarantine, many teachers turned to poetry to process their experiences. Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance: An Oral History of COVID-19 preserves this poetry and teachers' experiences as they navigated a new reality in education.

Because of its ability to determine cause-and-effect relationships, the laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the method of choice for psychological science. One downside, however, is that as it carefully controls conditions and their effects, it can yield findings that are out of touch with reality and have limited use when trying to understand real-world behavior. This module highlights the importance of also conducting research outside the psychology laboratory, within participants’ natural, everyday environments, and reviews existing methodologies for studying daily life.

Drug research has contributed more to the progress of medicine during the past century than any other scientific factor. With lecture snippets of Gerhard Domagk, Gertrude Elion and Brian Kobilka this Mini Lectures introduces to the fundamental research methods of drug targeting.

The designing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting of psychological studies entail many choices that are often arbitrary. The opportunistic use of these so-called researcher degrees of freedom aimed at obtaining statistically significant results is problematic because it enhances the chances of false positive results and may inflate effect size estimates. In this review article, we present an extensive list of 34 degrees of freedom that researchers have in formulating hypotheses, and in designing, running, analyzing, and reporting of psychological research. The list can be used in research methods education, and as a checklist to assess the quality of preregistrations and to determine the potential for bias due to (arbitrary) choices in unregistered studies.

Le but de ce manuel est de vous donner les connaissances de base nécessaires pour commencer à rechercher des informations en utilisant le catalogue et les bases de données de la bibliothèque de l’Université d’Alberta. Le manuel contient des instructions étape par étape, des vidéos et des exemples en sciences humaines et sociales. Pour atteindre les objectifs prévus, il vous faudra passer au moins une heure et demie à lire les instructions du didacticiel, répondre aux questions des exercices et revoir les exemples chaque fois que cela sera nécessaire.

In animal experiments, animals, husbandry and test procedures are traditionally standardized to maximize test sensitivity and minimize animal use, assuming that this will also guarantee reproducibility. However, by reducing within-experiment variation, standardization may limit inference to the specific experimental conditions. Indeed, we have recently shown in mice that standardization may generate spurious results in behavioral tests, accounting for poor reproducibility, and that this can be avoided by population heterogenization through systematic variation of experimental conditions. Here, we examined whether a simple form of heterogenization effectively improves reproducibility of test results in a multi-laboratory situation. Each of six laboratories independently ordered 64 female mice of two inbred strains (C57BL/6NCrl, DBA/2NCrl) and examined them for strain differences in five commonly used behavioral tests under two different experimental designs. In the standardized design, experimental conditions were standardized as much as possible in each laboratory, while they were systematically varied with respect to the animals' test age and cage enrichment in the heterogenized design. Although heterogenization tended to improve reproducibility by increasing within-experiment variation relative to between-experiment variation, the effect was too weak to account for the large variation between laboratories. However, our findings confirm the potential of systematic heterogenization for improving reproducibility of animal experiments and highlight the need for effective and practicable heterogenization strategies.

This exercise guides students through reading and outlining an empirical journal article. It reviews the basic structure of empirical journal articles and prompts students to take detailed notes of each article as they read.

This exercise guides students through how to outline a non-empirical (theoretical, philosophical, practical) journal article. Students are prompted to take detailed notes as they read within a structured format.

This course presents the overarching framework, principles, and core responsibilities of public health research and practice from a multidisciplinary perspective. The course also provides the necessary foundation for further studies toward advanced cross-cutting approaches essential for public health practice.

What are the most effective methods to study for a test? What are the meanings of dreams? How do illusions work? With whom are you most likely to fall in love? These are just a few of the questions that have been asked by psychologists since the birth of the field as an area of scientific research in the 1870’s. This text surveys the basic concepts, theories, and pivotal findings over the past 100 years in the science of Psychology, with special emphasis on contemporary concepts and findings focused on the relation of the brain to normal and pathological behaviors. Psychology has long evolved past the psychodynamic influence to include biological, social, learning, motivational, and developmental perspectives, to name a few. Contemporary psychologists go beyond philosophical or anecdotal speculation and rely on empirical evidence to inform their conclusions. Similarly, readers will push beyond pre-existing schemas and misconceptions of the field of psychology to an understanding of contemporary quantitative research methods as they are used to predict and test human behavior.

We designed our book to help graduate social work students through every step of the research process, from conceptualization to dissemination. Our textbook centers cultural humility, information literacy, pragmatism, and an equal emphasis on quantitative and qualitative methods. It includes extensive content on literature reviews, cultural bias and respectfulness, and qualitative methods, in contrast to traditionally used commercial textbooks in social work research.

Limiting the debilitating consequences of ageing is a major medical challenge of our time. Robust pharmacological interventions that promote healthy ageing across diverse genetic backgrounds may engage conserved longevity pathways. Here we report results from the Caenorhabditis Intervention Testing Program in assessing longevity variation across 22 Caenorhabditis strains spanning 3 species, using multiple replicates collected across three independent laboratories. Reproducibility between test sites is high, whereas individual trial reproducibility is relatively low. Of ten pro-longevity chemicals tested, six significantly extend lifespan in at least one strain. Three reported dietary restriction mimetics are mainly effective across C. elegans strains, indicating species and strain-specific responses. In contrast, the amyloid dye ThioflavinT is both potent and robust across the strains. Our results highlight promising pharmacological leads and demonstrate the importance of assessing lifespans of discrete cohorts across repeat studies to capture biological variation in the search for reproducible ageing interventions.

The last ten years have witnessed increasing awareness of questionable research practices (QRPs) in the life sciences, including p-hacking, HARKing, lack of replication, publication bias, low statistical power and lack of data sharing (see Figure 1). Concerns about such behaviours have been raised repeatedly for over half a century but the incentive structure of academia has not changed to address them. Despite the complex motivations that drive academia, many QRPs stem from the simple fact that the incentives which offer success to individual scientists conflict with what is best for science. On the one hand are a set of gold standards that centuries of the scientific method have proven to be crucial for discovery: rigour, reproducibility, and transparency. On the other hand are a set of opposing principles born out of the academic career model: the drive to produce novel and striking results, the importance of confirming prior expectations, and the need to protect research interests from competitors. Within a culture that pressures scientists to produce rather than discover, the outcome is a biased and impoverished science in which most published results are either unconfirmed genuine discoveries or unchallenged fallacies. This observation implies no moral judgement of scientists, who are as much victims of this system as they are perpetrators.

This is the textbook (reader) for the course Introduction to Academic Research, taught at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen (The Netherlands). This is a compilation of four chapters from 3 different textbooks that are classified as open educational resources (OER) and together provide the accompanying literature for the course.

The chapters cover the following topics:
- Academic research and the research process
- What are spatial sciences?
- Theories in scientific research
- Research ethics

The original sources of the chapters in this textbook are mentioned on every page. These texts are taken almost verbatim from the mentioned sources; small adjustments have been made for the consistency of referencing, providing a little context, or aligning the numbering of sections.