Student Guidelines for the Introductory Psychology Subject Pool
Fall 2008
Psychology Student Academic Affairs Office
1343 East Hall
E-Mail: Subject.Pool@umich.edu
Phone: 764-2580
Staff: Brian Wallace, Lori Gould, Jennifer Taylor
Website for Student Log-in: https://umichpsych.sona-systems.com
IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, OR EXPERIENCE ANY PROBLEMS WITH AN EXPERIMENT OR EXPERIMENTER, PLEASE CONTACT THE OFFICE. DO NOT ASK YOUR INSTRUCTOR.
Overview
Course Requirement
Much of what you will be learning in Introductory Psychology will be through your formal course work this term, but there is also the opportunity for you to take a more active role in this process by participating in ongoing psychological research. Therefore, as part of your requirements for Psych 111, there is the expectation that you will participate for 6 hours of experiments as a subject in the Introductory Psychology Subject Pool.
The experiments you will participate in are designed and run by psychology faculty, graduate students, and senior honors students. The data collected is used in journal articles, doctoral dissertations, or senior honors theses. No identifying information about you will ever be used in connection with your experiment results. Besides increasing your understanding of psychology, your participation in these experiments helps provide new information and insights about psychology.
If you prefer not to take advantage of this experiential learning opportunity, you may choose to complete alternative written assignments. However, if you do not complete either the 6 hours of experiments or the alternative written assignments (these papers are graded Pass/Fail), you will receive an incomplete for the course.
If you choose to complete the Alternative Written Assignment please know that you may only submit the assignments electronically through email to subject.pool@umich.edu. Then we will send you an email as a receipt indicating that we have received your papers and your requirement has been completed. You MUST keep this receipt until you receive your final grade for this course and verify it on Wolverine Access.
You can satisfy the Introductory Psychology Subject Pool course requirement by participating only in Subject Pool experiments. There are many research projects on campus needing subjects, and there are also paid subject pools, but we do not accept your participation in those experiments toward the requirement.
The Experiments
All the experiments are reviewed and approved by the University of Michigan Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board. If you would like more information about this committee, you can call 647-3648.
In some psychological studies, participants only learn about the actual nature and purpose of the experiment at the end of the study. In these cases, participants may be given false information so as to prevent knowledge of the true purpose of the study. This is deemed necessary when full knowledge of the study might influence the individual’s responses and consequently, make the findings invalid. In all cases, participants are fully debriefed at the end of the experimental session, including information on the purpose of the study, the expectations of the experimenter, and why it was considered necessary to not provide the full truth from the beginning. Deception studies of this sort are absolutely critical to the study of psychology so that we can learn how people think, feel, and act naturally without any undue biases affecting the data we collect. If you want to make sure that you do not participate in a deception experiment, please be sure to check the appropriate box on your online pretest.
Procedures
Enrollment
You enroll in the pool by completing a “Prescreen Survey” at the Subject Pool Website. Your password to get into the site will be emailed to you September 3rd. You will not have access to the site until you receive your password. We ask that you register online and complete your “Prescreen Survey” by September 9th. If the “Prescreen Survey” is not completed during the term, you will have to do 6 Alternative Written Assignments.
The first section of the Prescreen Survey completes your registration into the Subject Pool. The rest of the questions are for prescreening purposes that will allow you to sign up for studies for which your particular information is important.
You will answer a question asking if you want to participate in the Subject Pool. If you do not want to participate in the Subject Pool for any reason, you must answer this question "no.” You will then be required to turn in 5 Alternative Written Assignments.
You will also provide your name, 8-digit university ID, uniqname, local phone number, gender, class and section, and birth date. If you don't go online to register for the Subject Pool within five days of receiving your login information, you will have an additional hour added to your requirement. You are responsible for telling us if your phone number changes during the term.
If you don’t want to participate in the Subject Pool, and so indicate on the Prescreen Survey, you will be responsible for obtaining the directions for the Alternate Written Assignment from the Psychology Student Academic Affairs Office.
If you are not yet 18 years old, you are required to come to the Psychology Student Academic Affairs Office for a permission form for your parent or legal guardian to sign.
How to Get Into Experiments
Starting on September 10, you may sign up for experiments using the website: https://umichpsych.sona-systems.com
You will sign-on to the website using your uniqname and the password you received in email from Subject Pool.
You may do each experiment only once. Some may be two part experiments, you will have to sign up for both parts.
You must be on time for experiments, or they may start without you. If that happens, or if you miss an appointment entirely, you’ll be counted as a no-show with penalty.
Experiments begin on the hour or half-hour only (not "Michigan time"). Experiment sessions are anywhere from 0.5 to 3.0 hours long (in 1/2-hour increments. Some of the longer experiments may consist of more than one part. If you are in a multiple part experiment, you should be given credit for the work completed at the end of each timeslot.
You may remove your name from an experiment on the web up to 3 hours before the experiment. After that, you may contact the experimenter up to two hours prior to the experiment to opt out of the experiment due to illness or emergency. To make sure there’s a record, send an e-mail to the experimenter with a carbon-copy to Subject.Pool@umich.edu. An e-mail only to the subject pool is not sufficient notice.
If you don’t show up for an experiment
If you No-Show an experiment in which you’ve agreed to participate you must do an additional hour of experiments to make up for it, regardless of the length of the missed experiment. If you no-show 1 experiment, your total requirement will be 7 hours instead of 6; if you no-show 2 experiments, the total requirement will be 8 hours, etc.
Other Rules
Experiments must take place in a University classroom, office, or laboratory buildings.
If at any time during the experiment session you become uncomfortable with the topic, methods, etc., you may stop participating in the experiment. You can either leave, or, if you're in a group, you can wait until everyone is done with the session. Please tell the experimenter that you're leaving so you can get credit. Please come to the office and let us know so we can make sure you get the credit.
Only the Student Academic Affairs office can give you credit for an experiment for anything other than not finishing the experiment.
If anyone associated with an experiment behaves inappropriately (e.g., asks you for a date, requests that you participate beyond the scheduled time, etc.), please contact the Student Academic Affairs Office immediately.
Experimenters can call you only between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m. Experiments can start at 8 a.m. and must end by 9 p.m. Please let the office know if you're called outside those hours or if you're in an experiment that runs later than 9 p.m.
If the experimenter doesn't show up (please wait 15 minutes), you will get credit for the experiment session ONLY IF you report it to the Student Academic Affairs Office in person.
Don’t go to experiments during your class time: experiments are not an excuse for missing class.
Receiving Credit
You receive credit for each study you participate in on line through the Subject Pool website. The credit should appear within 24 hours of the completion of the study. We recommend that you check your amount of credits regularly throughout the term, and at the end of them once you’ve completed your hours print out the page from the website that indicates you have fulfilled the requirement and keep if for your records until you see your grade posted on Wolverine Access. You may also email subject.pool@umich.edu with any questions.
Important Dates
September 3 - 9 Register for Subject Pool by completing the “Prescreen Survey”
September 10 First day to signup for experiments on the web
September 12 First day to participate in experiments
October 18 – 21 Fall Break – No timeslots, no credit given
November 26 – 30 Thanksgiving Weekend No timeslots, No credit given
December 2 Last Day to do experiments
December 9 Last day of classes. Alternative Written Assignments due.
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT SUBJECT POOL ALTERNATIVE WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT
The intent of the research participation requirement is to provide you with first-hand experience with human psychological research. From this, we hope you will get a better understanding of several current areas of research, the methods the experimenters select (and the reasons why), as well as the potential contribution of each particular study to our understanding of psychology. However, you can achieve some of these goals by reading reports of human research projects in psychological journals.
As an alternative to serving in experiment(s), please read one article on human research for each hour of your subject pool requirement (adjusted for no-shows). The journals should be research journals published by the American Psychological Association:
- Behavioral Neuroscience (formerly Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology)
- Journal of Abnormal Psychology
- Journal of Applied Psychology
- Journal of Comparative Psychology (formerly Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology)
- Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
- Journal of Counseling Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Journal of Educational Psychology
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Perception and Performance
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
- Psychology and Aging
These journals are all in the Shapiro and the Graduate Library. Flip through until you find an article published in the last five years that looks interesting; the abstract at the beginning of each article will help you make a choice. Be sure it is a research article: it must report new data collected on some issue (if it does not have a section headed "Methods," it probably is not a research article).
Then read the first two parts of the article: the introductory section, which describes the issue and surveys previous studies, and the section headed “Methods,” which describes how this particular study was carried out. You need not read the rest of the article ("Results and Discussion"), though you might want to do so to satisfy your curiosity.
Type a summary of the introduction and methods sections using the following format:
- Your name, uniqname, student ID number (Mcard middle 8 digits, NOT Social Security number), course and discussion section number.
- The title of the article you read, followed by the authors' names and a full reference to the journal (this usually appears at the top left of the first page of the article), and include journal title, year, volume number, issue number, and pages.
- Describe the issue being studied and the reasons.
- Summarize the methods used to conduct the research.
a. What subjects were used, how many, how were they selected.
b. What apparatus or materials were used, and procedures (describe how the research was conducted).
An adequate summary should be one to two pages (double spaced) or one-half to one page (single spaced).
Turn in your written assignments by email to subject.pool@umich.edu as a Microsoft Word document in the form of an attachment. We will then send you an email that serves as a receipt verifying that we have received your assignments and your requirement has been met. Please keep this email until you have seen your grade posted correctly on Wolverine Access. Assignments are due no later than the last day of scheduled classes before final scheduled exams begin this term.
