The teaching is organized as follows:

Learning objectives

General aims: The general aims of this course are mainly connected with two aims of the entire degree course: 1. To develop knowledge and understanding of research methods and measurement issues in psychology, considering psychological phenomena at individual and group level. 2. To develop skills concerning psychological assessment, mainly oriented to the assessment of individual needs for lifelong education and training, also in an organizational and community perspective. Specific learning objectives: This course aims: * To develop some fundamental concepts and critical knowledge concerning the research process on psychological sciences. Research methods will be discussed, both considering a qualitative and quantitative approach. * To help students in developing skills useful to critically examine and evaluate the scientific communication in psychology, with a focus on organizational research. * To allow students to carry out a simple research project

Prerequisites and basic notions

Being a first year, first semester exam, there are no specific requirement different from those required for access to the bachelor course.

Program

TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS
Contents will be delivered through both lectures and laboratory practicals.

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LECTURES
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- The Science of Psychology: qualitative and quantitative methods.
- The Scientific Method.
- Ethical Issues in the Conduct of Psychological Research.
- Descriptive Methods (Observation; Survey Research).
- Experimental Methods (Independent Groups Designs, Repeated Measures Designs, Complex Designs).
- Quasi-Experimental Designs.
- Validity in psychological research.
- Data description and data analysis in qualitative and quantitative approach.
- How to read and how to communicate research results.

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LABORATORY PRACTICALS
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- Library Research Methods in Psychology.
- Managing a scientific paper.
- Data collection and Computer-Assisted Data Entry. How to manage a dataset.
- Computer-Assisted Data Analysis, descriptive statistics. Illustrate and summarize the data.
- Correlational analysis, Regression analysis.
- Computer-Assisted Data Analysis, inferential statistics. Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST); Comparing Two Means; univariate ANOVA.

Didactic methods

The course includes a part of lessons and a part of laboratory practicals.

Learning assessment procedures

The same examination will be applied to students who attend or not attend the lessons. The exam comprises two parts: Part 1, a multiple-choice test, with 32 questions, and Part 2, with 3 open-ended questions.
Contents.
Part 1: Basic knowledge. This part comprises 32 closed-ended questions, designed to assess the student's understanding of theoretical contents in Psychological Research Methods. Items found on this exam all the topics described in the program. To address this part it will be useful to study the suggested handbooks (or other similar ones).
Part 2: Applied knowledge. This part comprises three open-ended questions (very short answers required), designed to assess student’s competence concerning some technical and methodological issues of the discipline, even statistical ones. The starting point will be a scientific communication in the field of psychology (generally a short report, in English language, describing a psychological research). The questions will concern method, data analysis, communication of results. It will be required to be able to read numeric tables, figures and graphs.

Evaluation criteria

Maximum evaluation for each part will be 32 over 30, and each part will be evaluated separately. For Part 1, scoring will be: correct answer=1; missing answer=0, wrong answer=-0.2. Total score will be the sum of each single item scoring. For Part 2, scoring will be max 10 for each question, with 2 additional points, for an excellent overall performance. Final scoring depends on the two evaluations, with different weights: 4 for Part 1 and 1 for Part 2. Final grade will be computed as following: Final grade ={[(Part 1 scoring x 4) + (Part 2 scoring x 1)] / (30 x 5)} x 30. Single part’s scoring cannot be used separately: finale grade is one.

Criteria for the composition of the final grade

Scoring in the lab final test (see lab part of the program) will be added (max 3 points) to the written examination score (only for evaluations more than 18 over 30), to reach the final grade. This part is not mandatory.

Exam language

Italiano