A new course in Expermental Design is being run at the Humanities Lab by post-doctoral researcher Richard Dewhurst, beginning Feb 2012. Please email Richard.Dewhurst@humlab.lu.se if you want to sign up (the course is now full for this term Feb-March 2012). The course is particularly targeted at beginning PhD students, who want to address a research question with quantitative methods.

Prospective students should be aware that whilst Masters students are welcome, the Humanities Lab cannot guarantee the allocation of course credits; this is down to their supervisors at their home department, who will need to sign a form permitting them to attend (:public:course_form_for_masters_students.pdf)

Please follow this link to the full schedule on the Lab Wiki

Overview

Do you have an idea for a research question, but you are not quite sure how to pin down the various elements into a testable hypothesis? This course could be for you. We will go through the typical stages involved in planning and preparing an experiment, from coming up with an idea, formalising it through checking existing literature, to data pre-processing, the step just before statisical analysis. Along this route there are many things to consider, and choices the researcher must make: defining independent and dependent variables properley, eliminating extraneous variables with suitable control manipulations, the validity and reliability of the data you collect, as well as how you actually implement your design in practice. The course will begin with the foundations of empirical theory, move on to evaluate this with some classic examples from experimental psychology and modern scientific reporting, and end with practical lab work where participants build their own experiment and prepare the data for statistical analysis.

This course compliments, and if possible should precede taking the MatLab course, and the Statistics course, in that order. Although the Experimental Design course focuses on cognitive and behavioural sciences, the basic principles are discipline independent, and the course should be relevant to anyone from Humanities to Biology who has a 'vague idea' for a research question which they wish to address with the various measurement technologies we have in the Humanities Lab.

The following topics will be covered in the course:

- Empirical theory

- Types of Experimental design

- Building an experiment with available software

- Variables, stimuli, and control

- The practicalities of data collection

- Interpreting results

Each class will be two hours, and the course will begin with learning skills which allow students to effectively evaluate research reports, from the point of view of their experimental designs. So, the beginning lectures will be followed by discussion groups of reading material. Then, we will focus on practical aspects, like actually putting the experiment together. For this we will concentrate on PsychoPy, a freely available alternative to eprime. We will take advantage of the excellent facilities at the Humanities Lab to demonstrate data recording with some different experimental set-ups.

Teacher: Richard.Dewhurst@humlab.lu.se

Duration: 2012-02-06 → 2012-03-13

Credits: 7.5 ECTS