Research Methods in Practice

Course organization and staffing

Students work in groups of 6 within workshop classes of 80, so each class is three times to accommodate a cohort of 240 students. The courses runs for 15 weeks, with 12 weeks of teaching, followed by three ‘fallow’ weeks allocated to revision and exams for other modules. Throughout that time, there will be a specified teaching assistant (Ph.D student or TARA) who is the supervisor of each group as is responsible for monitoring the progress of their groups.

Each week, students attend a two-hour high intensity workshop, and a two-hour low intensity workshop. The high-intensity workshops have a student:staff ratio of 16:1. One of those staff must be a member of academic staff (Lecturer / AP / Prof), who is expected to be present throughout the session. High-intensity sessions are where new topics are introduced, and where students can expect prompt high-quality support from topic experts, including their supervisor.

The low-intensity workshops are staffed at 40:1 ratio, by teaching assistants. No academic staff member is present. The low-intensity sessions are where students continue to work on material introduced in the high-intensity workshops, with support that is mainly technical or procedural in nature.

Assessment

The module’s mark is based on 20% Practical and 80% coursework, with no exams, but wth pass/fail comptency components. References to ‘week X’ mean the Xth teaching week of the semester. For the 2019/20 Plymouth University timetable, teaching week 1 of semester 2 begins 27/01/2020.

20% - Group mark for a 10-min group oral presentation. The mark is weighted mainly on the quality of the research presented, rather than audio-visual slickness. There is a detailed quantitative markscheme. Due end of Week 7

80% - Individual mark for an individually-written 4000-word journal article. The feedback is returned in the format of a journal peer review, and the mark derived from this feedback via a detailed quantitative mark scheme. Due end of Week 12. Aim to completing marking by end of Week 14 (in order to assist assessment officers. Return to students Monday of Week 16 (not earlier, to avoid returning work during the exam period).

Pass/fail - There are a set of pass/fail competency components, and also act as a lab book. In order to keep on track students should complete them in the week indicated (see below). However, they can revise their entries at any point up until the end of week 12. Some of these are group components. In these cases, every member of the group still has to submit it individually, but they can all submit the same thing without penalty.

They have to pass 80% of them to pass the module.

List of assessments

A full list of assessments, with proformas and model answers in most cases, are available here

Resources

All sessions in 2019/20 will be run in the Psyc:EL space. The course requires one computer (PC, Mac, or Linux) per student, in all sessions, so any student with a laptop must bring it.

For activities based around R, students will continue to use the RStudio server account they were allocated at Stage 1. They should be prompted a week before the module starts to request login details if they do not have them.

There is a need for an online lab book system (see above).

For activities using Open Sesame, students will need to install this on their machine. There is time in the schedule for them to do this in class.

Employability skills

Communication skills. Group working to deadline. Project planning / timetabling. Critical thinking / analysis.

Ethics

Students write a detailed description of their methods; the discussion and approval of this document by staff provides a practical insight into ethics in these fairly innocous studies.