CURE

A CURE gives students the opportunity to conduct research in one of their courses. I teach PSY200/L (Introduction to Research Methods and Data Analysis) and it's the perfect place to implement a CURE. It's the first time that students majoring or minoring in psychology get to really focus on how research is conducted in the discipline. Students get to learn about research designs and then design a real study that they conduct from start to finish. Below are some of the activities that students engage in during the term:

• Learn about research designs that measure the correlation between two variables

• Learn about research designs that measure cause and effect between variables (i.e., experiments)

• Find and learn how to read peer-reviewed articles in PsycInfo (the database that indexes all peer-reviewed articles in the psychology discpline)

• Design a real experiment on a topic of interest

• Collect data from students out and about on campus (i.e., in the field)

• Analyze the data using Jamovi (an open-source stats program)

• Communicate the final results in poster form and in a short video

In the spring 2022 term our class conducted an experimental study on helping behavior in CSUMB students that also measured students' satisfaction with various elements of their experience at CSUMB. We titled it: CSUMB Students Prove Helpful.

Here's our class (below) in front of the (almost) finished poster on May 13, 2022:

From L-R: Renee Jimenez Guerrero, Jennifer Pineda, Rahel Bracht, Emma Guerrero, Aislynne Chappell, Neahkahnie Conley, and Jennifer Rodriguez Cortez (not pictured: Jasmyn Ramirez and Aidee Garibay).

Want someone to describe what we did and what we found? Click the video below to hear Aidee Garibay give you a walkthrough of the poster.