Research participation provides opportunities for students to directly experience the methods used to study the human mind and behavior. Research participation is valuable to everyone in the psychology community at Ramapo College. Participation in research has been found to significantly increase students’ knowledge about psychology. In addition, Ramapo College psychology professors and students created all of the studies in the participation pool. The pool allows them to test their hypotheses and present results to further psychology as a science. 

Importantly, researchers will protect your privacy and no identifying information will never be made public. If you prefer not to take advantage of this experiential learning opportunity, you may choose to complete alternative written assignments. For more information about these assignments, scroll to the end of this website. 

Note: Individuals under the age of 18 will be asked for parental consent or will be required to do the alternative written assignments (see below).  

Participation Requirement:

As part of your introduction to psychology course, all students are asked to participate in psychology research.  You will need to participate in 2 hours (2 “points”) of research during the semester, each point worth 2% of your grade, for a total of 4% of your grade.  

You now need to complete BOTH (2) points by December 8, 2025, by 11:59 PM*. Each research participation point is worth 2% of the overall course grade, for a total of 4% of your overall course grade. 

NOTE:  Completion of points will be given a pass/fail grade at the end of the semester. Only full points will be given a passing grade. So, if you completed 1.5 points worth of studies, you would receive a “pass” for the first point and “fail” for the second point. Thus, make sure to complete the full 2 points worth of studies. 

*Note that only some studies will have the Monday December 8 at 11:59 pm deadline. Others will have earlier deadlines. 

How to Participate:

In order to participate you will need to access the website below. To signup for a study you will need a user name and password. Your user name will be the first part of your Ramapo email address, for example “jsmith” (without the @ramapo.edu). Your password will be emailed to you after the add/drop period ends and it can also be generated when you first logon to the participant pool system by using the “lost password link” at the lower left of the homepage. 

The URL to log on is: http://ramapo.sona-systems.com/ 

Signing up for a study is easy to do. Once you have logged in for the first time there are a few questions to be answered, and then you can simply view the studies that are available and the open time slots, and you can sign up.

A set of available studies will be displayed with a brief description and any related restrictions. You may choose to participate in the studies that interest you. Some studies may be online surveys, while others may require that you go to a specific location. 

Some points to consider:

• Research studies will be displayed online throughout the semester, so if you do not see one that fits into your schedule or there are none available you can check back periodically to look for a study. Please note that there will not be a regular pattern to study availability. There may be times when many studies are available at once, and there will be times when no studies will be available. Study availability is completely dependent on researchers' own timelines. Do not wait until the last minute to participate, as few participation opportunities may be available at the end of the semester. 

• Some studies may be conducted online and you will receive credit once you complete the survey or project. 

• Please write down the time, date and location of your study (there will also be a record of your sign-up schedule in the system which you can also access). 

• If you can not make an appointment please contact the experimenter and let them know you can not make it. If you cancel an appointment you will not get credit for participating. 

• At various times during the semester you will receive an email from the participant pool administrator informing you of available studies. 

• Some of these studies will be online - but not all will.  Studies that are in person or virtual/synchronous will occur at a time outside of your normal class - please schedule early to ensure this is possible.

• IMPORTANT NOTE: FOR ANY STUDY, YOU WILL NEED TO SIGN UP FOR THAT STUDY AT LEAST 3 HOURS BEFORE THE DEADLINE TO PARTICIPATE. So, if the study says, "Participation Deadline: November 1 at 11:59pm," you need to sign up for the study by 8:59 pm in order to be able to participate.

If you have questions, please contact the Psychology Participant Pool Administrator: Professor Leah Warner, lwarner@ramapo.edu

Alternative Writing Assignment:

The American Psychological Association  requires an Alternative Assignment to be offered to students who choose not to participate in psychological research (http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html).  

Research participation provides opportunities for students to experience the methods used to study the human mind and behavior, and participation has been found increase students’ knowledge of current areas of research and psychology as a field. For those who are opposed to participating in research, or if you are under the age of 18, you can still achieve some of these goals by reading reports of human research projects in psychological journals.

As an alternative to serving in studies you can read and write a summary about an article on human research. An article summary is worth one point, and so you will need to complete one article summary for each point of your participant pool requirement.  

The article must come from one of the following research journals published by the American Psychological Association:

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Journal of Applied Psychology

Journal of Comparative 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 Personality and Social Psychology

Professional Psychology: Research and Practice

Psychology and Aging

These journals are all in the Ramapo Library. You can also access the journals online through Ramapo Library’s “Journal Finder.” Once you get to the library’s website, click on the “Journal Finder” link and then type in one of the journals listed above.  Click on the link it provides, which will take you to the article listings by year. Flip through until you find an article published in the last 6 months 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). If you have any problems with finding an article, please contact a reference librarian: https://www.ramapo.edu/library/.

Assignment  Details: 

Read and write summary of the research article. When doing so, pay attention to the introduction section, which describes the research topic and summarizes previous studies, the Methods section, which describes how the research is conducted, the Results section, which describes the results of the study, and the Discussion section, which summarizes the findings, describes limitations, and also future directions for research. 

Your summary should include the following: 

1. Describe the topic being studied and the reasons why this topic is being studied.

2. Summarize the methods used to conduct the research. 

a. Describe what participants were used, including how many and how were they selected. 

b. Describe what apparatus or materials were used and describe how the research was conducted (“Procedure”).

3. Summarize the results.

4. Discuss the implications of the research. 

a. Research limitations (What limited the research findings? What were problems with the study?).

b. Suggestions for future research

An adequate summary should be 300 words.   NOTE: Everything must be in your own words.  No quotes!  Assignments that fail to meet the above requirements will not be granted credit.  The subject pool coordinators will be grading your assignments on a credit/no credit basis.

Note: This assignment was originally developed by the University of Michigan and was adapted, with permission, for use at Ramapo College.

Submitting your Assignment: 

You will submit this report online at the participant pool website: http://ramapo.sona-systems.com/

Go to the “Study Sign-up” page and click on the “Alternative Written Assignment” link.  From there, you will click on the link that will take you to the submission website.  

On the website, you will be asked to indicate your name, your R number, the course and section number, and your instructor’s name. 

You will also be asked to type in information about your article:  the authors’ names, the year it was published, the title of the article, the journal name, the journal volume number, and the page numbers. 

Then you will be asked to insert your assignment.  

It is recommended that you write your assignment in a separate document using a word processing program and then cutting and pasting it into the website rather than writing directly on the website. There is no way to save your work on the website prior to submission.  

If there are any problems or questions please contact:

Dr. Leah Warner email: lwarner@ramapo.edu