Intro

Course description

This course aims to train psychology majors to clean, analyze, and present behavioral science data using programming tools. Academic psychologists increasingly use such tools to support their research, and expect trainees to begin programs with prerequisite programming experience. Industry data scientists frequently work with human behavioral data, and training in behavioral science is key to rigorous, ethical applied science. This course thus aims to highlight the importance of the relationship between programming skills and “pure” science for psychology undergraduates, and inspire excitement about the uses and joys of programming for psychologists.

Learning objectives

Programming literacy

By the end of this course, students will be able to…

  • Diagram the parts and functions of a piece of pre-written R code
  • Generate code to manipulate a dataset or produce a data visualization
  • Identify and debug commonplace R errors

Scientific concepts

By the end of this course, students will be able to…

  • Describe how scientific computing improves the quality of psychological science
  • Critique the informativeness of a data visualization
  • Assess what research questions a dataset can and cannot answer

Prerequisites

A semester isn’t a very long time, and we have a lot to learn! In order for us to implement psychological science concepts through programming in this class, I must be able to assume that you have a certain amount of prior experience with those concepts.

Therefore, to enroll in this class, you must have taken:

  • Introductory psychology
  • Introductory statistics

Course format

This course will consist mainly of interactive code-along lectures, interspersed with solo and group work time on in-class activities and exercises.

Expectations →