Getting started
Brian Holt
2023-04-05
Getting started
This document explains in quite a bit of detail the “how” to do this course. Notice the menu over on the left. I guess this is called “accordion style”, so if you hover or select an item the sub-items will reveal.
If you haven’t read the syllabus, or at least skimmed the parts about getting a textbook, how you’ll be graded, and how to get on slack, you might consider doing that first.
Course Layout
Throughout the quarter you will Read/watch some things, do/write some things. You will save these written bits of work in a single document as a google doc (more on this below)] and share the document with the class on Slack where you will participate in helping one another get better at critical thinking and meta-cognition.
Why a Google doc and not some other cloud-based service? Simply there’s too much variation in how each software program manages share and edit settings. In an effort to cut down on the need for me to troubleshoot different student software issues, I’m requiring that we use Google Docs.
If you want to draft and write your work on a home computer where you’re saving a word like file on your computer, that’s fine.
The key thing to remember, though, is that you will have just 1 document for the whole quarter. As you start a new assignment, you’ll just add pages to the document, title the new page, add a date, and keep going.
This means you’ll only need to share (more on how to do that later) the document once and you’ll have a record of your progress for the whole quarter.
Ungrading and self reflections
You will be giving yourself a grade. This is different from earning points through assignments and tests.
Points or learning?
Could it be that “point chasing” is harmful? Or maybe it doesn’t foster good thinking and education or learning? Could chasing grades and points simply reduce anxiety in the instructor and student because it is easier to make distinctions between point totals at the end of the quarter versus distinctions about human development in learning?
Within the #ungrading movement there is an emphasis placed on self-reflection and I would argue meta-cognition, which is a systematic and thoughtful activity of thinking about your own thinking.
You will get better at shifting your focus away from chasing points and instead thinking critically.
An overview video on self reflection.
This is not a detailed set of instructions but a gentle intro. Instructor Brian Video on self refleciton overveiw
Part of what my class intends to do is to help you think more clearly about psychological claims. But the emphasis is going to be more about thinking clearly and writing clearly, with minor guidance in how to practice those things in psychological content
A different way to approach this is to think broadly about what should an educated person be able to do? And then what should an educated person in Psychology be able to do? that’s how I’m thinking about this class.
Often, students find that they avoid doing better work because they are doing the bare minimum in the context of mostly arbitrary deadlines that rewards them doing the bare minimum.
Grades
Grades will be based on your own assessment of what you’ve learned. You are giving yourself a grade. I have the right to over-rule your self-given-grade, but I anticipate people are going to be fair to themselves and to this class. If I have an issue with your grade, I’ll ask for help understanding how you arrived at that grade. Often, the discrepancy between instructor and student is due to a missing assignment, or one that was misplaced.
Feedback will be given to many but not all of your weekly writings. However I do not promise to give feedback to all papers every week.
I will occasionally provide my own writing and reflections for you to witness. If I do give you feedback on a weekly writing, my intention for it is to push for you to consider deeper issues that is aligned with your wants for the class but especially development of critical thinking. If I give you feedback on a weekly assignment, the feedback will be in the document as a comment. Sometimes, the feedback I’d like to give will require that I have edit permissions (some feedback is just too complicated for a comment in the margin), but I will contact you about that. For now, make certain your google document has the permissions for “anyone with the link” can “comment” More on how to do that below.
At least Four times this quarter I will ask you to provide me a short sample of your writing from the previous weeks and a self-reflection on your progress. I will read all of these and give feedback on all of them.
The reason you’re writing every week is to provide yourself a track record of writings from which you can reflect. If you do not do this, you won’t have enough content to reflect upon.
More on ungrading
Most students appreciate this approach and not because it gives them an easy A. A few students, however, may think that they should get an ‘A for effort’ when that doesn’t capture the intention of the system.
Effort is necessary but it doesn’t necessarily lead to growth. We are looking for growth. A development of quality thinking and writing. You may naturally then wonder how this looks in practice.
I invite you to consider your development on several abilities. The most obvious is critical thinking. The 9 standards of Critical thinking (in the syllabus)
But development in using logic, meta-cognition, reading, writing, self-reflection, time management, workflow, these are also important.
If you merely go through the book and try to memorize facts, you shouldn’t be thinking you’ve done enough to earn an ‘A’. If you produce similar quality at the end of the quarter compared to the beginning, then I’m not sure an ‘A’ is appropriate.
Quarterly self reflections
Every 3 weeks you’ll do a self reflection. This is to help keep you on track. If you don’t do these self reflections timely, it will impact the highest gpa you can earn. The Syllabus has more information.
Communication
Canvas will not be used
However, some videos have been made available in Panopto, which requires logging into canvas. And this will probably not change because some video content shouldn’t be made public for reasons of copyright (e.g., if I discuss at length a chapter out of a privately owned book).
Don’t use Canvas email
Canvas creates a fire hose of messages and I simply can’t be bothered anymore to manage it.
Use Slack or real email
In slack, if there is a post you’d like me to see, simply write @brian.holt your message, and then hit enter, and I’ll get a notification. That will be a public exchange. If you want to talk with my privately, you can send me an email or a direct message (DM) in slack by typing /DM in any message box followed by ‘enter’. You will see the direct message ‘area’ and you can type my name and send me a note.
You may have some questions about Slack
It’s basically a social media platform where you can participate in teams by having threaded chats or sharing of documents. It can be used synchronously or asynchronously.
More instructions for using slack can be found in this document
Required Software tools
All classes
- Google docs –not OneDrive, not dropbox
- Slack –You can download a desktop app or simply use it in a web browser
- access to canvas, though only to be able to watch previous videos stored in panopto.
- access to Youtube
Using Slack
The main reason I’m using slack is simply that canvas is not as intuitive or easy to use. Canvas also requires a lot more work for me as the teacher to manage. Slack appears to be a a lot easier in that respect.
Communicating in slack
- Easily contact your instructor by using a Direct message or by tagging them using the ‘@’ symbol
- Post questions or documents in “Channels”
- Channels are like public chat rooms
- You can create a threaded conversation on top of a post by hovering
over the main post, a ‘threaded reply’ icon will show up.
- How to send a Direct message
- 2 ways: go to the “direct message” area in slack and start writing (this is the private way to communicate) or add an ‘@’ symbol in front of a user’s name and they’ll be notified (This will be a public communication)
Adjusting notifications in slack
Slack will send you a notification at first for just about everything and it can be overwhelming. You’ll notice there is a little red dot in your slack space indicating activity. Sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s just white.
I don’t want you to be notified every time one of your classmates posts and assignment.
I do want you to be notified if I post something, or if anybody posts in the following for channels: resources, Logistics, muddy point, and general.
Those channels are the way the class communicates with itself and I want you to be aware if somebody asks a logistical question because there’s a good chance that you might benefit from the question and its answer.
The gist of it: Left click on the “General Psychology” title at the Left-top of the slack page. Then go to “Preferences” and change them.
But please watch the video because I want you to receive notifications for every message for 4 channels: #resources #logistical-questions #general and #muddy-points and the video shows you how to do that.
Note to instructor. Give slack examples for:
- finding channels Using search function or in-chat formatting with # symbol
- how to think about slack for collaboration
- and somewhere, but not here, an entry that ties together slack, google doc to rule them all, and the conceptual/architectual process for students to use these tools to simply think better, to write better, to develop a workflow, to collaborate in order to improve thinking, how to reach out for help and to not silo oneself.
How to sign up for slack?
I will invite each of my classes to the slack workspaces via email and maybe in canvas, just because I know everyone uses canvas at first.
Once you have signed up for slack, spend some time filling out your profile and make sure to make your profile picture and actual picture of you.
The last thing about slack is that when it comes to sharing documents, you may need to add permissions for slack to interact with your word processing program. For instance I use Google Docs a lot and I have already added Google Docs as an app that is recognized by Slack.
Tips for using Slack
Slack has a pretty thorough set of instructions to help new users. Don’t try to learn slack all in one go. For now, make a profile and introduce yourself.
3 minute video of Slack tips, will need to sign in to canvas for this video
Using google Docs
One document to rule them all
Logistically, you will put all of your assignments into one google doc. This way you only need to set up the share settings once. Its link (URL) will never change, so you can keep pointing back to it by sharing the same URL.
Educationally, having a single document for the majority of your writing will also keep a history of your progress for both you and your instructor. This could very much serve as a portfolio showing development.
Using Google forms (only for Research methods and/or stats)
In development
- Randomizing sections
- Sharing copies
Using Zotero (Psych 209 Research Methods)
Why use Zotero?
Simply, using a program to manage your bibliography is a convenience. Not only does it store citation information, but it can also manage the formatting of your in-text citations as well as your reference page. Zotero is also a free, open-source program.
When I was in graduate school in the 90’s my thesis had 50 pages of references that I had to type out by hand. Think and be afraid of typos. And it took hours of time to make sure that everything was in its correct order and correctly typed.
And if a supervisor wanted to change some language in your document that shifted you’re in-text citations around, or inserted a new citation, then that would require you to go in to your reference pages and insert a new reference which would then shift the remaining 20 pages of references down. Granted, we had Microsoft Word so it was easier than typing with a typewriter. It still took hours of time for these fixes, but I would say just formatting my thesis with 50 pages of references took months. Easily (because I was still also teaching and taking classes and doing other research work).
With bibliography software you don’t have to worry about that.
But there’s also a reason to use this software and that is you can begin to have a conversation not just with other people, but with yourself, and with the content in the journals. The reason is you can use Zotero to actually make notes about the article you found. It seems to be a little bit time-consuming up front, but when you’re writing a research paper it will save hours of time if you have little annotated comments about an article stored in the database that keeps track of your citation data. In other words, you don’t have to reread the article.
Installing Zotero
This introduces how to install zotero, a free, open-source bibliography program.
Broad view
There are two parts for zotero to work:
- Download the Zotero desktop application
- Install the zotero plugin for your preferred browser
Basically you need both of these programs because they work together. The desktop application has the most functionality and options, it’s really the ‘thing’ of zotero.
The plugin for your browser is a program that helps interface whatever it is that you’re looking at and the zotero application. For example, if you’re looking at a journal article with your chrome internet browser, it’s the zotero plugin for that browser that will export the information into your Zotero desktop application. (you can use Firefox, too, but it has it’s own ‘add-on’ plugin).
Here is a drawing showing these ‘parts’.
Drawing of Zotero parts
Go to Zotero
So to begin, we need to go to the Zotero webpage and download the necessary software.
Because I’m using a Linux machine, I believe Zotero’s website presents me the most logical software combination needed to run zotero. It should do the same for you, too. But notice I circled other operating system options.
Zotero Image of linux offering
But at this point, it should be simple enough for you to download and install the software. If you have troubles, let’s chat about the snags.
Using Zotero in Research
You will need
- Zotero Desktop Program open
- Zotero app installed to chosen browser
- Zotero app is enabled (I disable it if I’m not actively using zotero)
- Document for saving search terms (alternatively you could email searches)
- Search ideas
Accompanying youtube vid for zotero walk through above (Full video)
Search Terms ~ 1 min long, begins about 80 seconds into full movie above
Enable Zotero and refresh browser (chrome), download article to Zotero ~ 2 min
Annotate a reference and philosophy of library searches, avoiding plagiarism ~ 6 min
Use Zotero to create a Reference/bibliography section ~ 1.5 min
How to study for memorization
Although our class doesn’t emphasize this part of learning (memorization for exams), there are some techniques that can help (and hinder) this sort of learning.
- Flash cards? Not so good. They can work but only if you do it
right?
- Cramming? Not so good. Gives false sense of familiarity that disappears at the start of exam
- Using mental models and self quizzes with personal information? Very good. Here is a doc showing how it works.
Appendix
Using the library
The library has set up a simple library guide for our class.
For Research Methods in Psychology library guide
Note: Don’t pay for articles
One important word of advice is to never pay for a scholarly article. If you go online and use Google, or even Google Scholar to find online sources, you may be directed to the publication that will charge you a large amount of money to access just one article. So don’t do that.
Generally there are ways to get articles through our library, so don’t pay for articles.
To get started with some of our readings, you’ll need to use our Library (online, of course) to obtain many of the articles.
Finding journal articles is a skill that gets better with practice. This happens to be why Librarians are so helpful. They’ve actually been trained so if you can’t find an article, it’s okay to ask librarians for help.
In fact, here is how you can get help from North Seattle’s library staff.
Relationship of an article to its Journal
Using hierarchies helps us organize information. Journal articles, or for that matter the file directories on your computer, work somewhat like an address for a person’s home. There are several different parts that give us information to track down and locate whatever it is we’re looking for, be it a computer file, or Journal article. Basically, a journal article has the following components, some of which may be familiar to you :
Database (of periodicals)
Periodical (eg., magazine, newspaper, scholarly journal)
Year (of publication)
Volume Number
Volumne Issue number
Page Number (optional, often unnecessary)
Article Title
AuthorSo, to find an article, you’ll need to know the parts above. When you are given a list of references, or citations, nearly all of the information needed above is given to you. What is not given, or at least is done implicitly with web searches, is access to the top part, a database. These databases are proprietary and their owners will lease you access. Our Library pays a service fee to access these databases; that is how you can access them for ‘free’..again, not really free because of the fees you pay to come to this college.
Here is a typical citation:
Author(s). (year of pub). “Article Title.” Periodical title. Volume Number (issue number).
The information in a citation isn’t presented in the same hierarchy as above, but all of the necessary parts are there.
Here is an example citation (reference) for something we may read. Can you identify the periodical?
Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, Mitchell Greene. 2007. “Defining Psychotherapy: The Last 25 Years Have Taught Us That It’s Neither Art nor Science.” Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2).
Most of the items in the list above are self-explanatory. I want to focus a bit about periodicals.
Note on formatting citations: underlining publication titles
In print, publication titles are italicized. I have a very hard time noticing that subtle font.
When you submit a written manuscript for printing, publication titles are underlined because traditionally manuscripts were typed with typewriters, and to be able to type italicized words required an entire additional alphabet represented in the hammers. So, underlining was how you could emphasize a word, and the printer–a physical person–could notice the author’s formatting intent and correctly publish the final product in italics.
It’s a bit different now with our computers, obviously. Still, I have a hard time seeing italicized words and will occasionally use underline.
So, sometimes I’ll underline pub titles, sometimes I’ll italicize. I have no rule on this. I am chaos manifested. Beware.
Periodicals
These are just the names of the major publication. The New York Times, is colloquially known as a newspaper but technically it is a periodical. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology is also a periodical.
When we search for articles, we have to first know which journal, or periodical, owns that article. So it is a little counter intuitive but once we have identified an article we would like to read, we have to first find out whether or not our College has access to that periodical.
To do that, we have to use our colleges periodical locator.
Finding a journal using Periodical locator
Periodical locator
Notice the first link within North’s Article page. It should say “Periodical Locator”
There are many databases, inside of these databases are pages of journals, and inside those journals are articles.
We need to use the periodical locator to determine which database houses which periodical. With that, we can then open up that periodical and get the article
Note on ‘free’ articles and tuition/fees
Part of the fees that you pay as a student are used to pay subscriptions for these periodical databases. We have a small, but pretty good selection. Major universities have much larger collections due to their size and tuition/fee structure.
So in a way, you are not actually getting this for free because you are paying for library access. That’s the benefit of taking classes from a college. If you were not an active student, you would not be able to see many of these articles.
So, download them all!
Here’s the main point:
I’ve given you a list of Articles to read. To read them, you must first find them; some will be out in the internet, some will be in our schools’ databases. So, use the information I’ve given you to find out which location (database, Wikipedia, Google, Google scholar) you’ll need to search to obtain the full article. You will start by using the periodicals locator tool.
Let’s use that Efran, Lukens, and Greene (2007) article.
Go to North’s Article page and click on the periodical locator.
Type in the periodical for Efran’s piece.
You will see a link with the periodical’s name. Go ahead and click on this but beware of the next instruction:
- Once you have clicked on that link you may want to start searching within that publication. But do not do that. Instead, notice a little bit further down the search box you should see something that says “View online” and beneath that you should see something that says “proquest research library”. It’s this piece we need.
That Proquest research library is the database that you’ve all paid fees to access. So you need to remember that database name.
While remembering that database name, you need to go back to North’s Article page.
Notice what is presented here. You can see Periodical locator, but notice “A to Z” list of databases. (You might also notice just below two links; one to academic search and the other to Proquest).
North’s Find Periodicals
Click on “A to Z”
You might notice that there are 67 databases that North Seattle has premium access to. In our case we’re going to be looking for the proquest direct database. And we can either click on the letter “P” or we can just type in proquest direct.
Note on Popular sources
You may also notice the little tag “popular” next to proquest link. That’s an indicator that the articles are not peer reviewed and so aren’t exactly cutting edge science. Even though this particular journal we are looking for, Psychotherapy Networker, is flagged as a popular type, it is a place for therapists to share their thoughts on the profession so there is a lot of value in it.
For help in distinguishing the different types of sources, the library has some guides:
- Opening Proquest from your home, or remotely, you will need to validate your credentials. In other words, you need to prove that your are in fact students of North Seattle before you can continue, which is why you’ve been prompted to give your email (name@seattlecolleges.edu) and password. (If you can’t remember these things, there is a little help link that will take you to a different webpage, probably to reset your password.) Once you’ve done that, you’ll then be able to see inside of the proquest database. Then you can now search for the article.
- You should see you simple search box, where you can enter in important bits of information. I often start with the author’s last name, in this case, Efran,and then some unique identifying feature of the article. A few key words of the article title, or perhaps the full article title will be useful.
But notice that next to the text boxes there are drop down menus. You need to use those, otherwise the search engine will just search for your terms anywhere in the document and will provide too many ‘hits’. Instead, you should indicate ‘Efran’ as author, and “defining” in the document title. (of course, you could search any way you like).
When you search for those two terms in their respective fields, you will get two hits and one of them is the article we need. You should notice that it is a full text, not all databases provide full text documents. But in this case it’s a full text. You can either print it or read it online.
Yay. Now you can find the other articles.
Anatomy of a journal article
Title
In some ways a title is an abstract of the abstract. Write this last. It should have key Concepts that will signal to other expert researchers whether or not the content is related to their needs.
Abstract
This is a summary of your full paper and should be written nearly last. All the key parts of the paper should be represented here, but in a general way. The results can be included, obviously not in massive detail but at least an indication whether or not something was found.
Introduction
The introduction is intended to grab people’s attention and to provide some broad background over the general topic of interest. If you can think of an hourglass that at the top is Broad but then Narrows in the middle, that place of the narrowing is the beginning of your hypothesis and your methods. Introductions serve as a broad statement about value. But it does introduce a problem, purpose, which will then be refined into hypotheses.
Lit review
Depending on the scope of your paper a literature review is useful to communicate that you have read relevant information which can signal to experts whether or not your review is adequate. But it also is used to continue your narrative over why your paper is important, what might be missing in the literature, what might be ambiguous in the literature, and ultimately good support why you are generating your hypothesis.
Methods
The method section comprises three parts: participants, materials, and procedure. Sometimes they might include 4th step called analysis. There is not much written, if anything between the title “methods” and the next subtitle “participants”.
Participants
This section documents who was included in your research. it describes how they were reasons for including some people or excluding others.
Materials
Materials include information about things that are necessary to run your experiment. This can run the gamut of a survey, a desk and a chair, a projector, access to the internet. the list goes on. You don’t necessarily have to include the type of writing instrument that a person uses to fill out a survey, unless that instrument is germane to your hypothesis.
If you’re using a survey, you want to describe it here, if you are trying to define a construct like ‘anxiety’, you might operationally Define anxiety as a score on a particular survey. That information should go here.
Procedure
The procedure articulates the steps to actually performing your experiment. You don’t need to be so specific to explain that a participant had to enter through a door Define their chair unless that process was important to your hypothesis. Instead, this area explains the logic of your experiment, whether or not it was a within subjects design, how different participants received different conditions of the independent variable, or any other important part of the process that bear directly on the outcome of your experiment
Results
traditionally it is in this section that you report the basic statistical demographic information obtained in your study. So, it’s common to begin with simple descriptive statistics of your participants. What percent had a particular gender, or a particular age, or ethnicity. Additionally it would be here where you would report differences between groups and possibly explain the statistical techniques used to disentangle those groups.
If there’s an analysis section it would show up before here meaning ahead of time how the researchers planned to perform their statistical assessment.
Discussion
The discussion starts off narrow and ends with broad scope. What this means is that it is the beginning of the discussion where you interpret your results and overall experiment. The authors have to make sense of what they did while remaining humble and reasonable about how far-reaching the results can be taken.
The discussion ends kind of like the introduction began; with Breadth. You should take the findings of your experiment in reasonably extrapolate them to broader Issues.
The last thing that shows up here is a discussion on limitations. Things that went wrong, things that you didn’t foresee, possibly some hints that you could give future researchers to improve upon so that they don’t make the same mistakes you did.