A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE RESEARCH EXPOSURE REQUIREMENT FOR PSY 100, 215, AND 216

FALL 2012

1) As part of PSY 100, 215, and 216, you are asked to complete a Research Exposure Requirement that accounts for a certain percentage of your final course grade. This introduces you to the wide variety of research being conducted in the Department of Psychology at UK. For a more detailed document about this requirement, please go to the Department of Psychology website: http://web.as.uky.edu/psychsubjectpool/

2) The requirement involves 6 hours of research exposure for PSY 100 and 4 hours of research exposure for PSY 215 and 216. If you are taking two of these courses at the same time you are required to meet the requirement for both courses. For example if you are taking both PSY 215 and PSY 216 in the same semester you have 8 hours of required research exposure. There are two ways to meet this requirement: a) participating in experiments being conducted by Psychology department researchers, or b) writing summaries of recently published research papers.

3. PSY 100 students can earn 1 hour of research exposure credit for participating in a “screening” session early in the semester that involves filling out questionnaires. (The screening is not available to PSY 215 and 216 students). Depending on your responses to the screening questionnaires, you may be eligible for other studies later in the semester. If you are, the experimenters will contact you and invite you to be in their study. For the Fall of 2012, we are testing an online version of the screening for the first time. Your instructor will provide more detailed instructions.

4. If there are enough experiments, you may be able to complete all of your research exposure hours by volunteering as a participant in experiments. However, if there is a shortage of experiments, or if your schedule makes it difficult for you to attend experimental sessions, or if you are uncomfortable with participating in research, you should complete some or all of your hours by reading and answering questions about recently completed research articles.

5. To get credit for being in experiments, or writing summaries of articles, you have to use the Department of Psychology’s research credit website called SONA. The web address is: http://uky.sona-systems.com/

When you use SONA, it is very important that you use your email account that ends with uky.edu. Other email addresses may not work well with the system.

5a. The first step in getting your research credits is that you MUST REGISTER in the SONA system. To do this, go to http://uky.sona-systems.com/ click “request an account here” and fill out the form.
- Your User ID is the part of your UK email address before the @ symbol.

- It is important that when you fill out the form that you use all 9 digits of your student ID number.

5b. Once you have registered a password will be sent to your e-mail account within a few hours. You are then required to log-on the site to make sure everything is working properly.
NOTE: If you have junk mail (spam) filters configured for your email, please configure the filters to accept email from uky-admin@sona-systems.net, as emails from the system will often be sent from that address

6) Information about participating in experiments:

A. You can only serve as a research participant if you sign up for an experiment on SONA.

B. You can only sign up for each experiment ONE time, unless stated otherwise.

C. The experiments are posted on SONA by many different researchers and include many different days and times. Your Instructor, TA, and the Subject Pool TA have no control over what studies are posted, the times they are available, or who is eligible for any study.

D. If you sign up for an on-line study, you can usually do the experiment whenever you want.

E. You can earn a maximum of 3 research participation hours from online studies. The rest of your hours must be from in-person studies.

F. Credit is allocated in .5 hour increments. Thus, sessions lasting up to 25 minutes earn you .5 research credit; sessions lasting between 26 and 50 minutes earn you 1 credit. The general rule is that you are given 10 minutes of time to travel to your next class. Thus 1.5 hours of research credit translates into 1 hour and 20 minutes of actual experimental time. The one exception to this “minus 10 minutes” rule is for .5 credit hour experiments; these should not exceed 25 minutes.

G. After you sign up for an experiment, you will receive a confirmation email that tells you the time, location, and contact information for the experiment. If you sign up for an on-line experiment the confirmation email will simply tell you that you are signed up.

H. Make sure you go to the experiment at the correct time and location. If you sign up for an on-line experiment you will be directed to the on-line link.

I. Notify an experimenter at least 24 hours in advance if you must miss an experiment--contact information for each experiment is located where you signed up in SONA.

J. If you do NOT show up for an experiment, you may receive a “No Show” penalty. This penalty decreases the total number of credits that you can earn. For example, if you miss a 1-hour experiment and receive a No Show you can earn a maximum of 5, rather than 6, hours for the semester.

K. After you participate in an experiment, the experimenter will enter your credit for participating on the SONA system within a few days. You can check on SONA to make sure your credit was posted. If it has not been posted after a few days, contact the experimenter to ask if there is a problem. Be sure to give the experimenter a few days to get the credit entered. In case of a disagreement about whether you completed the study, it would be wise to save a copy of your consent form. The experimenter will give you this during the experiment.

L. Other departments on campus have their own SONA systems. For PSY courses, you can only use the Psychology department's SONA system. If you are taking a course in another department (such as Communications) that also uses a SONA system, you cannot use Communications experiments to get credit for your PSY class. You will have separate login info for each SONA system that you participate in.

7. Information about writing summaries of articles:

If you are reading and answering questions about research articles (instead of participating in experiments), you will:

A. Get the list of eligible articles from the Department of Psychology website: http://web.as.uky.edu/psychsubjectpool/

B. You should anticipate spending approximately 25-50 minutes reading and answering questions about each article. Each summary for which you receive credit is worth 1 credit hour of research exposure.

C. Read the article.

D. Type a 1-2 page (1” margins) double-spaced summary of the article answering at least 4 of the following questions:

1. What was the purpose of the research?

2. What was the hypothesis?

3. What were the independent and dependent variables?

4. Who were the participants?

5. How was the hypothesis tested?

6. What were the experimental results?

7. Describe the impact of the results on society.

8. What do you think of the research?

9. Relate the research to anything that you have learned in lecture or lab.

E. Turn in your summary to your TA to be graded. If your TA determines that you should receive credit for the summary he or she will notify the Subject Pool TA.

F. Remember, you must be registered with the SONA system in order to get credit for the article summaries.

G. If you have any questions, contact the Subject Pool TA:

Name: Jessica Stagner

E-mail: jpaigeco03@hotmail.com

Office hours: Wednesdays 11:00 - 12:00 and by appointment.

Office: 111I Kastle Hall

IMPORTANT DATES AND DEADLINES:

Tuesday, August 28	Students can start to participate in experiments.
Friday, October 5, noon	Deadline for registration in SONA system without penalty. After this date, students can still register for SONA but will receive a one-hour No Show penalty.
Tuesday, November 27, 5pm	Last day to hand in article summaries to your PSY 100 TA.
Tuesday, December 4, 5pm	Last day to participate in experiments.
Friday, December 7, 5pm	Deadline for handling all research credit issues.