Below I have described new 4000-level course that will be offered beginning spring 2012. I strongly recommend it for all psychology majors who have (or will have) completed Research Methods in Psychology (PSY 3213C) and the computer literacy requirement prior to the semester of enrollment. The course is called "Computer Applications in Psychology with Lab." I even recommend the course for those of you who tremble with fear, or yawn with boredom, at the thought of computer programming! While the course will be offered by the Department of Scientific Computing, it was developed specifically for psychology majors, and it was developed with input from psychology faculty, including myself. Because this course is intended for psychology majors, you will not be taking it with a bunch of computer "jocks."

Each week will be dedicated to one topic related to programming. Topics were selected to provide psychology students with practical skills and tools that can help them in their research, as well as make them more competitive for graduate/professional school and/or jobs. All topics will be studied with the help of the language "R." Topics include: concepts of the language R, data protection and backup, reading and writing datasets, preparing data for analysis (and conducting simple statistical tests), data restructuring, Excel queries, Internet searching, signal & image manipulation, visualization of experimental data, and image databases. Datasets will be provided by psychology faculty so that you will be working with relevant data.

Your grade in the course will be based entirely on weekly assignments. There will be no formal exams. This should provide an ideal learning environment for those of you who truly want to invest your time and effort in becoming more proficient with computers, but are afraid that you may not have the "right stuff." If you regularly do your work, attend lectures and labs, and ask questions when you don't understand something, you should do well and benefit greatly. It is estimated that you will spend between 6-10 hours per week outside of class for assignments, which is very reasonable for a 4-credit hour 4000-level course.

Because the course is taught through another department, you will not receive psychology credit. However, this may be a good thing because a course from the Department of Scientific Computing should look impressive on your resume. :-)

My Best, Dr. Licht