September 2005
Volume 18, Number 9
Making Research Educational
My motivation as a participant in the psychology department subject pool was similar, I suspect, to that of many undergraduates: to fulfill course requirements. I did so somewhat grudgingly, not entirely understanding the benefits of research and thinking mostly about how the extra time commitments were going to burden an already busy schedule. Some of the experiments seemed interesting at the time; most did not.
With a few exceptions, my first experiment was representative of them all. I showed up on a Saturday morning and waiting for me was a bright-eyed research assistant. She was an advanced undergraduate who I had seen in some of my classes. The study, she said, "tests how people think." (I'm still not sure which studies are not included in that description!). She said I would see a series of words on a computer screen, each printed in a different color. My task was to say the color of the word out loud as quickly as possible. I knew that she was administering some version of the Stroop task because I had read about that in a cognitive psychology text, but that's the sum of what I gathered intellectually from the experience.
It turns out that the study was actually both socially important and very interesting. The principle investigator was Ian Gotlib, Stanford University, and the goal of the study was to examine how depressed and non-depressed individuals process emotionally-valenced information. The thinking was that depressed individuals might exhibit preferential attention to and memory for depressotypic information, and that these processes may work to maintain one's negative cognitions and, in turn, the depressive symptoms. The computer tasks that I completed were designed to detect these precise biases in cognitive functioning, which are often measured in milliseconds. Even this brief description, I believe, sounds more interesting than simply saying that the study examines "how people think."
The research process is much more interesting from the perspective of a graduate student or professor because they understand the theoretical basis for the experimental tasks being administered. They know what the tasks are trying to detect, why certain tasks are more appropriate than others, and how the data derived from the tasks fit into the larger conceptual picture of the phenomenon under study. For these reasons, they also understand why each undergraduate's time is valuable. Undergraduate research participants do not understand these features of the research process because these features are rarely explained to them. Debriefing forms are mandatory, but almost never interesting, let alone conceptually informative.
The opportunity to partake in the research process as a subject is often framed as an educational experience to undergraduate students. I think this promise is rarely fulfilled. Instead of vague, uninformative, and boring debriefings that say little about why the study is socially relevant and very interesting, why not use the experience as a teaching tool to convey something exciting about research methods and the specific content area under investigation? The opportunities here are endless. Undergraduates could evaluate empirical articles that are related to the experiments, write brief reaction papers to the experiments, and/or design and propose similar experiments in either a written or oral presentation format. We might not be able to make all of the experimental tasks fun, but we can certainly make the overall process of being a participant in the subject pool more exciting and educationally valuable.
GEORGE SLAVICH is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Oregon. He received the inaugural Psi Chi-APS Albert Bandura Graduate Research Award in 2004.
