Research Methods

I teach Research Methods in Psychology. The class is structured to be a lot of work for the undergraduates at NU. It is often viewed with dread by the students. There's a lot of writing and the material seems like it might be pretty dry.

So I was jealous when I see Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman occasionally post their class syllabi online to their blogs. Their classes look interesting, but I wouldn't post a Research Methods syllabus online. Who'd want to read that on purpose?

Reflecting on this, I think maybe I'm doing it wrong. People actually like science. There are science columns in all sorts of weeklies, in newspapers, on the "most emailed" list at Yahoo or other news aggregators. And a lot of that science is not so good. People should be better at distinguishing the good stuff from the weak stuff and in theory, Research Methods is the class where they would learn to do this.

I haven't figured out how to do it right yet, though. I'm not posting the syllabus. Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel seems to manage to teach some science and get people to watch on purpose. I can't think of a way to blow stuff up in Research Methods, though.