Temary

Although this course is listed as optional it is required for the good performance of the Master (so it would be the first of the optionals)

The ¿scientific basics¿ course is divided into two sections.

The first section of the course focuses on how we communicate in psychology. The implications of a scientific approach to brain and behaviour for communication are discussed. The focus is on improving student¿s ability to obtain, organize, and critically evaluate information and to report it in a clear, concise manner in the standard mediums of the discipline: writing abstracts, articles, and theses, and delivering poster or oral presentations at conferences. Students will first be presented with a lecture-style overview of these issues and complete various assignments including article writing and in-class presentations, where they will receive feedback from the instructor and other student.

Because of the complexity of high dimensional data, modern statistics and data analysis depends heavily on the use of computational resources. In this section of the Scientific Basics course, we will use the statistical language R to learn how to fit statistical models, evaluate the quality of the fit, and further your understanding of statistical variation.

Bibliography

Compulsory materials

There is no textbook for this class, a list of readings selected from scholarly articles and book chapters will be provided at the beginning of the course.

Basic bibliography

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/the-science-of-scientific-writing

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association manual. Washington:APA, 2001.

Other literature will be made available via Blackboard: The science of scientific writing, American

Scientist Online.



Williams, J. M. (2007). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (9 ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.