Abstract

The Department of Psychological Science at Carthage has made several changes to the psychology major on the recommendation of the American Psychological Association’s “blueprint” for undergraduate education, which has proposed that scientific methods should form the core of the psychology major (Halpern, 2010).  The goal of this project was to assess the extent to which undergraduates in the psychology major at Carthage are making progress towards a better understanding of research methodology. A subset of items from the Academic Skills Inventory (Perry, Foust & Elicker, 2013) was used for students to report their understanding in the domain of research methodology and statistics. Students responded on a Likert scale indicating how strongly they agreed with statements, such as “I understand that researchers’ biases can influence studies”. 157 students from “core” classes in the psychology major (Introduction to Psychological Science, Behavioral Research Statistics, Experimental Psychology, and Thesis in Psychological Science) completed the survey. For most items, students’ perception of their knowledge did not differ across academic year.  Responses from freshmen varied from other academic years for items that assessed specific knowledge about statistics. The relatively small differences in responses across academic year is surprising. One possibility is that students’ metacognitive appraisal of their own understanding is not very accurate.  To explore this possibility, on-going research will assess actual skills and knowledge.