Running low on ideas and short on time? The APA Online Psychology Laboratory (OPL) could be the answer. OPL offers learning opportunities for psychology students at all levels and is a tool that can assist instructors in meeting the student learning outcomes outlined in the APA’s “Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major” (APA, 2023). In this article, I will present several ways to incorporate OPL in courses ranging from Introduction to Psychology to Capstone in Psychology.
The APA Introductory Psychology Initiative (IPI) model (APA, 2021) situates research methods as the foundation for all of the pillars of psychology. Participating in a psychological experiment is a great way to introduce research concepts such as operational definitions, experimental methods, independent and dependent variables, and random assignment. For example, students can complete the Be a Juror experiment and then instructors can present the results to the class. As a follow-up assignment or assessment, students could locate a recent study that has extended the findings or propose a new research design to test the same hypothesis. The OPL experiments can also enhance students’ understanding of concepts in content areas such as social cognition, learning, memory, and perception at the introductory level. The Facial Recognition experiment tests memory accuracy over time. Instructors can use it to teach students about the constructive nature of memory and eyewitness testimony, false recognition, encoding specificity, retrieval cues, and working memory.
OPL is an accessible and hands-on approach to teaching statistics. Students report that they need more hands-on practice with data to master data analysis skills that are difficult to learn in a lecture-based class (McDonald et al., 2024). Instructors can use the experiments to teach a range of concepts such as how to determine sample size by conducting a power analysis and inferential statistics like independent and paired t tests, ANOVAs and even mixed factorial ANOVAs. Students can practice their skills by running a step-by-step analysis in class or complete it as a homework assignment. Instructors can easily download data from their students or any subset of data from other institutions into Excel (CSV), JSON, or XML formats to create a data set to run any statistical test. Students can practice interpreting the findings by writing the results in an APA style paragraph. Embedding active learning opportunities and using authentic assessment can facilitate improved learning and retention of concepts that can often cause students anxiety (McDonald et al., 2024). Students (sometimes!) like to work in groups so there are opportunities for peers to interact in small groups by assigning each group a different experiment. Instructors should provide structure for the assigned work to avoid social loafing and include a rubric so students can gain specific feedback on their work.
OPL is particularly helpful in a writing intensive course because it provides the research design, hypothesis, and data allowing instructors to focus on developing students’ interpretation and writing skills. For example, I teach a course in experimental psychology and although the students complete in-person experiments during class time, OPL offers additional and more time-efficient opportunities to learn about experimental design. I use it to teach students how to develop a rationale for a study by reading additional research on the topic as well as create an experimental protocol. They write an APA-style lab report that includes a short literature review, methods, results, and discussion sections. Lastly, utilizing OPL in a capstone course may help alleviate some of the challenges inherent in creating a research-based capstone experience for students (Tatum & Schwartz, 2020) while still providing the high-impact practices of incorporating undergraduate research and writing into the course. OPL experiments can serve as a source of data for students in a capstone course who often face time constraints. Students can use the studies in OPL to carry out a replication or extension of a research question, collect data or systematically create a set of existing data, and present research findings in a poster or final paper.
Be sure to visit the OPL websiteopens in new window to explore all it has to offer.
Holly Tatum is the Mary Sabel Girard ‘34 chair in psychology at Randolph College where she also served as the director for the Center for Student Research. She teaches courses in introduction to psychology, research methods, experimental psychology, testing and measurements, personality, health psychology, and gender. Tatum conducts basic and applied research on student cheating, academic integrity, and honor codes. She recently completed a grant-funded experiment investigating risk-taking and cheating among high school students using a virtual reality paradigm. She also writes about and presents work on the scholarship of teaching and learning and high-impact practices such as capstone courses in psychology. In 2019, she co-wrote Ethics in Psychological Research: A Practical Guide for the Student Scientist. Tatum earned her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Tennessee.
