Unit convenor and teaching staff |
Unit convenor and teaching staff
Lecturer and Convenor
Naomi Sweller
4 First Walk (C3A) 512
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Credit points |
Credit points
4
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Prerequisites |
Prerequisites
Admission to MRes
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Corequisites |
Corequisites
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Co-badged status |
Co-badged status
PSY 418
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Unit description |
Unit description
This unit is designed as preparation for honours projects and to help equip students for research careers. The unit focuses on practical issues of quantitative data analysis. Most topics are dealt with in the context of SPSS. Topics include sample size and statistical power analysis, data management in SPSS and more advanced methods specifically applicable to research in psychology.
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Information about important academic dates including deadlines for withdrawing from units are available at https://www.mq.edu.au/study/calendar-of-dates
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
Final examination information
If a student misses the exam due to illness or other unavoidable circumstances they can sit a supplementary exam which will contain only an individual component, with no group component (following University guidelines that the supplementary exam does not need to be the same format as the original exam). If a student has special circumstances such as the need for an individual testing room, or a longer testing time, they will sit the individual exam at the same time as the rest of the group, but in their own room. They may start the exam earlier to enable them to finish the individual component with enough time to make their way to the group exam room to complete the group component of the assessment.
Students who are unable to sit an examination must advise Ms Donna Keeley (9850 8113, ask@mq.edu.au) and submit an Application for Special Consideration form (supporting documentation from a medical or health care professional clearly stating the reasons for the absence from the exam must be attached to your submission). All documentation must be submitted to Donna Keeley no later than 24 hours after the date of the exam. The only exception to not sitting an examination at the designated time is because of documented illness or unavoidable disruption. In these circumstances you may wish to consider applying for Special Consideration.
If a Supplementary Examination is granted as a result of the Special Consideration process, the examination will held one week after the original examination date. The format of a supplementary examination is at each unit convener’s discretion and is subject to change from the original final examination.
Supplementary Exams are only offered to students who have satisfactorily completed all other assessments for the unit and were unable to sit the final exam because of documented illness or unavoidable disruption.
You are advised that it is Macquarie University policy not to set early examinations for individuals or groups of students. All students are expected to ensure that they are available until the end of the teaching semester, which is the final day of the official examination period.
Research evaluation form information
Penalties will be levied for late submission of the assignment: Late submission of the research proposal will attract a penalty of 5% of the maximum mark for every day late. In other words, the assignment is worth 40%, so a penalty of 5% x 40 = 2 will be applied. 2 marks are subtracted from whatever the student received for the report for each day late.
Requests for extensions for assignments are granted by Donna Keeley.
Fit to sit model
Students who sit an exam and/or in-class test or otherwise submit an assessment, declare themselves fit to do so and will not be eligible to apply for special consideration unless there is evidence that (a) they were unfit to make reasonable judgement on their fitness to undertake the assessment, due to mental illness or other exceptional circumstances; or they were taken ill during the assessment (in the case of an examination or test), and this can be independently corroborated.
Name | Weighting | Hurdle | Due |
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Final examination | 60% | No | Week 13 |
Research Evaluation Form | 40% | No | 5pm Friday 3rd May |
Due: Week 13
Weighting: 60%
This will be a 2-stage exam, with a team-work component. The exam will be a mixture of multiple choice and “fill in the blank” short answer questions. The procedure is such that you will first sit the exam individually, and then immediately afterwards in the same time slot you will do the exam again in groups of four. The exams will then be graded such that 90% of the score comes from the individual attempt, and 10% from the group attempt, unless the individual attempt is better than the group attempt, in which case the student will get 100% of their score from the individual attempt.
I will be allocating all students to groups. I will post the group allocations to iLearn in the week prior to the exam. All allocations will be completely random and based on a random number generator.
Due: 5pm Friday 3rd May
Weighting: 40%
The Research Evaluation Form requires you to evaluate an existing empirical research article which you will be provided with. It consists of a series of short answer questions, to which you will be required to write a response. Responses may include SPSS syntax. The questions contained in the form will be made available in Week 1. All submissions are to be through Turnitin in iLearn.
Please note that you are welcome to complete the PSY418 version of this assignment, the Research Proposal Form, rather than the PSYC718 version of the assignment. Please discuss this with Naomi Sweller.
Required and recommended texts / materials
One required text:
Please note that the previous edition of the textbook (4th edition) will be perfectly acceptable for use in this unit. Page numbers may differ from those noted for the most recent version, but the content covered will be equivalent.
Two handbooks authored by Dr. Alan Taylor, both of which can be downloaded from iLearn:
Two additional readings by Dr. Alan Taylor, also downloaded from iLearn:
Additional readings, available from the Library or from iLearn.
Classes
Thirteen weeks: 12 x 2-hour lecture and 1-hour demonstration, with final examination held in the Week 13 lecture slot.
Lectures will involve demonstrations of SPSS procedures, using various examples. Students are encouraged to bring their own laptop with SPSS installed, but this is not required. Theoretical issues will also be discussed during the lectures.
While there will be Echo recordings, the lectures are designed for face-to-face format. Due to the interactive nature of the lectures in which students are encouraged to ask questions as we go, on occasion additional notes may be written on a whiteboard, or discussed verbally. There is no guarantee these will be captured by the recording. Further, if a recording fails, no replacement recordings will be uploaded as this unit is designed for internal mode only, with the assumption that students are able to attend classes.
The only exception to this is Week 13, which will be the final exam.
Practical exercises will be set each week for students to undertake in their own time. The following week there will be a demonstration session in addition to the lecture in which the lecturer will show (live) how they would approach the exercises. Students are encouraged to bring their own laptop computers to demonstration sessions to follow-along. Questions are encouraged during this session in particular.
Students are expected to complete readings prior to attending the lecture, and they are expected to participate in class discussions.
Week by week list of topics |
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Week |
Lecture Date |
Lecture Topic |
Reading |
1 |
26th February |
Introduction to unit, reading data into SPSS and data manipulation |
Intro 1-17, Field Chap 3 |
2 |
5th March |
Introduction to sample size and statistical power analysis |
Field section 2.6.1.8 Lachin journal article + Notes on Using the SPSS manova Procedure for Power Calculations |
3 |
12th March |
Interactions in GLM (including categorical and continuous predictors) |
Field Chap 13 “GLM” |
4 |
19th March |
Advanced Logistic Regression I |
Field Chap 20 |
5 |
26th March |
Advanced Logistic Regression II |
Field Chap 20 |
6 |
2nd April |
MANOVA #1 |
Field Chap 16 |
7 |
9th April |
MANOVA #2 |
Field Chap 16 |
Monday 15th April – Friday 26th April = mid-session break |
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8 |
30th April |
Path Analyses with GLM / Regression |
Keith Chap 10 |
9 |
7th May |
Path Analyses with AMOS |
Field Chap 10 |
10 |
14th May |
Exploratory Factor Analysis #1 |
A Brief Introduction to Factor Analysis Field Chap 17 |
11 |
21st May |
Exploratory Factor Analysis #2 |
Field Chap 17 |
12 |
28th May |
Confirmatory factor analysis |
Keith Chap 14 |
13 |
4th June |
Final examination |
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