The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services produced a bunch of great videos to explain topics related to human subject research . The videos were created as part of a broader outreach effort intent on  explaining the research process to research participants .  I think they would fit right into a Research Methods course. Topics include: IRBs: Research design: There is also a specific video explaining social science research: All of the videos (along with handouts) are available here . All videos have closed-captions as well as Spanish versions

NPR did a series of stories exposing research that the U.S. government conducted during WWII. This research exposed American soldiers to mustard gas for research purposes. In some instances, the government targeted soldiers of color, believing that they had tougher/different skin that would make them more resistant to this form of chemical warfare. Here is the  whole series of stories  (from the  original research, exposed via Freedom of Information Act , to  NPR working to find the effected veterans ). None of the soldiers ever received any special dispensation or medical care due to their involvement. Participants were not given the choice to discontinue participation without prejudice, as recalled below by one of the surviving veterans: "We weren't told what it was," says Charlie Cavell, who was 19 when he volunteered for the program in exchange for two weeks' vacation. "Until we actually got into the process of being in that room and realized, wait a m...

The original idea for using this article this way comes from Dr. Susan Nolan 's presentation at NITOP 2015, entitled " Thinking Like a Scientist: Critical Thinking in Introductory Psychology."  I think that Dr. Nolan's idea is worth sharing, and I'll reflect a bit on how I've used this resource in the classroom. (For more good ideas from Dr. Nolan, check out her books, Psychology , Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences , and The Horse that Won't Go Away (about critical thinking)). Last summer, the National Academy of Sciences Proceedings published an article entitled "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks ." The gist: Facebook manipulated participants' Newsfeeds to increase the number of positive or negative status updates that each participant viewed. The researchers subsequently measured the number of positive and negative words that the participants used in their own status updates. They fou...