Jennifer Raff  is a geneticist, professor, and enthusiastic blogger . She  created a helpful guide for how non-scientists (like our students) can best approach and make sense of research articles. The original article is very detailed and explains how to make sense of experts. Personally, I appreciate that this guide is born out of trying to debate non-scientists about research. She wants everyone to benefit from science and make informed decisions based on research. I think that is great. I think this would be an excellent way to introduce your undergraduates to research articles in the classroom. I especially appreciated this summary of her steps (see below). This could be turned into a worksheet with ease. Note: I still think your students should chew on the full article before they are ready to answer these eleven questions. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/09/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-a-guide-for-non-scientists/#author ...

MOOCs aren't just for current students. I think they can serve as professional development for faculty members as well. I don't have time for a MOOC during the school year, but I am committing to doing one this summer. I think that instructors can approach MOOCs in two ways: 1) professional development, and 2) a search for improved pedagogy. As professional development, learn a new statistical skill or freshen up a dormant one. Learn R. Learn Python. Freshen up on your non-parametric skillz. Take a course on data mining or using statistics in order to gain business insights. Unofficial documentation of your course progress is typically offered just by taking the course. Official documentation/grade reports are usually available for a reasonable fee (my husband has taken a few such philosophy courses and paid around $50 for the official documentation). Another way to use these courses: Don't take them to learn new skills, take them to learn new ways to teach your old...

If you haven't already, please consider joining Teaching of Psychology  (Division 2 of APA). Your membership fees help fund plenty of great initiatives, including: Teaching Statistics and Research Methods: Tips from TOP by Jackson & Grigs This free e-book is a compilation of scholarship of teaching publications. Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology's (OTRP) Teaching Resources This page is divided by topical area in psychology (including Statistics) and includes instructional resources for every topic. Most of the material was created as part of OTRP's Instructional Resource Reward. Among the useful resources are a free booklet containing statistics exercises in both SPSS and R as well as an intense primer on factorial research design . UPDATE (2/24/16): This new resource provides a number of hands-on activities to demonstrate/generate data for all of the concepts typically taught in intro statistics.   Project Syllabus  Project Syllabus is a colle...

For those who teach statistics, research methods, and psychology major advisers. Some of these have been posted before. Some of these have not. I created all of them except for the first one. Additionally, I created a bunch of Psychology Advising memes as I am currently editing the "Advising" portion of my rank and tenure application.

Back in the day, I remember having to complete an online research ethics course in order to serve as an undergraduate research assistant at Penn State. I think that such training could be used as an exercise/assessment in a research methods class or an advanced statistics class. NOTE: These examples are sponsored by the American agencies and, thus, teach participants about American laws and rules. If you have information about similar training in other countries (or other free options for American researchers), please email me and I will add the link. Online Research Ethics Course from the U.S. Health and Human Service's Office of Research Integrity. Features: Six different learning modules, each with a quiz and certificate of completion. These sections include separate quizzes on the treatment of human and animal test subjects. Other portions also address ethical relationships between PIs and RAs and broader issues of professional responsibility when reporting results. ...

This blog posting by Dr. Randy McCarthy discusses best practices in organizing/naming conventions for data files. These suggestions are probably more applicable to teaching graduate students than undergraduates. They are also the sorts of tips and tricks we use in practice but rarely teach in the classroom (but maybe we should). Included in Randy's recommendations: 1) Maintain consistent naming conventions for frequently used variables (like scale items or compiled scales that you use over and over again in your research). Then create and run the same syntax for this data for the rest of your scholarly career. If you are very, very consistent in the scales you use and the data analyses your run, you can save yourself time by showing a little forethought. 2) Keep and guard a raw version of all data sets. 3) Annotate your syntax. I would change that to HEAVILY annotate your syntax. I even put the dates upon which I write code so I can follow my own logic if I have to let a d...

  OpenStax  CNX  " is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. " So, free text books that can be easily downloaded. Including nearly 7,000 free statistics text books as well as over 1,500  research  methods texts . How OpenStax works (viahttp://cnx.org/about) I like this format because it is free but also because it is flexible enough that you can pick and choose chapters from different text books to use in a class. Additionally, if you are feeling generous, you can upload your own content to share.

Here are two free, Flash tutorials about APA style directly from APA . The first tutorial is provides an introduction to APA style, while the second provides a list of changes in the 6th edition. And here is a free quiz on reference alphabetization, also from the APA Style Blog (you can also download the quiz in PDF format for in-class use). Also, don't forget on these resources ( 1 , 2 ) for help crafting results sections in APA style.