Research Methods in Psychological Science I

This is where psychology stops feeling like interesting facts and starts feeling like a science you have to defend — you learn the framework (the three claims, the four validities) that lets you judge whether any given study actually shows what it claims to show. Most of the work is reading real papers, picking apart their designs, and writing up small studies of your own in proper APA format, alongside a midterm and final that test whether you can spot confounds and weak measurements. It's the methodological backbone for everything that follows: PSYC 205 in the spring, every upper-level seminar, and any honors thesis you might write, so the habits of thinking you build here stick around for the rest of the major.