The Impact of a Multifaceted Approach to Teaching Research Methods on Students’ Attitudes

Amultifaceted approach to teaching five experimental designs in a research methodology course was tested. Participants included 70 students enrolled in an experimental research methods course in the semester both before and after the implementation of instructional change. When using a multifaceted approach to teaching research methods that included both active learning and a form of scaffolding, students reported a greater efficacy in American Psychological Association style writing, a higher perceived utility of research and statistics, better attitudes toward statistics, and higher perceived skills/abilities in statistics. This approach benefitted students ’ perception of an often disliked but required course in psychology. Keywords research methods, statistics, teaching of psychology Providing solid research training is one of the established bench-marks of a strong undergraduate program in psychology (Dunn, McCarthy, Baker, Halonen, & Hill, 2007). To this end, both research methodology and statistics courses are among the most frequently taught classes in psychology curricula (Perlman & McCann, 1999a, 1999b). Students acquire many of the market-able skills from psychology within these courses. Unfortunately, students have a variety of negative associations with suc