By Maddy Peterson, Assistant Professor in Psychology & Counseling
Have you ever thought about having students work with data in your classroom but weren’t sure where to start? If you haven’t considered this before, it might be an opportunity for you to create authentic, real-world tasks, such as those that researchers are faced with, which could be motivational for students (Lovett et al., 2023, p. 100). In other words, data-related skills are relevant to many students’ future professional lives, which provides an impetus for them to take these activities seriously.
To begin, you might access one of the sources listed in Table 1. As you select a dataset, you might consider the size of the dataset file. If the file is too large, students may have difficulty loading and working with the dataset. Other considerations include the availability of different variable types within the dataset and an accompanying codebook or data dictionary.
Table 1
| Source | Example |
|---|---|
| American Psychological Association | Browse the links to datasets and repositories |
| Dryad | An fNIRS dataset for multimodal speech comprehension in normal hearing individuals and cochlear implant users |
| Journal of Open Psychology Data | The Replication Database: Documenting the Replicability of Psychological Science |
| Kaggle.com | Student lifestyle dataset |
| OpenNeuro.org | The Medial Temporal Lobe Supports Mnemonic Discrimination for Event Duration |
| OSF.io | Do Men and Women Exhibit Different Preferences for Mates? |
| Scientific Data | An open resource for transdiagnostic research in pediatric mental health and learning disorders |
There are many possibilities for using open data in class! You could use these datasets to give in-class demonstrations of statistical software and tests, or to illustrate open science practices, which include making study materials and data available publicly when it is ethical to do so. Open data could also be used for labs, especially when it isn’t feasible to have students collect data. In my Research Methods for Psychology course, I incorporated open data in a series of hands-on assignments. The following is an example assignment:
You have the following research question: Does having more educational experience with a subject impact the amount of anxiety that a person feels about that subject? You hypothesize that taking a statistics class will decrease math anxiety. To test this question, you will perform a t-test in Jamovi and then report your results in APA format.
- Perform the t-test in Jamovi, examining group differences in global math anxiety between
those who have and have not previously taken statistics. Don't forget to save your
Jamovi analysis file!
- Hint 1: In Jamovi, go to Analyses > t-tests > [select the appropriate t-test]
- Hint 2: Check the hypothesis box that corresponds with your hypothesis
- Report your results in APA format. This should include the t-test results and a figure (plot).
This lab will be graded for completion (both the Jamovi analysis file and Results section). You may receive feedback on APA formatting or aspects of the writing.
References
Lovett, M., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Ambrose, S., & Norman, M. (2023). How Learning
Works (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.