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Research Participation for Psy 105 and 106:
Instructions for Coordinator

This page contains information for the Research Participant Coordinator. The Coordinator (usually a graduate student) works under the direction of the Research Participation Pool Manager, a faculty member in the Psychology Department. The Coordinator handles the day-to-day operation of the Experiment Management System and is the primary contact person for students, researchers, and instructors who have questions or problems.

Research Participation Pool Manager, 2006-2007

David Allbritton

Duties of the Research Participation Coordinator

Before the first day of classes

  1. Contact the Research Participation Pool Manager for instructions and to enable your access to the system.

  2. Get the list of Psy 105 and 106 courses from Campus Connect. (Be sure to uncheck "open sections only" to make sure you get all the sections.) In the Experiment Management System go to "Set Up, course listings" and enter the course names. Use course names of this format:

        Psy 105-201 MWF 3:30

    The number of credits required should be 5. Select the instructor if he or she is already listed in the drop-down menu. If not, you will have to come back later and assign an instructor after you have added an account for them. It is important to get all the course names listed in the system as early as possible, though, so go ahead and create all of the course listings even if you do not have an instructor for them yet.

  3. Send an email to all faculty, part-time faculty, staff, and graduate students in the Psychology Department reminding instructors to include subject pool information in their syllabi, and reminding everyone where the subject pool instructions can be found on the web. This sample letter is probably a good template. Check with the department main office to see if there are any part time instructors who might have missed the mass email, and find a way to get the information to them before classes begin.

  4. Get a list of Psy 105 and 106 instructors. Create instructor accounts for them if they do not already have one. Either use the userID they request, or by default use their last name with the numeral "2" appended to it. You can use the "Batch user import" function under "Users: add/edit/search" to paste in a list of new users. You will need to cut and paste in a list in the following format:

         userID, last name, first name, email address

    Instructors should email you this information, but if you know their email address you should go ahead and create their accounts without waiting for them to contact you. After setting up the instructor accounts, remember to go back to "Set Up: course listings" and designate an instructor for each section.

  5. Set up and activate the Prescreening Survey ("Set Up: pretest setup"). If there are no additional measures besides the demographic survey, you simply need to click on "Make Active" to enable the existing survey. If you need to add additional sections requested by researchers, however, you will need to do the following:

    • Click "Edit Questions and Sections"
    • Click "Copy From an Existing Section"
    • Select the "Survey/Pretest to Copy From" where the researcher has created the survey to be added
    • Click "Select Section"
    • There should be only one section listed. Click the radio button next to it, then click "Copy Section"
    • Click "Final Review" to save the changes to the pretest

  6. Reset the Timeslot Usage Limit for all studies to the default limit (currently 50). This is necessary because some studies from previous quarters may be carried over, and the usage limit for some studies may have been increased the last time they were run.

    • Click on "Studies: view all"
    • Click on "Batch Study Update"
    • Under "Adjust All Studies" click the radio button for "Set the timeslot usage limit for all studies to" and enter "50" in the text box
    • Click "Save Changes"

Two weeks after classes begin

Deactivate the Prescreening survey two weeks after classes begin.

  • Click on "Set Up: pretest setup"
  • Click on "Make Inactive"
  • Click on "Apply Changes, Make INACTIVE"

Week 5

  1. Email instructors and ask them to

    • Log in to their instructor account
    • Check their roster against the system's list of students for their class
    • Report to the Coordinator any students listed for their section in the system who are not actually in the class (any "extra" students)
    • Contact any of their students who are not yet registered in the system (any "missing" students) and remind them to register

  2. Email students registered in the system and ask them to check their user information (such as which section of the course they are in) and report to the Coordinator any errors.

Throughout the quarter

  1. Check the system email account daily
  2. Create new Principle Investigator and Researcher accounts when requested, after verifying the accuracy of the email address supplied by the researcher
  3. Answer student and researcher emails regarding questions or problems
  4. Update the system records in the event of errors or omissions
  5. Check the box in the main office weekly for optional papers, etc.
  6. Make new studies visible to participants when researchers email a request to do so.
    • Click on "Studies: view all"
    • Click on the name of the study to be made visible
    • Verify the IRB approval code and expiration date
    • Click on "Change Study Information"
    • Click "Yes" for "Visible to Participants?"
    • For lab studies, make sure the duration is a multiple of 60 minutes, and the Credits/Pay is a 1 Credit for 60 minutes, 2 for 120 minutes, etc.
    • For online studies, make sure the duration is 30 minutes and the Credits/Pay is 0.5 Credits. If the researcher had some other value, contact them to see whether the study actually takes longer than 30 minutes. If so, set the duration to the lowest multiple of 30 minutes that is long enough, and the number of credits to .5 per half hour, but not less than .5 Credits total
    • For online studies, set the "Course Restrictions" so that participants must be in one of the Loop or evening sections. To do this, highlight all the classes that have section numbers of 400 or greater, and make sure no classes with section numbers less than 400 are highlighted.
    • Click "Save Changes"
  7. Set and update enrollment caps for each lab and online study
    • The current (as of Winter, 2007) enrollment caps for lab studies are as follows.
      • Initial cap for each study: 50
      • After 2 weeks, at researcher's request raise cap to no more than: 100
      • After the 4th week of the quarter, increase the cap for all lab studies to: 100
      • After the 8th week of the quarter, increase the cap for all lab studies to: "unlimited"
    • The same caps apply for online studies if they are restricted to Loop and evening sections only. The course restrictions must remain in place throughout the quarter. If the researcher wishes to remove the course restrictions and make an online study available to LPC day sections, then the enrollment cap can not be raised beyond the initial cap of 50.
    • Any exceptions to these policies must be approved by the faculty Research Participation Pool Manager.
  8. Grade the optional papers and enter the credits
    • Click "Users: add/edit/search"
    • Search for the Participant's name
    • Click on "Update" next to the user's name in the resulting list
    • Under "Non-Study Credit Grant" enter "1" for "Number of Credits to Grant"
    • Select the "Course for Credit Assignment." If the student is enrolled in both Psy 105 and 106, email him or her a reminder to change the credit allocation between the two classes if they wish to.
    • In the "Commments: (optional)" box, enter "Paper on" followed by the author and year of the article they summarized, such as "Paper on Skinner, 1989"
    • Click "Grant Credit

Week 9

  1. Email instructors again with the same request as in Week 5.

  2. Email both instructors and students and remind them of the following deadlines:

    • The deadline for papers to be turned in to the box in the main office, and for experiments to be completed
    • The date you plan to post the preliminary end-of-quarter totals for students to review, and to allow students to reassign credits between sections if needed. This should be as early during final exam week as possible
    • The date that credit totals will be finalized and made available to instructors for grading. After this date, no changes can be made to the totals in the system, and students can not re-assign credits between sections.

  3. Email all researchers and remind them to download any prescreening or online study data before the end of finals week. Remind them that all system data (including survey results) are deleted at the end of each quarter. Remind them what the last date is that they can schedule experiments (last day of regular classes, and tell them the date) and remind them to update all credit and no-show assignments by that date also.

  4. Send another reminder about the deadline a day or two before the last day of classes, to all researchers and participants.

At the end of the quarter

  1. On the last day of classes, unlock all student accounts so that students who were locked out due to no-shows can log in and re-assign credits between sections if needed.
  2. After 5pm on the last day of regular classes, make all studies inactive.
    • Click on "Studies: view all"
    • Click on "Batch Study Update"
    • Under "Adjust All Studies" click the radio button for "Make all studies Inactive"
    • Click "Save Changes"
  3. Enter the credits for the "optional papers" by the date you told students preliminary end-of-quarter totals would be available for their review. This should be by the third day of final exam week at the very latest. Remember to assign the credits to the student's class so that they will appear in the credit report the instructor sees. If the student is enrolled in both Psy 105 and 106, assign the credit to the class the student requested on the paper, or to the class with the fewest credits if neither was specified by the student.
  4. On the date you told instructors and students that credit totals would be finalized, email instructors to let them know that the final totals are available for grading. Remind them that all student credit data will be purged from the system at the end of the quarter, therefore instructors should download or print out their students' credit totals as soon as possible.
  5. Before you email instructors to let them know the final credit totals are avaiable, disable the system feature that allows students to reassign their credits from one class to another.
    • Click on "Set Up: system settings"
    • Scroll down to "Course Credit Reassignment"
    • Change the value of "Course Credit Reassignment" to "No"
    • Scroll down to the bottom and click "Save Changes"
    • Be careful that you do not change any other settings in this panel
  6. CC the Research Participation Pool Manager when you email instructors at the end of the term
  7. Once you have emailed instructors to announce that the totals are finalized, you must not make any subsequent changes to the credit totals in the system. If you discover an error after the totals have been finalized, you will have to email the instructor the corrected information directly rather tha
  8. Generate the following reports ("Tasks, generate reports"), cut and paste the relevant information from them into a Word or HTML document, and email it to the whole department:
    • System Summary Report (do not include the Pretest/Survey Responses portion of the output in your document)
    • Credit Usage Report [On-Screen]

After the deadline for instructors to turn in grades

  1. Archive all credit data from the current quarter (or make sure that the Research Participation Pool Manager has done so before you proceed to the next step).
  2. Delete all participants from the system (but do not delete instructors or researchers)

Updated December 28, 2006