Course on Social Processes and Interaction

Objectives and Components

Course Objectives: To explain and analyze topics related to our social world including social cognitive and perceptive processes, forming social judgments, developing and maintaining (or changing) attitudes, persuading and being persuaded, among others. Throughout the course you will be encouraged to apply the concepts learned to your personal experience, to view the processes discussed as common aspects of human behavior, and to gain insight into how these processes impact your interactions with others.

Course Components: The course will include lecture material, video clips, in class demonstrations, and class discussion.

Academic Honesty:

You are expected to act in an academically honest manner. Please read the Plagiarism statement attached to this outline and ensure that you follow these policies. Changes in Course Outline:

After the first class changes to the course outline may only be negotiated during a regular class and by consensus of the students present at that class You will be required to find 4 peer-reviewed, experiment-based, journal articles that address a common theme, issue, or topic, to complete review templates for each article and to write a review paper based on the articles you pick.

Review Templates

The article reviews will consist of you reading the articles and filling out the review template (one template for each article) that is posted below and on the CMS. As you will see, the template is designed to highlight the key questions you should consider when reading a journal article as well as to highlight the types of information that are important to consider in an article. These reviews are designed to give you the opportunity to develop your skills at reading and understanding scientific research articles and at picking out and clearly communicating the important information in a research article. You are also going to gain experience in assessing the quality of research as part of the reviews will be noting any limitations in the research that you notice. Another aspect of these reviews is the ability to be concise. Therefore, do not exceed two pages for a single article and use the template format. You may alter the amount of space used for a specific section of the template, by the entire review must fit on two pages. This is intended to force you to focus on the most important elements of the articles and to convey them in as concise a way as possible while still being informative. This takes practice, and that is what these reviews will allow. Please use a 12-point font and proper grammar. (single spacing is okay for the templates but not for the review paper).

Review Paper

The article templates are also designed to provide you with the key information from each article that you will use to write the review paper. The review paper should use the relevant information from your templates to form a concise and coherent review of the topic you chose. The paper is not merely copying the content of each review template one after the other but rather using the information in the templates to tell the reader a story about the topic focusing on a few key themes you think are most important. Therefore, use an introductory paragraph to address the main topic of the paper and any specific issues you will be discussing. The following body of the paper is where you present the relevant information. In the body of the paper attempt to avoid simply discussing one article at a time as you need to discuss aspects of several or all articles to clearly address a specific point. The review paper should be written in APA style according to the 6th edition of the APA manual and should include a proper title page and reference page. Please use a 12-point font (Times New Roman or similar), double spacing and 1” margins all around. The paper should be between 5-7 pages in total (so 3-5 pages of text) and remember that being concise and clear are very important. Please avoid plagiarism by ensuring that you state everything in your own words (switching a few words in a sentence isn’t paraphrasing, it is plagiarizing).