Volunteer Science for Research Participation Credit
Jason Radford
Dear Colleagues,
We invite your students to participate as research subjects on Volunteer Science, an online research
lab run out of Northeastern University.
We host a number of experiments on human behavior including social dilemmas,
group problem-solving tasks, cognitive biases, and personality. These studies are
part of on-going academic research and have been reviewed and approved by participating
researchers’ respective IRBs.
Students and instructors can verify student participation in
experiments with automated reports that students generate themselves. See http://volunteerscience.com/how_to_certificate/ for information about how students can generate a certificate of participation and
how you can verify its authenticity, please see these instructions and example
report:
Last year, we worked with Professor Anand Sokhey’s Introduction to American Politics course of over 400 students at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In three weeks, 300 students participated in 1,300 experimental sessions.
Professor Sokhey said, "In the fall of 2015, I made Volunteer Science a part of my large introduction to American politics course (400+ students). The experience was great (and the reaction from my students and TAs uniformly positive). I was looking for an extra credit opportunity that would be both engaging and easy to administer, but that would also expose students to research in the social and behavioral sciences. Volunteer Science checks all these boxes. The site is easy for students to navigate and makes tracking participation a breeze (students can print certificates logging time spent playing). Moreover, students generally found the experience both entertaining and informative -- a number asked if they could just keep playing; several commented on the connections between the games they played and course themes such as collective action. I plan to make Volunteer Science a part of this and other courses for years to come."
You are free to use the site for your classes on your own. If you would like to
coordinate specific experiments for your classes, please contact Lab Manager
Jason Radford at: j.ra...@neu.edu.
Sincerely,
The Volunteer Science Team at Northeastern University
--
Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, University of Chicago
Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University
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