Application to recruit students from the Psych 125 Subject Pool
Please see Our Commitments to our Participants for some of our departmental research values.
All studies must be reviewed according to the guidelines defined by the college. Make sure you have gone through the appropriate level of IRB review before starting any study. The St. Olaf IRB procedures may be found here. An IRB approval date will be needed to complete the Subject Pool Application
After completing all IRB requirements, please complete the Subject Pool Application. This document will be used to create an experiment for you in the Moodle Subject Pool site, and allow the department staff to grant credit to your participants. All experiments undergo a formal approval process, and you may not email or otherwise contact the class directly or begin recruiting without approval. Please click here to complete the Subject Pool Application.
Some important information for applying for access to the Psych 125 Subject Pool and granting credit for participation.
Study Name – This should be the name of your study that you plan to use on ALL recruiting materials including those that students see. If you need to change your recruiting title after you have been approved, please email us at subject-pool-admin@stolaf.edu to let us know.
Number of Participants Requested – Use REALISTIC estimates of subject numbers in your request… we need accurate targets to know how many studies to approve. Do not over inflate these estimates here as it can have an adverse impact on the pool.
Time/Credits Granted – All credits are granted by the half hour, so a study that is 30 minutes or less will grant .5 credits, whereas an hour study will grant 1 credit. Do not over inflate your credits when calculating the credit associated with your study. By the time you apply for access to the subject pool you should have piloted your study to know exactly how long things are likely to take in order to grant credit appropriately.
Recruiting Description – This should be the description of the study that we will post on Moodle for students to sign up. Once approved you will not be able to change this description without approval from the subject pool administrators. This should include a description of the time the study will entail, the number of credits participants will receive, and how participants will sign up for the study. If you are using a google document or spreadsheet for students to use to sign up, please include that as well.
Experiment Description – The experiment description included in your IRB materials. This should not be the text to be used in the recruiting document.
Debriefing Materials – Please provide a half- to one-page summary of your study with (1) a narrative description of what you did, why, how it relates to the literature or broader theories and what you expect to find, (2) the educational benefits Psych 125 students will gain from their experience as participants and (3) at least 1 citation of an article from the primary literature that your study is based on (in APA format). [Note: The purpose of this debriefing material is to make sure that participants can relate the study back to major theories or course content learned in Psych 125, in addition to being properly debriefed after the research. Therefore, this statement is REQUIRED for access to this subject pool, even if your study does not require a debriefing as determined by the IRB.]
Granting Credit – Once a student has participated in the study, be sure to debrief them on the experimental methods and goals, and direct them to complete their online Research Credit Slip.
After your study is approved, we will send you an electronic credit slip in the form of a Google survey based on the information you gave us in the Subject Pool Application. This survey is unique to your project and will be used by us to grant your participants credit for their time. This survey will also include the Debriefing Materials approved when you were granted access to the pool. If you do not wish your debriefing materials to be added here, please let us know.
After each session, please promptly send a copy of this survey to your participants so that they can complete it for their credit. We ask them to send a copy of their responses to themselves in case any discrepancies arise. This information will be sent to us in order to grant student credit in Moodle. You should also make note that you sent the survey to them in case we need to track down errant cases. While this does put more onus on the researchers, we think it will make the entire process easier for everyone involved, and far more streamlined.
The slips are set up such that you will need to add student emails in order for them to complete the forms. To do this, open up the credit slip in Forms, click the “Send form” button in the upper right, and add the emails of your participants in the “Send form via email” field, then click the “Done” button. If you have a list of participant emails, you can enter them at the same time by copying the list and pasting it here. Please do not just email students the links.
The reason we want researchers to disseminate the forms in this way is so that we can 1. track how many students are actually completing them, 2. verify that the researchers are actually sending them out, and 3. keep just anyone with the link from responding (thereby lowering our incidences of students claiming credit for experiments they did not actually complete). If you have any questions, or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at subject-pool-admin@stolaf.edu
Please keep track of the following information and forward to us at subject-pool-admin@stolaf.edu weekly:
- Subjects who sign up but do not show up (no-shows)
- Subjects who cancel within a 2 hour window of the experiment without a reasonable excuse (late cancellations)