Recruiting Participants from the Psych 125 Subject Pool
2024-2025 Coordinators: Prof. Jessica Petok, Darla Frandrup
Contact us at subject-pool-admin@stolaf.edu
Please note that the pool is only available to St. Olaf Psychology Department faculty
and current St. Olaf Psychology students.
The purpose of the Subject Pool is threefold:
1. Expose students to Psychological Research, demonstrate the empirical side
of the discipline, and enhance their experience in the course
2. Inspire research interests early and connect students to subjects, courses,
and faculty that can nurture and focus those interests
3. Provide the means for Psychology faculty and students to engage in
meaningful and powerful research to enhance coursework, professional
development, and dissemination of research findings
Application to recruit students from the Psych 125 Subject Pool
Step 1: Review Our Commitments to our Participants for some of our
departmental research values.
Step 2: Obtain IRB approval… The St. Olaf IRB procedures may be found here. 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. An IRB approval date will be needed to complete the Subject
Pool Application
Step 3: Complete the electronic Experiment Information Worksheet. 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.
Each experiment will appear as a separate assignment, and after a student has
participated in your experiment they will be granted credit. All experiments
undergo a formal approval process, and you may not email or otherwise contact
the class directly or begin recruiting without approval.
How to grant students credit for participation (after subject pool approval)
Step 1: You will receive an electronic credit slip (a Google Survey form) based on the information you provided in the Subject Pool Application, including your approved Debriefing Materials (if you do not wish your debriefing materials to be added to the credit slip, please let us know). This survey is unique to your project and will be used by us to grant your participants credit for their time.
Step 2: After each data collection session, promptly send this electronic credit slip survey to your participants so that they can complete it for their credit. This information will be sent to us in order to grant student credit in Moodle, and participants will receive a copy of their responses. In case any discrepancies arise, you should also make note of who you send the electronic credit slip survey to, in order to track down errant cases. While this does put more onus on the researchers, it makes the entire process easier for everyone involved, and far more streamlined.
- How do I add student emails to the electronic credit slip survey? 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.
- Why do the student researchers send out the electronic credit slip surveys? 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).
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)