Board of Advisors and the Instructors

The following five experts have agreed to serve as advisors to the project, and to act as instructors in the Advanced Training Institutes:

Michael H. Birnbaum
Department of Psychology and Decision Research Center
California State University, Fullerton
Fullerton, CA 92834

John H. Krantz
Department of Psychology
Hanover College
Hanover, IN 47243

Gary McClelland
Department of Psychology
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

Kenneth O. McGraw
Dept. of Psychology
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677

Ulf-Dietrich Reips
Department of Psychology
University of Zürich
CH-8032 Zürich
Switzerland

William C. Schmidt
Dept. of Psychology
355 Park Hall
University at Buffalo,
The State University of New York
Buffalo, NY. 14260-4110

The board will plan and organize the event, determine the curriculum, and help publicize and recruit participants. In the tentative plan described below there will be six topic areas, each to be represented by at least one expert instructor.

Qualifications of the Proposed Training Staff

Clearly, this topic is one that is undergoing rapid change as hardware is improved and new software is developed. For that reason, it is planned to invite additional outside criticism and review of the plans so that the institute will be as optimally designed and up-to-date as possible. Expert reviewers will be recruited from authors of advanced chapters in Birnbaum (2000b), Reips & Bosnjak (2001), and from those who are publishing on this topic in the journals and on the Web. On-line forms will be developed to allow them to provide their advice and criticism on-line, which will make it easy for them to give us their feedback.

The people who are currently on the advisory board have all developed successful on-line research programs and all have experience lecturing and teaching on specific areas within this general topic. Birnbaum has published two books on On-line psychological research, including an edited book with specialized contributions, Psychological Experiments on the Internet (Birnbaum, 2000b), and an introductory text book for use with undergraduates and graduate students, Introduction to Behavioral Research on the Internet (Birnbaum, 2001a). He has also published three journal articles and two chapters that deal with research using on-line methods (Birnbaum, 1999a; 1999b; 1999c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b), with two additional works in press (Birnbaum, in press-b; Birnbaum & Martin, in press).

Birnbaum has taught two undergraduate courses (Psych 305 and Psych 466) in which each student learned how to put an experiment on the Web, conducted an experiment with at least 100 participants, and wrote an APA style article. He is teaching a graduate seminar on Internet Research in Judgment and Decision Making in Fall of 2001. A course Web site for the undergraduate course in advanced computer methods (Psych 466), which contains a number of exercises, examples, links, and self-scoring online quizzes, can be reached at the following URL:

http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych466/

Birnbaum was invited to give keynote addresses to the German Online Research Society (DGOF) meetings in 1999 and to the Dutch Association of Social Psychologists (ASPO) in 2000. He participated in a symposium on Judgment and Decision Making on the Web, and has been invited to present in two symposia on this topic to be held on this topic at APA convention in 2001, and a workshop to be held in Berlin in late June of 2001.

Birnbaum (2000c; 2001) has created Web pages that make Web pages that can be used in survey research and factorial experiments. Run by JavaScript engines, these free pages create simple forms that collect data in a fool-proof way that even undergraduates can master in one hour. This system has already been used by more than 25 students and faculty researchers around the world to collect data. These tools make it easy to get someone started in Web—based research.

Birnbaum will teach HTML, Forms, and JavaScript using chapters from his (2001) book, along with new templates that will be created for the Institute. These templates will be designed to execute popular types of Social Psychology Studies. The templates will demonstrate how to conduct these studies and also be materials that the participants can modify to suit their own needs.

Ulf-Dietrich Reips and John Krantz are probably the first two psychological researchers to collect experimental data using the new methods for WWW research that became available in 1995. Reips received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Tübingen, Germany on "Acquisition of causal knowledge". He created the award-winning Web Experimental Psychology Lab (Reips, 2001) and has served as its Webmaster since inception in 1995.

http://www.psych.unizh.ch/genpsy/Ulf/Lab/WebExpPsyLab.html

The lab was originally developed at Tübingen and moved with Reips to Zürich, Switzerland. He is coeditor of Dimensions of Internet ScienceReips & Bosnjak, 2001), and has authored or co-authored a number of articles and chapters on Web experimentation, including methodology (Reips, 2000), history of web experimentation (Musch & Reips, 2000), analysis of drop-outs and CGI versus JavaScript (Schwarz & Reips, 2001).

Reips and his group in Zürich developed WEXTOR, an online Web experiment generator that also teaches experimental design, and is to be integrated with the Swiss Virtual Campus. He currently serves as Vice President of the German Society for Online Research (DGOF), and on the steering committee of the Society for Computers in Psychology. His research interests include: potential biases inherent in online and offline research, social desirability in online studies, teaching with net-based technologies, social cognition, and causal knowledge.

WEXTOR:

http://www.genpsylab.unizh.ch/wextor/index.html

Reips has published and lectured in both English and German (e.g., Reips, 1997) and serves the important role of bridging new findings between the literatures in these two languages. Reips will teach Methodology of Web experiments and Managing a Web Lab.

Prof. John Krantz is the Webmaster of the American Psychological Society’s Web page of on-line experiments. Musch and Reips (2000) noted that Krantz is probably the first investigator to publish Web experiments (Krantz, Ballard, & Scher, 1997; Welch & Krantz, 1996). Krantz is an expert on the validity of Web experiments, having reviewed the emerging literature comparing Web and Lab versions of the same studies (Krantz & Dalal, 2000). He is also a leader on techniques for sending multimedia via the Web (Krantz, 2001). It is already possible to send psychophysical stimuli, including visual, auditory, and video transmissions. Within the next few years, delivery of visual and auditory signals will improve, and video delivery via the WWW will likely approach the quality of TV transmissions, so many studies now done with video presentations (e.g., eyewitness testimony research) will become easy to deliver via the Web. Prof. Krantz will serve as lecturer on the topics of validity of Web experimentation and stimulus construction and delivery.

http://psych.hanover.edu/APS/exponnet.html

Prof. Gary McClelland is an expert in Web methods, including the use of Java to construct Web-based programs in which dynamic results, including dynamic graphics are possible. He has developed methods allowing Java applets to deliver results that can be saved by a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script to the server. Java is an extremely powerful new language that allows one to create applets that can deliver interactive graphics, among other features. Prof. McClelland has created a number of such programs to teach and compute statistics. He organized a symposium for Society for Judgment and Decision Making on Judgment and Decision Making on the WWW:

http://psych.colorado.edu/~mcclella/jdm/web.html

Prof. McClelland is also an expert in statistical analysis and measurement, having written two books on data analysis (Judd & McClelland, 1989; McClelland, 2000) and a chapter on measurement for the Handbook of Research Methods in Social Psychology (Judd & McClelland, 1998). The Website for his statistical book illustrates the power of Java programming for creating interactive graphics to illustrate statistical principles:

http://www.seeingstatistics.com/

Prof. Ken McGraw is one of the creators of the PsychExperiments site at the University of Mississippi (McGraw, Tew, & Williams, 2000a). This site is an on-line collaboratory, which allows psychology students (and professors) at distant campuses to conduct experiments from their campuses and download the data for analysis. Supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), McGraw, Tew, and Williams have conducted numerous workshops for faculty wishing to use and contribute to the experiments at the site.

McGraw, Tew, and Williams have conducted four FIPSE-funded 3-day workshops at the University of Mississippi, training a total of 60 faculty members in their approach to on-line research. These workshops taught faculty to develop their own experiments using Macromedia's Authorware, the experiment generator used at the PsychExperiments site. Authorware is an extremely powerful program that can be used to construct interactive teaching modules, quizzes, and on-line experiments (Williams, McGraw, & Tew, 1999). The program can be downloaded for a 30-day free trail, which will suffice for the workshop and for giving the participants information to decide if they want to purchase it.

McGraw’s current NSF grant supports development of training materials that can be used in lieu of (or as supplement to) workshops for faculty who wish to contribute to the PsychExperiments site. Used in association with a brief workshop, the materials will allow the person receiving training to continue a program of distance learning on the topic. The PsychExperiments URL is as follows:

http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/

Prof. McGraw has also presented the techniques used in the PsychExperiments lab to more than 20 scientific conventions, colloquia, and workshops. These include invited addresses and workshops at meetings of the American Psychology Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Gettysburg Conference on Instructional Technology, McGraw-Hill Conference on Teaching of Psychology, and the biannual Computers in Psychology meeting in York, UK. Feature articles regarding the site have appeared in the APA Monitor, the APS Observer, Tech Trends.

An article concerning the integrity of data collected using the technology at the site was published in Psychological Science (McGraw, Tew, & Williams, 2000b), and a paper has been submitted on the topic of the accuracy of timing in Authorware experiments. The best way to appreciate the power of the PsychExperiments approach to on-line experiment delivery and data collection is to visit the site and try a sample of the experiments available there. The participant must first download the free Authorware Player in order to view the studies.

William Schmidt (http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~wcswcs) has written several technical papers on ways psychologists can exploit benefits of the Web medium (Schmidt, 1997a; Schmidt, Hoffman & MacDonald, 1997; Schmidt, 2000) as well as assessing limitations in graphical presentation timing for Web-based animations (Schmidt, 2001).

As a graduate student in 1996 Schmidt created World-Wide Web Survey Assistant (Schmidt 1997b), the first CGI program generator of its type that allows survey administrators to create complex surveys on the Web without programming knowledge (this is free for academic use!). http://survey.psy.buffalo.edu

Schmidt is currently undertaking several large-scale Web surveys and experiments on a variety of topics from labor pain (http://www.laborpain.org) to Web-based incentives to experiments on motion perception (http://survey.psy.buffalo.edu:8080).

Summary Page

Application

References

Agenda

Material in this Web site is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. SBR-9410572, SES-9986436, and especially, BCS-0129453. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.