Psychology SONA

SONA Subject Pool Policies

(modified 8/26/2017)

Students may participate in research in order to satisfy course requirements or to obtain extra credit. However, no student may be required to participate in research without alternatives to satisfy the same course requirement or extra credit. Instructors who require or offer extra credit for research participation will also offer students the choice to substitute comparable non research participation alternative assignments.
Psychology 101 instructors must require a minimum of 6 SONA credits (FECs) and allow 6 additional FECs as extra credit. The required credits must count for a meaningful percent of the course grade (or alternative writing assignments, or other instructor defined alternatives such as colloquium or other event attendance).
1. These numbers may be adjusted in a given semester.
2. Faculty will be asked to estimate the number of hours they and their students will use during the semester one month before the beginning of the semester, and 101 instructors may be asked to adjust the credit hour requirement (up or down).
3. If demands for student hours begin to exceed reasonable availability the department may have to develop a system for allocating hours to researchers, much as is done at many institutions.
Psych 101 students will be required to complete at least 4 (2/3) of their required credits prior to midsemester. This will be determined according to the number of studies (and credit hours) approved by the IRB and ready to deploy one month before the semester begins. Faculty will be asked to report this availability at the same time they are asked to estimate the number of student research credit hours they will need during the semester as a whole.
1. The SONA coordinator will generate a report for instructors at midsemester and at the end of the semester. This will allow instructors to enter research participation grades for the first and second half of the requirement separately.
2. If students have not completed the minimum available credits within each half of the semester, they will no longer be able to receive those credits (either by research participation or other assigned curricular activities). Their first participation grade will be based only on what is complete at midsemester. These credits cannot be made up during the second half of the semester.
No Show Policy:
1. If a student fails to show up and fails to provide a reasonable excuse (unexcused, no-show), they will be barred from further participation in the SONA pool for the remainder of that course and must complete the alternative assignments instead. A second unexcused no-show for credit in another course will result in the removal of the student's SONA privileges for that semester.
Research must be conducted physically in-lab, though the study may nevertheless be online. Exceptions to this will be rare, and must be justified by the requirements for testing the hypothesis (such as, for example, diary or event sampling studies). Researchers who feel they need an exception may submit a request for exception to the subject pool committee, which will respond in no longer than 2 weeks.
Credit will be granted as 1 PEC per ½ hour participation.
Credit for online (out of lab) studies will be granted at ½ the PEC credits for comparably long in-lab studies, except for Psych 101 offered online wherein the students can get full FEC credit for online experiments.