This course has a theoretical and a practical part about tools and methods in neuropsychology. Moreover, it is divided in two main topics, namely data acquisition (given by myself) and data analysis (given by Adélaïde de Heering).

Data acquisition

The aim of this part is to provide students with both the theoretical concepts about good practices in data collection and the practical skills to design any experiments.

Here are the main chapters of the theoretical course: Utility of collecting data, Available tools and resources, How to do a good testing?, Case studies and patient testing, Good research practices. In the practical course, students learn to program experiments with the PsychoPy application. At the end of the course, they are supposed to have enough knowledge to write scripts with both the graphic user interface (builder) and the command line interface (coder).

Data analysis

In this part, students learn how to analyze data, which nicely follows the first part. The aim is to equip them with good tools and practices to perform analyses, but also to make them think about what do they do when they run analyses. In other words, we want them to understand what they do and not to just click on buttons. Another challenging feature of this part is that students are now introduced to Bayesian analyses.

In the theoretical part, the main chapters are Descriptive statistics, Notion of probability, Inferential principles, Mean comparison, Analysis of variance, Local comparisons, ANOVA with several factors, Repeated measure ANOVA. In the practical part, students learn to preprocess their data with R/R Studio (from raw data to tables of means) and then to perform the analyses in R or JASP.

Ebooks and flipped classroom

In 2015-2016, Alain Content and I were awarded a ULB teaching credit to develop a course plan based on flipped-classroom design (renewed in 2016-2017). Teaching programming –be it for data acquisition or analysis–, requires time to teach procedures, time for students to practice, and homogeneous skills of the taught group. Giving time (out of class) to the students to get introduced to the procedures and to repeat them increases the quality of learning. In our course plan, students receive an eBook one week before the practical class. The eBook includes many explanations and demonstrations (videos, scripts) of new programming concepts that need to be acquired. This comes along with exercises and self-assessment tools. If students experienced difficulty while working outside the class, they can always get in touch with the professors or the assistant on line via the website of the virtual university or during TA offices. In class, the time if fully dedicated to practice the procedures via new exercises. This is also a privileged moment to address questions and to individually help students.

Students can access the eBooks (in French) via the virtual university or here.