SONAR is a research credit management system for Ball State Educational Psychology (EDPS) courses. All EDPS undergraduate course instructors are encouraged to require research participation of some kind in their courses. SONAR helps you facilitate such a requirement in your courses with little effort on your part.
Typical research participation is one of two forms:
- Participating as a human subject in a current research study facilitated via the SONAR Research Participation Pool
- Writing a 1-page research review over an empirical article, facilitated via the SONAR Research Review Option.
Benefits to students and instructors:
- We manage a database of open research studies seeking participants.
- We provide your students with guidance on writing a review of empirical research.
- We provide students with feedback on their research reviews.
- We generate emails as evidence of completion they can send you.
Research Credits
The typical number of research credits required in a course is 3.0, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of time required for research participation. IRB and therefore SONAR uses this convention throughout its system.
Including the Research Requirement in Your Course
Below is a description of the research requirement that you can copy and paste into your syllabus:
“Many courses in the Department of Educational Psychology require research participation in some form. The department administers this research participation through SONAR, an online system for managing research participation and research credit. SONAR lists current research studies you can participate in under the “Open Studies” tab. However, you may elect to not participate in any experiments and write a research review instead. You are required to compete 3.0 research credits in this course. Different studies in SONAR offer different amounts of credit for your participation. Visit http://espace.bsu.edu/sonar for more information.”
Special Note: If you choose to require research participation in your EDPS course, the Department of Educational Psychology strongly encourages that you only use the SONAR Research Participation system. SONAR is managed by EDPS and benefits the undergraduate students in EDPS courses as well as the EDPS graduate students and faculty who need a sufficiently large pool of research participants.