All students enrolled in 194A will meet with the program coordinator once per week in a seminar discussion environment. These meetings have several purposes.
The main requirements of 194A are:
The final grade in 194A will be based on student progress towards completing their honors thesis, the quality of the written proposal, and participation in class.
A grade of A- or better is required in 194A in order to continue in the honors sequence.
The thesis proposal shall consist of an introduction that contains a thorough (and relevant) review of literature of the topic of the thesis proposal. Although it is assumed that significant changes will be made to this introduction after the project is completed, this introduction should be written in a form and style that is consistent with its serving as the introduction to the completed honors thesis. APA style should be used (see the APA style manual). Students should become familiar with the form and style of writing in the journals in their area of concentrations. They should learn to imitate articles in those journals. The student should make the purpose of the research clear in the introduction. The introduction should lead the reader to the next section of the proposal, namely, the method section.
Following the introduction, the proposal should contain a method section that describes the proposed design, measures, procedures, specialized instrumentation, and participants that the student proposes to use to discover answers to the issues raised in the introduction. As with the introduction, the form and style should follow that in the journals in the students area and should be consistent with the APA style manual.
The last section of the proposal should describe how the results might turn out in light of the ideas raised in the introduction. What does the hypothesis predict? If alternative theories are being tested, what would the different theories predict.
Finally, the proposal should contain a complete reference section matching APA style.
You can find a much more extensive discussion of the basic sections of thesis at a site maintained by Dr. Plonsky.
One of the requirements that many honors students, indeed all researchers who use human participants in their research, must deal with at UCSD is the Institutional Review Board. This IRB exists to insure that the rights of human subjects are protected. UCSD requires that all research involving human subjects be reviewed, whether funded by federal grants or not. As a result, you should all become familiar with this process. You can find information, forms, deadlines, guidelines, and example consent forms at UCSD Human Research Protection program. This program conducts all of the reviews on campus. There are two IRBs: one for medical research and another for the social and behavioral sciences.
All honors students are required to read a recent article (Mueller & Furedy, 2001) in the Observer, a monthly newsletter published by the American Psychological Society. This article presents a critical analysis of the role of IRBs in protecting human subjects. I am requiring this article because it is critical of many of the assumptions that seem to underlie the IRB program. As such, it should get you thinking both about the need to protect human subjects from undue risk and how best to ensure that this is done.