PEN-700 Cognitive Neuroscience Summer Lab Rotation I

Course Overview

In this first of two research laboratory rotation courses (PEN 700), students gain intensive Educational / Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory research experience at a partnership university during the summers after their first and second years in the PEN doctoral program, devoting special attention to the lab’s scientific questions, hypotheses, and methods. Students will become familiar with the set of research questions guiding the laboratory’s research, understand how the questions have been approached in the laboratory setting and represented as research hypotheses, gain hands-on experience in the technical aspects of data collection and analysis in the lab, and study how the lab’s current work adds to the previous findings of the lab and the discipline. Students will also consider the principled application of the lab’s research activities to the improvement of education and society, although this topic will become a major focus of the second rotation of the following summer. Students will focus their final paper and presentation on demonstrating their knowledge of the research process in the visited lab from theory to hypothesis to research design to analysis to interpretation.