Courses & Learning Resources
This page archives the Subject Pool courses index — originally a hub for participants and researchers working through the University of Edinburgh Psychology Department’s experimental-methods curriculum. As the site has transitioned to a broader education and research-methods resource, we’ve kept the original course structure available below and added pointers to modern online alternatives where appropriate.
Original course archive
Year 3 — Research methods
- Y3 Research Methods — introduction to experimental design, hypothesis testing, control conditions, blinding, ethics review processes
- Y3 Project — supervised individual research project with formal write-up and supervisor review
Year 4 — Specialist topics
- Y4 General Paper — broad psychology survey with synthesis essays
- Y4 Personality — personality theories, measurement instruments (Big Five, HEXACO), and contemporary research
Year 5 — Honours topics
- Y5 Individual Differences — cognitive and personality differences across populations
- Y5 ID Personality — advanced personality measurement and theory
- Y5 ID Statistics — multivariate statistics for individual-differences research
Modern online alternatives
If you’re studying psychology research methods today and looking for online coursework, the modern catalog has grown significantly since this archive was created. Recommended starting points include:
- Coursera — research methods MOOCs from Yale, Duke, and the University of Amsterdam
- edX — MIT and Harvard offer rigorous statistics-for-psychology sequences
- FutureLearn — UK university offerings, including Edinburgh’s own modern psychology programmes
- OpenIntro Statistics — free open-source textbook used in many research-methods curricula
For researchers
If you’re a researcher looking for tools to author and run experiments, see the PsyScript section — the original Edinburgh experiment-authoring tool documented here. Modern alternatives include PsychoPy, jsPsych, OpenSesame, and Gorilla.sc for browser-based experiments.