Student Resources
UIUC Student Resources
- Campus updates regarding COVID-19
- COVID-19 Mental Health Resources
- Compiled by the Psychology Department, relevant to all
- Disability Services
- The Disability Resources & Educational Services office is available to facilitate the removal of barriers and ensure reasonable accommodations. You can share your letter of accommodation with the instructor by email.
- Emergencies or Personal Matters
- The Student Assistance Center is on the 3rd floor of the Turner Student Services Center, or contact them at helpdean@illinois.edu or 217-333-0050.
- This is where you go to get a letter from the Dean of Students if you need to communicate to many instructors that you need emergency accommodations (such as extensions of assignments and rescheduling of exams) in case of a major disruption in your life.
- If you need help with an urgent matter after hours (NOT a previous or anticipated absence from class), contact the Emergency Dean at 217-649-4129.
Writing and Research
- Google Scholar
- Find and access scholarly publications (mostly articles, some books and book chapters, also includes case law if you’re into that sort of thing)
- The Academic Phrasebank
- When you’re reading an academic paper, you notice that there are turns of phrase that seem to be used that otherwise do NOT show up in common language. These researchers compiled a substantial dataset of those phrases and organized them into categories of when & why they are typically used. Helpful if you’re having trouble figuring out how to phrase something.
- Purdue Owl APA format guide
- We use APA formatting throughout this course because (1) there needs to be some kind of consistent formatting across papers, otherwise, it would be a nightmare to provide instructions (You: “How should I format my references?”) and grade (Me: “Which study is this student referring to here?”), and (2) this course is housed in a Psychology department, so (3) APA is as good a standard to follow as any other.
- Grammarly grammar checker
- The free version is excellent
- Randy McCarthy’s suggestions for self-editing your writing
- A helpful list of recommendations (not specific to behavior genetics)
Genetics and Statistics
- Greg Carey’s Genetics Glossary
- A useful resource from the behavior genetics class at the University of Colorado - Boulder, focused on the more biology-y terms that will come up sporadically in this course.
- Learning Statistics with R by Danielle Navarro
- A free intro statistics textbook with examples using R.
- Boulder International Statistical Genetics Workshop
- Example scripts, data, and tutorials available in the Past Workshops section.
- Psyc 408 twitter list
- Authors whose work we read in this course, plus some of my favorite scicommers
Course Activity Templates
These are examples/forms that you will use as a guide to complete participation activities and course project assignments throughout the course.
- Empirical Article Summary
- Use for articles reporting a new analysis of data.
- Review Article Summary
- Use for articles that summarize or review previous research and do NOT report any new data analysis.
- Topic Summary
- Suggested 5 section structure for a blog post or a paper
- Method Summary
- A 1-2 page summary of a Method (not necessarily a single paper or study).
- Peer Review
- An academic-journal-style peer review structure