Teaching

PSC 162 - Introduction to Personality

This one-quarter course introduces the scientific study of personality. Personality refers to the relatively enduring patterns in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over time and across situations. The course will involve a combination of lectures, exams, in-class activities, and a written assignment.

  • Winter 2023, UC Davis
  • Winter 2024, UC Davis
  • Winter 2025, UC Davis
  • Winter 2026, UC Davis (scheduled)

PSC 203b - Data Visualization in R

Link to full course website, including all workshops

In scholarly writing, a figure can be worth 1000 words. Data visualization is a key part of the scientific enterprise, yet most students are taught only a small range of visualizations that are most frequently used in their fields and for the types of methods they use. Such standard procedure can limit the reach and scope of scientific work in an era of rapid digital technological innovation. This course will be designed around themes rather than types of visualization. The beginning of the course will cover best practices in data visualization from the perspective of a growing literature on cognitive perceptions of data visualization and will orient students to visualizing data in R using ggplot2. Next, we will cover several broad topic areas, including visualizing probability, differences, and uncertainty. We will conclude with interactive and animated graphics in R and Shiny. Students are highly encouraged to bring their own data from ongoing or completed projects, but this is not required.

  • Fall 2022, UC Davis
  • Winter 2025, UC Davis
  • Winter 2027, UC Davis (scheduled)

PSC 203a - Data Management and Wrangling in R

Link to full course website, including all workshops

In graduate education, training on research (and statistical) methods and conceptual frameworks far outpaces training on key technical skills that underpin all research, empirical or otherwise. On average, researchers spend about 80% of their (analytic) time on data cleaning, but we spend comparatively little teaching those skills. This course aims to fill that gap by helping researchers to (1) build their reproducible research workflow and (2) improve their data cleaning and general statistical programming skills. To that end, each session will be split to address each of these goals, with the beginning of class focused on conceptual ideas about best practices in building a workflow and the latter half focused on technical training on programming and cleaning data in R. This course will be set up as a “bring your own data” course to allow students to anticipate specific challenges that face different types of research.

This course is not a “pure” data science (i.e. we won’t be working with databases, etc.) because it focuses on the skills and tools most common within the social sciences. Science is a collaborative enterprise, and these tools are widely used among many social scientists, which promotes an open, equitable workflow by using tools available and most commonly used by the majority of our peers.

  • Fall 2023, UC Davis
  • Winter 2026, UC Davis (scheduled)

PSC 190 - Advanced Topics in Personality

What if everything we know about personality is motivated fiction? If you can’t trust the “facts,” how do you evaluate the evidence and determine their legitimacy?

This one quarter seminar/laboratory course aims to teach you critical thinking skills necessary in conducting personality science and psychological science more broadly. We will review primary and secondary source materials from different perspectives (learning phase), many of which were covered in PSC 162, and then apply the methods (both data and models) used to support that approach. In this course, you will build your own idea what personality is and isn’t based on existing evidence and learn how to think about what more evidence is needed to test your understanding.

Although there will be a variety of assignments and other forms of assessing knowledge in this course, its primary goal is not to proliferate a set body of knowledge but rather to teach critical thinking skills and engagement with psychological scholarship.

  • Fall 2024, UC Davis

PSC 289AB - Current Topics in Personality

Each term, we read a series of thematically related papers and discuss them. These topics may range from statistical methods to theoretical topics and papers, past and present. The goal of these discussions is to diversify our understandings of what personality is, how we measure it, and more. Where possible, terms end with project proposals related to the term’s thematic theme.

  • Fall 2022, UC Davis
  • Winter 2024, UC Davis
  • Winter 2025, UC Davis
  • Fall 2025, UC Davis