Veranstaltung

Description

The goal of this course is to help students develop a basic understanding of how quantitative modeling and simulations are used in behavioral research, especially in tracking/explaining behavior observed in experiments. The course will take a seminar form. Students will be assigned to read one journal article per week, with special attention paid to the quantitative/modeling part of the paper. In the weekly lecture/discussion that follows, we will talk about the article, try to reproduce the models/simulations along with their predictions and results using R, and discuss possible extensions of the work.

English will be the language used in all lectures, discussions, course materials, and assessments.

Competence Certificate

The assessment consists of writing two R scripts that implement certain functions specified by the instructor. The first assessment will be due after 8 weeks and the second will be due one week after the last lecture.

Workload

Students are expected to spend a total of 90 hours (30 hours per ECTS) on this class. Weekly lecture/discussion will have an average duration of 2 hours. Reading and programming assignments will take an average of 4 hours each week.

Prerequisite

Basic knowledge of the R language. Familiarity with concepts and operations such as vectors, functions, reading and writing data, conditional statements is considered sufficient.