ABSTRACT
Assessment is most useful to learning and teaching when the faculty design assessments to be diagnostic, in order to reveal the specific conceptions that students use in their performances. In this chapter, the author proposes that the suggestions the author offer supplement and not replace the more typical activities that faculty already use to help students to conceptualize their research projects. Student participation in discussion of inconsistencies will serve a double purpose, addressing the popular misconceptions about the nature of progress in research, and pointing students who do not already have projects in mind to the most fertile ground for specific research ideas. Faculty design psychology curricula, using one set of conceptual categories-the content areas such as social, personality, physiological, and cognitive-to organize the content of the discipline of psychology. There is certainly a wide variety of reasons that students have difficulties in finding independent experimental research ideas.
