I/O Psychology Program Courses

Personnel Psychology

Personnel Psychology: This course provides an overview of personnel psychology. Topics include reliability and validity, job analysis, performance criteria, performance appraisal, employee recruitment, employee selection, and training and development.

Advanced Personnel Psychology I: This course covers the topic of personnel selection and assessment, with an emphasis on various employee selection methods, criterion development, validation, and legal issues.

Human Performance Assessment: This course covers the topics of job analysis and performance appraisal/ management (PA/PM). Specific topics include job analysis methods; use of job analysis results for various HR functions; performance assessment/appraisal methods; multi-source feedback; employee reactions to and use of PM/PA information; rater cognitive processes and affect; rater goals, bias and accuracy; and organizational, practical and legal issues surrounding job analysis and PA/PM.

Human Resource Development: This course covers research findings, methodologies, and evaluation designs for the training and development of personnel in organizations. Specific topics include needs assessment, learning principles and system design.

Seminar courses as offered.

Organizational Psychology

Organizational Psychology: This course provides an overview of organizational behavior and theory. Topics include leadership, motivation, teams, social processes at work, workplace relationships, organization structure and environments, and organizational development and change.

Micro Organizational Psychology: This course involves the study of individual and group behavior in organizations. Emphasis is placed on classic and contemporary leadership and motivation theory and research.

Macro Organizational Psychology: :  This course uses a multilevel perspective to provide a foundation in organization theory. Students develop a theory of organizing that incorporates variables at the individual, dyad, group, unit, organization, and organization network levels of analysis.

Careers:  This seminar covers the developmental processes, facilitators, and barriers individuals encounter in their work lives and in career advancement. Considering traditional and alterative definitions of career success, a relational approach is applied to topics including psychological contracts, socialization, mentoring, the work-family interface, and diversity.

Holistic Organizations:  This seminar focuses on the creation of organizations that develop and use the "whole" person, not just the economic portion of humans devoted to productivity and profit, with emphasis on theory and research in positive organization science. Multilevel case studies of holistic organizations are examined and discussed and a holistic organization is created to implement ideas taught in the class.

Organizational Development and Change: This seminar discusses models and theories of organizational change and interventions that are commonly used to foster organizational development and effectiveness. Students participate in an organizational consulting project to apply lessons learned in the classroom.

Field Research Methods in Organizational Psychology: This seminar discusses the design and analysis of surveys, quasi-experiments, questionnaires, interviews, and other methods for studying organizational processes. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are discussed.

Statistics and Research Methods

Analysis of Variance and Experimental Design:  This course covers basic descriptive and inferential statistical procedures with a heavy emphasis on fundamental and advanced analysis of variance techniques. Topics include contrasts, factorial designs, within-subject and mixed designs, and analysis of covariance. Course materials are covered in the context of classical experimental and quasi-experimental design.

Regression and Correlational Design: This course covers correlation with heavy emphasis on regression analysis in the context of the general linear model. Topics include partial correlations, categorical and continuous interactions, non-linear regression, and multivariate statistics. Course materials are covered in the context of correlational designs and survey research.

Psychometric Theory:  This course introduces concepts from classical and modern test theory.  Topics covered are basic scaling and elements of instrument and test construction, the true score model, reliablilty and validity.  The course also introduces more advanced topics such as generalizability theory and exploratory factor analysis.  If time permits item response theory is also introduced.

Structural Equation Modeling: This course covers the topics of linear structural equation modeling and focuses on estimation, measurement models, confirmatory and hierarchical factor analysis, structural equations, longitudinal models, multi-sample analyses, and mean structures.

Multilevel Models - HLM: This course covers advanced regression or multilevel models used to analyze nested or hierarchical data. Topics include estimation techniques, model building, assumptions and testing, and longitudinal data analysis.

Examples of Course Electives Available

Human Factors Psychology: This course covers the application and evaluation of psychological principles and research relating human behavior to the characteristics of design, and the use of the environments and systems within which humans work and live.

Learning and Cognition: This course examines the processes influencing the acquisition and retention of new information.

Advanced Social Psychology: This course discusses the behavior of the human as a member of a group. Topics include attitude theory and change, interpersonal attraction, group dynamics, and related theory and applied research techniques.

Human Computer Interaction: This course reviews the physical, cognitive, and performance capabilities and limitations of humans as they interact with modern computer systems. Emphasis is placed on the tools, techniques and procedures for the assessment and effective design of computer hardware, software and displays of information.

Theories, Models and Simulations in Human Factors: This course surveys the historical and philosophical bases for the use of theories, models, and simulations in human factors applications with a critical evaluation of existing theories, mathematical and cognitive models, and simulations in terms of actual and potential contributions to the field.

Perception: This course covers the phenomena of perception emphasizing the historical contributions, recent methodological development, empirical findings, and an examination of the theoretical positions that have been offered. 

Note: Please see the University catalog for a complete listing of available courses. Also, please refer to the I/O Ph.D. Requirements Guide for content areas and suggested course sequences.