SONA Directions for Instructors

Generating Course Reports

Instructors can generate reports for experiment participation. The SONA Experiment Management System is used for scheduling and managing the UCLA Psychology Department human subject pool. As an instructor, your interaction with the system will be minimal, but painless. Your primary use of the system will be to check on the credit status of students (participants) in your courses, though in some cases you may also assign credits to your students, and view which studies are available for your students.

Getting Started

The system works best if you use a web browser that is less than 2 years old. It works well with all recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. It will work with other web browsers, and with older versions popular browsers; however the layout may not be as clean. No functionality will be lost by using an older web browser. Ask your IT department if you needhelp with installing or using a web browser. This documentation assumes you have a basic knowledge of how to use the web. On this system, it is not necessary to use the Back button. You can always use the toolbar on the top to navigate anywhere on the site.

Logging In

To login, go to the front page of the site, you will be given the URL by the System Administrator. Type in your username and password. If you have forgotten your password and the system is configured to allow password retrieval, you will see a link where you may choose to have your password emailed to you. Once you login, you will be presented with a Main Menu with a few options.

Course Reports

On the Main Menu that you see after logging in, you will see an option to generate course reports. Once you click on that, you will see a list of all the courses you are listed as an instructor for, and you have the option to generate reports for each of those courses.

Course Listing

You have 3 choices for the type of report you would like to generate. All Participants will list all participants in the course. Completed Participants will list only participants who have met or exceeded their credit requirements. Incomplete Participants will list only participants who have not met their credit requirements. Click the link for the desired report.

The report will be listed in alphabetical order by a participant’s last name, and participants that have not completed their requirements will be highlighted in bold. For privacy and research ethics reasons, you will never see exactly which studies the students participated in – only a summary of their credit earnings. If for some reason this information is needed, the administrator can produce such a report for you using the Course Credit History report available to them.

You will see a credit status for the participant overall, as well as for the listed course. Please look at a participant’s “Credits Earned for Course” to determine if they have completed their requirements. If the report is too wide to be printed easily, you can use the Printer-Friendly format. A link to that will appear at the bottom of the report.

If you would prefer to deal with the information in CSV (comma-separated) format (for easy import into a spreadsheet program like Excel), use the CSV link at the bottom of the report to generate such a data file. If you have problem working with the CSV format file, please contact your IT department for assistance – CSV is a standard data format and they be quite familiar with it.

To generate a new report, choose the Main Menu link from the left toolbar and proceed. Viewing Studies You have the ability to view what studies are available in the system (to students). This is useful if you want to discuss information or concepts from those studies in class, as a part of the educational experience. You will see an All Studies link after you login. If you click this, you will see a list of studies, and you may then click on any study to view more about it. For privacy reasons, you may not see who has signed up for any of the studies.

Instructor Credit Granting

The system is not configured for instructors to give a student credit for participation in a research alternative (e.g., writing a paper), in lieu of actual research participation. Alternative assignments in lieu of research participation should still be considered when giving the final grade, and each abstract is equivalent to two research credits for Psychology 10.

Changing Your Password

To change your password or other information, choose the My Profile choice from the toolbar. Fields marked with (+) are optional and do not need to be filled out. If you change your password, please be sure to select a password you do not use on any other systems or websites. This is good computing practice, and especially important as in some cases, your password may be sent over email. In situations where the system is configured so you may enter an email address on this page, you will be asked to enter it twice when changing the address, to ensure it is typed correctly.

Logging Out

When you are done using the system, choose Logout from the top toolbar to log out. You are now logged out. It is always a good security measure to close all your browser windows as well, especially if you are using a computer that is shared by others.

If you would like to receive training or have questions about the Psychology Subject Pool system, please contact us at subjectpool@psych.ucla.edu.

Instructor Directions 

Sona Systems