No matter what level of education, laboratory experiences are expensive. The expense may involve the cost of the equipment, the materials, safety accommodations, etc. Even in my field, cognitive and educational psychology, this is the case. While we moved away from specialized equipment and now mostly rely on computers, there is still the matter of the software.
APA’s education directorate (American Psychological Association) and the National Science Foundation have provided resources to create an online lab for psychology. The idea is to offer opportunities to participate in “classic” psychological experiments over the Internet and then download data for analysis and discussion. The site promotes itself to secondary and small college psychology instructors. The site also encourages researchers to generate their own experiments and gather data from Intro students at other institutions.
This site is the first psychology component of the National Science Digital Library.
