Addressing the "Why is this class important?" on the first day of class

​When I first started teaching as a graduate student, I was assigned courses that students notoriously dreaded. First, I taught a writing lab for our research methods course, where students learned about APA formatting and wrote a research paper. After that, I taught Statistical Methods. In both courses, students routinely complained that the skills taught in these courses didn’t apply to them. They didn’t want to be researchers that conducted experiments, ran data analyses, and then wrote up findings in a manuscript. So why should they take these classes seriously?

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