R User Group Singapore August 2026

Title: What Teaching R to Psychology Undergraduates Has Taught Me

Speaker: Yu Junhong

Junhong is a lecturer and brain imaging researcher at NTU, where he directs the Cognitive and Brain Health Laboratory. He also serves as an honorary assistant professor at the Yeo Boon Khim Mind Science Centre in NUS.

Talk Description

Many of us picked up R because we wanted to. My students? Not so much.

Every year, I teach a large cohort of psychology undergraduates to use R in a compulsory research methods course. Most have little to no programming/data science background.

In this talk, I’ll share what I’ve learned from teaching R to these students — what worked and what did not. I’ll also discuss the use of GenAI in learning R — how it can be an excellent tutor, but also deprive one’s opportunity to develop genuine coding skills.