Curious David Redux

First Day of Classes (Professor's Perspective)

Even after all my years of teaching, the first day of class is anxiety-arousing, pressured, critical, and rewarding. As a youth, I was so anxious about giving oral presentations that I fainted when I gave my first high school debate. I had a similar melt-down during the oral component of my graduate school general qualifying examinations in Social Psychology at Ohio State. With experience and a few set backs I've learned to overlearn and to reframe (attribute) the anxiety I inevitably feel from negative feelings into excitement.

The pressures I feel are primarily situational nuisances : making sure that syllabi and handouts are up-to-date, proof-read, sufficient in number; visiting the classrooms ahead of time to better guarantee that there are enough seats, that the equipment works; thinking through how to handle disruptive classroom situations in that particular environment; and of course responding in timely fashion to the myriad course-related emails and missives. [Note the irony that I just now am posting this due to first-semester busyness!].

For me the first class meetings are critical for getting to know my students, for creating shared and appropriate expectations, and for establishing standards. This semester I am teaching my "usual" three courses yet, as in the previous three decades, each has features unique to it from previous semesters.

Based on 1) student evaluations, 2) what my students demonstrate that they can do at semester's end, and 3) how I feel every time I teach it, my "Statistics and Experimental Design " is without doubt my best course. Among the challenges in teaching such a class successfully are the attitudes that some students bring ("I hate math"; "I don't do well in math"; "I'm afraid"), weaknesses in students' fundamental computational skills, and their inexperience with my strongly believed outlook that statistics and data analysis is a tool, a language and a way of thinking.

With considerable trepidation I'm teaching my "Introductory Psychology" course in an entirely different way, pioneering how it will be taught to all our students starting next semester. Instead of the traditional survey course (as I have taught it since 1974), the focus will be on developing students' capacity for clear thinking and a better appreciation and understanding of evidence-based, scientific approaches to answering questions addressed by psychology. Here is what the syllabus presently looks like Download PSY_101B-D._SimpsonSpring2011. I hope to involve the students considerably in developing the course by introducing them to a number of tools such as Diigo , so I hope that I have a much enriched syllabus by the end of the semester.

The third course I am teaching this semester, "Psychological Testing and Assessment" inexplicably has only 7 students enrolled (usually I have more like 20). Given its small size and the fact that I know well 6 of the seven students, I may well be able with them to actually do something I've long hoped to do--- build a psychological test from scratch or improve an extant instrument. I'm also hoping to bring into the classroom a number of professionals (including former students) who in many different ways use psychological tests in their work.

Let the semester begin!

 

 

 

Puzzled

I'm puzzled. I just opened up today's mail and read with interest a special issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. This issue's special topic deals with  "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence."

The relatively short but lucidly written article by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork thoughtfully and fairly examines the empirical evidence addressing the proposal that instructional methods should be aligned with students' learning style in order to maximize student learning. The authors provide an overview of learning styles doctrines and industies, address the question of how learning styles approaches became embedded in education, propose the kinds of evidence needed to validate interventions based on learning styles, and evaluate the learning styles literature. They conclude that there is a paucity and poverty of strong evidence adequate for applying learning style assessments in school settings.

For visual learners, here is a report with similar conclusions.

And here the same psychological scientist's views on "brain-based" education.

What puzzles me are two things:

1) Why did I receive today January 7, 2010, the Volume 9 Number 3 December 2008 of Psychological Science in the Public Interest?!

2) Why is there such a disconnect between what is taught to teachers and what empirical evidence shows?

Curious. I welcome your thoughts.

Unfinished Business - The Zeigarnik Effect Revisited

I was first introduced to the Zeigarnik effect (people typically recalling interrupted tasks better than their recalling completed ones) by my first Oberlin College Introductory Psychology professor, Celeste McCollough. My participation in her visual perception studies of the "McCollough effect" formally introduced me to the science of psychology. I remember being both amused and fascinated by Professor McCollough's sharing an anecdote that she intentionally used the Zeigarnik phenomenon as a motivator for her to resume working on manuscripts that she was writing for publication.

I find it curious how a phenomenon such as the Zeigarnik effect can be discovered, experimentally investigated, popularized, misrepresented, forgotten, and rediscovered. Try conducting a "scholarly literature review" (e.g with, say PsycINFO) on this concept--now try the same with say, Google Scholar or some other such Internet learning tool.  How can one ascertain quality control of information when anyone (including yours truly) can through the Internet purport or imply that (s)he is an expert?

As I am winding up---or is it winding down---my academic career I find that there is so much unfinished business and so many interrupted tasks in need of completion. This Zeigarnik tension need not be aversive. Still, there so much to learn and I am fascinated by the many new ways of learning. I welcome any readers who'd like to join and assist me in exploring ideas through this blog---especially focusing on the top 21rst century learning tools categorized by Jane Hart.