Handbook of Demonstrations and Activities in the Teaching of Psychology

Volume II: Physiological-Comparative, Perception, Learning, Cognitive, and Developmental

Mark E. Ware, David E. Johnson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805830460
• eBook ISBN: 9781134997640
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For those who teach students in psychology, education, and the social sciences, the Handbook of Demonstrations and Activities in the Teaching of Psychology, Second Edition provides practical applications and rich sources of ideas. Revised to include a wealth of new material (56% of the articles are new), these invaluable reference books contain the collective experience of teachers who have successfully dealt with students' difficulty in mastering important concepts about human behavior. Each volume features a table that lists the articles and identifies the primary and secondary courses in which readers can use each demonstration. Additionally, the subject index facilitates retrieval of articles according to topical headings, and the appendix notes the source as it originally appeared in Teaching of Psychology--especially useful for users needing to cite information. The official journal of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Division Two of the American Psychological Association, Teaching of Psychology is a highly respected publication devoted to improving teaching and learning at all educational levels.

Volume II consists of 99 articles about teaching physiology, perception, learning, memory, and developmental psychology. Divided into eight sections (four devoted to developmental psychology and one for each of the other specialties), the book suggests ways to stimulate interest, promote participation, collect data, structure field experience, and observe and interact with patients.

SECTION IV
COGNITIVE

Starting and Planning the Course

Name mnemonics can provide a powerful technique for remembering names. Steven Smith’s classroom demonstration taught students how to construct and use name mnemonics. Working in small groups of 2 to 4 individuals, students created mnemonics for each other. Students also described their name mnemonics to the class. In addition to teaching mnemonics, the exercise gave students an experience with group problem solving and ensured that members of the class would know nearly every class member’s name.

Robert Sternberg and Jennifer Pardo described how teachers frequently seek unifying themes to help students develop an integrated and coherent mental representation of course material. Without such themes, material that seems integrated to teachers often can be disparate and incoherent to students. The authors pointed out how the theme of intelligence can provide a powerful conceptualization for unifying disparate material in a cognitive psychology course.

Scott Gronlund and Stephan Lewandowsky instructed students in an introductory cognitive course to make TV commercials using principles learned in class. The commercials illustrated the cognitive principles of chunking, primacy and recency, repetition, rehearsal, depth of processing, and cue-dependence. Favorable course evaluations and the high quality of students’ productions led the authors to conclude that the project was successful.

To give students a sense of the fervor surrounding cognitive psychology’s rapid emergence between 1950 and 1970, Kenneth Weaver developed a task. Students tabulated the references in Neisser (1967) by decade of publication. The resulting frequency histogram visually portrayed the explosive growth of cognitive research in the 1960’s, provided students with a richer sense of cognitive psychology’s recent history, and reflected Neisser’s monumental achievement of publishing his seminal book.

Students in Frank Hassebrock’s cognitive psychology course scanned selected journals’ tables of content from the last 40 years. Students judged whether each article represented a cognitive or behavioral framework. This activity helped the students compare the two frameworks, gave them an appreciation for the historical development of cognitive explanations, and introduced them to research issues in contemporary cognitive psychology.

Students in David Conner’s introductory cognitive psychology course participated in a feature film activity designed to help them define the parameters of cognitive psychology, apply course information to nonacademic situations, and work in a cooperative-learning situation. Students wrote a three- to five-page paper and gave optional class presentation in which they reported theoretical or empirical connections or both among the cognitive topic, journal article, and film. The instructor and students evaluated the film activity as highly enjoyable, a valuable instructional tool, and a fairly simple task to complete.

Teaching Concepts and Theories

To demonstrate the effect of attention on learning, Janet Larsen presented students with stimulus cards of different colors, each of which had a word and a number on it. The instructor asked students to remember either the words, the numbers, or the colors of the cards. As expected the highest recall was for stimuli to which the students paid attention.

Using the names of the Seven Dwarfs, Marianne Miserandino introduced and explained basic memory processes. The author contrasted recall and recognition to develop an understanding of important memory principles such as organization by sound, letter, and/or meaning, the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, long-term memory, and short-term memory. Students reported that the demonstration was effective in helping them master the basic principles of memory.

Timothy Bender and Carol Shoptaugh reported on the use of an incidental-learning demonstration as a within-group demonstration for a course in Memory and Cognition and as a between-groups laboratory experiment in an Experimental Psychology course. In Memory and Cognition, the goals were to introduce the incidental-learning paradigm and use it as a basis for the discussion of levels of processing theory and elaboration. In the Experimental Psychology course, this paradigm was used to expose students to analysis of variance, deception, and individually computer-administered experiments. Both designs and procedures produced significant results consistent with previous research, met various course objectives, and generated discussion.

Jacqueline Muir-Broaddus designed a simple exercise to demonstrate how content knowledge facilitates the rate of retrieval of domain-specific information. Music expert and novice class volunteers quickly named 7 words that relate to music. Reliably, the experts completed the task more quickly. Students rated this demonstration as both educational and interesting.

To introduce the topic of eyewitness testimony, Nancy Gee and Jennifer Dyck used a readily available videotape clip of a robbery. Students viewed the videotape clip and, after a delay, completed a multiple-choice memory test for the witnessed event. Students generally perform more poorly than they expected on the test, which led to a discussion of the fallibility of memory for witnessed events.

Lawrence Schoen developed a computer demonstration of the word fragment completion effect to enhance students’ comprehension of an experimental paradigm used in cognitive psychology. The robust word fragment completion effect introduced students to the implicit memory paradigm and illustrated the advantages inherent in such a procedure. The author concluded that the demonstration was a useful tool for comparing and contrasting experimental procedures and as a starting point for discussing multiple memory models.

Improving Memory

Russell Carney, Joel Levin, and Mary Levin described instructional suggestions, along with specific examples, for enhancing students’ motivation to apply mnemonic strategies. The authors fostered confidence in the efficacy of mnemonic strategies through demonstrations, and then they helped students apply the strategies directly to course content.

Lawrence Shoen’s students played Mnemopoly, which was based on the game board from Parker Brothers’ Monopoly®. The game’s mnemonic system combined students’ familiarity with the board game and simpler mnemonic devices (e.g., acrostics and rhymes). A classroom discussion of the basic principles common to mnemonic techniques enhanced and illustrated cognitive processes and provided an introduction to the study of human memory.

Examining Miscellaneous Issues

In a cognitive psychology demonstration, John Kruschke’s students saw a rat’s-eye view of a maze, projected from a computer, and vocally vote for moves through the maze. The class took false paths in the first run but avoided them in the second. Learning was explained in terms of analogical imagery or in terms of propositions and rules for modifying them. The demonstration achieved three goals: It actively engaged students, effectively explained the concepts, and provided a memorable referent for explaining other topics.

To demonstrate the effects of cognitive processes on emotion, Jerry Deffenbacher asked students to imagine the occurrence of a distressing event. Simultaneously, students experienced one of three cognitive scenarios designed to elicit feelings of anger, depression, or moderate sadness. Students noted their reactions and their evaluations showed that the scenarios produced different types and degrees of responses.

William Langston described software that presents classic experiments in psycholinguistics. The author used the software for a psychology of language course, but the software also has applicability to methods courses or survey courses in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.

1. STARTING AND PLANNING THE COURSE

A Method for Teaching Name Mnemonics

Steven M. Smith
Texas ASM University

When people meet me for the first time, they can’t help noticing my bushy beard. This may remind them of the man with the beard on packages of Smith Brothers cough drops. Now, if you need cough drops for your cough or cold, you may also have a stuffy nose; if so, you should remember that in an emergency, one’s sleeve may be substituted for a missing handkerchief. Because sleeve rhymes with Steve, you can remember my entire name simply by seeing me, face to (bearded) face: The beard leads to Smith brothers cough drops, which leads to sleeve, which rhymes with Steve.

This is an example of a name mnemonic, a mental device for remembering names that works surprisingly well, even for novices. The mnemonic associates a person’s appearance and name, using imagery and rhymes. Teaching name mnemonics on the first day of class in introductory psychology, cognition, memory, or experimental psychology can demonstrate the power of cognition via a firsthand experience. Within a short period of time, not only can it be demonstrated that “psychology really works.” but students will be impressed with their own untapped mental abilities. The exercise teaches about mnemonics, the use of interacting imagery and rhymes to achieve useful associations in memory (see Shimamura, 1984). Students will also get experience with group creative problem solving as small groups try to think divergently in order to create name mnemonics for each group member. Finally, and perhaps most important, the exercise helps to ensure that everyone in the class (including the teacher) will know everyone else’s name, a situation likely to facilitate any class where frequent and open discussions are encouraged.

Method

The exercise should begin with a brief discussion on the importance of knowing others’ names in a variety of social and professional situations. Students can be given the opportunity at this time to testify as to how difficult it is for them to remember names, and how that difficulty may have caused some of them considerable embarrassment.

At this time the teacher should come to the rescue with the name mnemonic, which one can use either to remember others’ names, or to ensure that others will remember one’s own name. The name mnemonic technique could be described (see Bellezza, 1982) with the aid of the teacher’s own name mnemonic as an example. Briefly, a mnemonic is a mental device that helps memory, often creating associations via the creation of interacting mental images that link or integrate the items to be associated, or creating associations via acoustic properties (such as rhymes) which the to-be-associated items have in common. Generally, names are needed when the person in question is seen; hence, the name mnemonic should begin with an image of the person’s appearance (or with some real or imagined component of the person’s appearance), and should link that image with an image related to the sound of the person’s name (or related to the sound of part of the name).

The teacher might throw out a few other examples of both good and poor name mnemonics. For a good example, my burly former teaching assistant named Rodney Flanary could be easily imagined as a football player who had a knee injury; hence the rod in his knee-Rodney. Benched for the injury, he kept warm by wearing flannel-Flanary. This example makes use of a physical cue (burliness) that immediately evokes an image, and the components of the image are acoustically related to the name. Mnemonics that fail to use a physical appearance cue or imagery associations, or that use obscure personal characteristics unknown to the learner (e.g., “I like to read science fiction”) are typically less memorable.

At this time the teacher should inform the students that their task for the next few minutes will be to convene in small groups (2 to 4 students per group) and create name mnemonics for each member of the group. Students will ultimately be responsible for their own name mnemonic, but the groups greatly facilitate this creative process. Assign students to the small groups, and recommend that they first appoint a secretary to write down the name of each member of the group. Also, recommend that each student try to come up with a mnemonic for at least one of their names, but preferably for both names.

Briefly monitor the groups, one at a time. Ask about current progress and make a few suggestions to ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Section I: Physiological-Comparative
• Section II: Sensation Perception
• Section III: Learning
• Section IV Cognitive
• Section V: Developmental Child
• Section VI: Developmental – Adolescent
• Section VII: Developmental–Adult and Aging
• Section VIII Developmental–Life Span
• Table - Volume 2
• Appendix - Volume 2
• Subject Index - Volume 2