Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Steven Pinker gives an intro psych quiz


The terrific Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker has published in the NY Times a pop quiz
"culled from one of his Harvard courses, “Psychological Science.” Although I'm a huge fan of Pinker and love the way he's applying psychology to "real life," I don't love all of the questions.

To avoid spoiling it any more, take the quiz and post your comments below. What did you think?

--posted by Steve

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I did not like it. Arly questions were unnecessarily violent nd the overall tone negative.

Shawn D said...

I think these are some fun questions that lean towards a more adult tone/theme, but certainly nothing seniors in high school cannot handle. One of them was unnecessary, but I as a whole I think they are pretty fun and certainly model a good way to create some similar questions for our own classroom use!

Unknown said...

I agree with Shawn - they are "fun" and if used that way, I bet they start good conversations. I'd say some of them are too distracting, etc to be used for "serious" data collection about student knowledge, but I bet that isn't the point? and I like the creativity :) (and what's with the Pete Townsend question?)