The Challenger Explosion, statistics, mistakes, and regrets

A LONG time ago, I wrote an activity called "Using the Challenger Disaster to Help Explain Correlation." I still think it's a good activity - gives students experience with generating/interpreting a scatter plot based on real data - but I've worried that it's "dated." Many/most students in my psychology club haven't heard about the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and those who do remember hearing about it feel like it's ancient history.

But this NPR report/interview made me realize that this is still a very current issue, in some ways, and there are connections to our psychology content that I never realized:

"30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself"

One of the engineers (Bob Ebeling) who originally tried to convince NASA to NOT launch the Challenger that day tells his story, and it is heartbreaking. He had all the data, he had the scatterplots, he had the effect sizes/correlation coefficients, and they convinced him that the shuttle would explode. He pleaded with the NASA officials in charge to delay the launch, but they chose not to. And he's been living  with this "failure" ever since. Really, really sad.

Students could do the original activity involving the scatter plots and decision making, and then listen to this engineer's story. Can students think of ways they might have convinced NASA administrators? Concepts that might be involved: groupthink, centeral/peripheral route to persuasion, foot in the door, etc. 

AND students can think about what it might have been like to have these data, to know how important they are, and to not be able to stop a tragedy from happening. Bob Ebeling is convinced he "failed," but I wish he could consider himself (and that the world could consider him) a hero for caring so much about his work and the lives of the astronauts. 


posted by Rob McEntarffer

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Can't go wrong with a cute baby video...

Writing prompt for your Learning unit: what parts of this video are examples of

• Operant Conditioning?
• Classical Conditioning? 
• Observational Learning?
• Schema?
• Something else?
  

 Laughing Baby - Nail Cutting

(Warning: cuteness level pegged at 11 on this one...)


posted by Rob McEntarffer

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Guess the Correlation game

If you think this is a fun game, you just might be a statistics geek :)

Guess the Correlation

Steve Jones reports that he asked the developer (Omar Wagih) to add negative correlations, and heard back that it's in the works. Adding that feature would make this game even more perfect!



posted by Rob McEntarffer

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The History of Psychology Rating Game

Christopher Green (who provides us with the fantastic resource "Classics in the History of Psychology") and Shane Martin developed a game we can all play!

Here's Christopher's description of the game:

"Play is extremely simple: The player is shown a pair of significant individuals from the past and asked to click on the name of the person who had the greatest impact on the psychology. If the player needs to refresh his/her knowledge of the figures, there is a short description of their important career highlights, along with a link to their Wikipedia entry. As soon as the player clicks on one of the two names, s/he is shown a new pair to choose from.

Players can play the game for as long as they like, as often as they like, whenever they like. They can quit at any time (though they might find it a little addictive). At the bottom of the page, they will find "top ten” lists that have been compiled from the tens of thousands of choices that they and others have made. (Click on the “Ratings” menu tab and they’ll find the complete list of ranking, along with some specialized top ten lists, including one for women psychologists.)

As well as a game, this is also a research project for us: the PsyBorgs Digital History of Psychology Laboratory at York University in Toronto. When starting the game for the first time, the player is asked three optional demographic questions, and there is a consent form to be “ticked” if the player is willing to allow his/her data to be anonymously included in the research project"

 I played for a while and found it addictive! I ended up skipping many pairings b/c I wasn't familiar with either name, but I enjoyed seeing the match ups, and the "rankings" at the bottom are fascinating (complete list of rankings).

(NOTE: If your district has rules about students participating in research studies, you may want to tell them to NOT click the box to participate in the study and give consent)

Psychology's EloRater Game



posted by Rob McEntarffer

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Ethically Teaching Psychological Assessment

A while back I posted a blog post about a website that I came across that would be great for our personality units - a website of really cool, original TAT images. I was pumped, but received a message regarding the post from someone much-less-enthusiastic about the post as I was. (I have since deleted the post due the concerns raised.) 

Dr. Ian MacFarlane of Austin College agreed to help educate me (and you, I hope) on why using original TAT, Rorschach or questions from actual IQ tests can be a real ethical dilemma. He also offers some great suggestion on what we CAN do. Here's what he had to say:

Ethically Teaching Psychological Assessment

With so much information at our fingertips, we can easily get primary source material to enrich our classrooms. Showing students pictures of the actual shock machine from Milgram’s study or grainy footage of Watson with Little Albert helps bring concepts to life in a way lecturing cannot. There is one area of psychology, however, where we must practice restraint and actually avoid exposing students to original material: psychological assessment. There are numerous places online where you can find the entire set of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards or sample items from intelligence tests. Our natural instinct is to use this source material in our classrooms, but the problem is psychologists still actively use these assessments in clinical practice. Exposing our students to these stimuli in non-clinical settings can change their responses to these tests if they encounter them later. Thus we need to convey how the assessments work without showing students the exact stimuli used. I offer you a simple method for doing so.

When I teach projective assessment, I usually cover the Rorschach and the TAT. For an in-class activity I take an image I find online to use as an example and have my students write a response as if they were actually being assessed. For Rorschach cards, search “inkblot images” in Google Image search or your favorite image search engine. Since I pass the images out to students for them to refer to later with their notes, I make sure to use an image licensed for reuse via Creative Commons (another search option in Google Image). Here’s an example from Flickr user BradleyLeese and another by DeviantArt user OmniSentinel. Be wary, as a lot of the actual cards are posted all over the web, but you can check the images you find against Wikipedia to be sure it’s not one of the originals. If you want to go a step further, you can have students actually make inkblots of their own. Margaret Peot has a page explaining how to do this as well as several examples. The instructions for the test are to explain what you see in the image.

For the TAT demo, I make sure to search only black-and-white images, and while the real TAT uses drawings exclusively, I don’t think that is essential to understanding the test so I also use photos if I like them. Here you can be creative with search terms, but I like to have multiple people interacting. Here’s an example of a photo I found when I searched for “conversation” (courtesy Flickr user Das Fotoimaginarium), and here’s an example of an engraving in the public domain from 1878 by Ridgway I found when I searched for “arguing.” Searching for images with these types of terms vastly reduces the likelihood that you’ll pull an actual stimulus from the TAT. The instructions for the test are to describe what led up to the moment you are witnessing, what are the characters thinking and feeling, and how does the situation resolve itself?

Explaining the objective assessments, like the MMPI, is typically more straightforward, but it is still important to not use actual items from the assessment. A demo I like to use when I introduce the empirical keying method of the MMPI starts by asking students to raise their hands if they enjoy going to concerts. I inform those who raised their hands they just received a point on the mania scale of the MMPI. While the other students snicker, I inform them they received a point on the hypochondriasis scale. I ask them to make sense of that, and eventually we get into the process used to develop the MMPI. I tell them afterwards that I made up the question, but it still illustrates the process nicely and gets them to think about psychometrics and the importance of norm groups.

Using these simple methods will allow you to confidently simulate the experience of taking a projective assessment while protecting the integrity of these tests so they can continue to be used in clinical settings.

Thanks to Dr. MacFarlane for educating me (Sorry, again!) and for the great suggestions. Ian MacFarlane, PhD (Follow him on Twitter at @I_MacFarlane) is an assistant professor of psychology at Austin College in Sherman, TX. He teaches general psychology, research methods, and several clinical psychology courses.

---- Posted by Amy Ramponi 

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Teach Psych Science

I'm gearing up for a new semester of AP Psychology in about 2 weeks and this semester I am starting with Research Methods on Day 1 and pushing History and Perspectives to the end of the semester, right before the exam. (My thought - they just don't have enough background knowledge to navigate the perspectives, and it is always such a struggle. And, my first day lecture is generally on structuralism and functionalism, Wundt, etc... and the first night reading is the whole History chapter with 2453 names and many of my students get overwhelmed with all that content right  off the bat. I'm going to see if moving History and Perspectives to the last unit after Social Psychology will make more sense to them as they'll be able to put all those perspectives, names, theories and movements of psychology into some sort of timeline and framework.)

ANYWAY...while looking around for some new Hindsight Bias, Confirmation Bias and Scientific Method-type activities, I came across this website. Um...wow. It is called "Teach Psych Science" and appears to be a great place to find activities for the teaching of various scientific method-type activities and also statistics and research type activities. The website appears to accompany the following Research Methods text from Macmillan Publishing (which I promptly requested a sample of!)

Teach Psych Science Link 

This great intro to Intuition vs Empirical Reasoning seems like a great way to get kids thinking about psychology as an empirical science for the first day! It is a variation of the "Which Door to Choose" activity.

Other good ones I came across?:

When does a joke go too far?- Ethics 

Smarties vs. DumDums - Internal Validity Activity 

Seriously - get to this website and check it out! Everything here looks amazing and very engaging for the high school psychology classroom. I'm excited to explore some more!!

--- Posted by Amy Ramponi

(Remember that snow and cold I wanted, yeah. It is 7 degrees out today. Low is going to be -1. What was I thinking?!)http://teachpsychscience.org/

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Guest Post: QuizUp

Today's Guest Post is by Michael Sandler or Arlington High School in the great state of Massachusetts. Michael recently posted during #psychat his exploration of using the app "QuizUp" for AP Psychology studying. 

Here is his idea, in his own words. Thanks, Michael, for contributing!

If your students are like mine, they’re on their phones whenever they can – and sometimes should – be. I’ll admit it: the same applies to me. When I have a moment, I like to play games, especially against friends; so do many of my students.

QuizUp is an app I’ve been playing for a few years. It allows players to face off in head-to-head trivia matches about a wide variety of topics. Recently, the game’s producer (Plain Vanilla Games, from Iceland, of all places) unveiled the opportunity for users to create original quiz categories. There has been a Psychology category for years – the questions tend to center around clinical psych – but I wanted to make a study tool tailored to my classes’ curriculum.

After my students read the chapter we’re studying, they have to create original multiple-choice questions about the unit. They use this Google form which populates a spreadsheet. From there, it’s copy-and-paste to put the questions into whatever quizzing tool I prefer: Socrative, Kahoot, Quizziz, and now QuizUp. The metacognitive act of creating questions is an ideal study method.

I encourage you to send your students to QuizUp’s web site or app and search for “AP Psychology.” My students use Myers for AP, ed. 1 and they wrote all of the questions. (But I vetted them, so no junk!) There are presently questions for Chapters 1-3, 5-8, and 10, but I will be adding more as the year progresses. I’d love to see some unfamiliar names on the leaderboard!

---Posted by Amy Ramponi

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Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" research and Civics

 I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind last summer, and it's stuck with me. It's an ambitious book which connects many different kinds of social/cognitive psychology findings with many different areas of our social lives.

One of those areas is politics, specifically the "Liberal/Conservative" continuum (and I think it makes this connection in a very respectful, open-minded way). Whenever I hear news about the presidential campaign, I think about Haidt's research, and I wish someone would go to the work on connecting the dots for me. Does Haidt's research predict or explain anything about the current campaign rhetoric and reactions? And if so, how?

Yesterday, I discovered that my wish got fulfilled! The New York Times article is a fascinating read: Haidt's research shows that people along the "Liberal/Conservative" continuum respond to and focus differently to different aspects of moral decisions, and those differences might explain some of the polarization we see in the presidential campaign, and our reactions to the campaign. (Note: the article is about much more than one candidate, promise!)

Purity, Disgust and Donald Trump

posted by Rob McEntarffer

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12 Days of Psychology - Day 12: Psychotherapy Online

I really dislike the therapy unit. I mean, I find it interesting to learn about - but really hard to teach. I know so little about therapy, that I feel it is really hard to teach kids about it in an engaging and thoughtful manner. Like any other teacher, I like my classroom to be active and interesting and hands-on (a topic that is hard to do in the therapy unit, since according the Therapists and other experts in the field role playing therapy doesn't have a place in the classroom and for the safety of all involved should be left to the professionals.)

These videos might help. 

Have a wonderful, cold and snowy January. 

----Posted by Amy Ramponi 

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12 Days of Psychology Class - Day 11: Top Ten Psychology Videos

I can hardly believe they narrowed it down  to ten, but here's a great list from Psychology Central. Some of these I've seen - some I haven't.

Top Ten Psychology Videos Link 

Hope you are enjoying your last Saturday evening of break - before it is time to return to school on Monday.

Cheers!

---- Posted by Amy Ramponi

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12 Days of Psychology - Day 10: Nightmares vs. Night Terrors

Sadly, I don't spend as much time in the States of Consciousness unit at I'd (or my students) would like due to time. However, I always like to spend time on the disorders of sleep because they're so fascinating and students find them so relevant.

I absolutely love this article from Scientific American Mind on Nightmares and Night Terrors.  So many good pieces of information in here and kids can easily read it during class and have a great discussion on its contents.

Some of my other favorite sleep disorders links are:

Shaq and Sleep Apnea video

Diagnosing Narcolepsy video 

Sleep Disorders video 

Dangerous Dreamers - REM Behavior Disorder Psychology Today article 

Have a wonderful and restful New Year's Day. (I will need some REM recovery after staying up until 2 am, that's for sure.)

----Posted by Amy Ramponi

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