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/