Teaching Psychophysiology Archives - Page 2 of 2

Thinking As Scientists Think

By Howard Iver Thorsheim, Ph.D., St. Olaf College. Information literacy skills projects help students discover that they know that they know how to find information, which increases their sense of competency, and is self-reinforcing.

(Photo © 2016 Knowledge Growers, Inc.)

By Howard Iver Thorsheim, Ph.D., St. Olaf College

I have titled this blog “Thinking As Scientists Think.” A more accurate—but longer—description might be “Helping Students Learn Skills to Think As Scientists Think—Information Literacy Skills.” I have found it effective to help students learn two levels of skill development that will help them think as scientists think: (a) information literacy skills to learn about the skills, which is the focus of this blog, and (b) empirical research skills to do the skills they have learned about (discussed in this post, building on Biopac Student Lab lessons).

I partner with a librarian colleague to develop and provide an initial 45-minute information literacy skills session on how to use available databases to locate information. I provide a selected list of research skills to guide their search. Teams decide exactly what they read online about each listed skill, so information each team locates may be unique, though the skills searched are the same. They discover that they know that they know how to find information, which increases their sense of competency, and is self-reinforcing.

You can select your own list of research skills you wish students to learn about, to fit your own teaching/learning goals and schedule. The following are some examples from my skills list for introducing psychophysiology in courses:

strategy for using information literacy skills;
using a consultant (in this case it is me, their teacher);
forming research questions;
psychophysiology methods;
operationalization of variables;
psychophysiological measurement;
adhering to research ethics;
statistical analysis in psychophysiology (selecting methods appropriate from their course background ranging from descriptive to more sophisticated statistics);
writing following the format of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and
oral presentation skills (e.g., tips for presenting their summaries that will help them be excellent peer-mentors).

The genuine research skills students learn support your course goals and engage students in science, contribute to national STEM goals, and add to a student’s thinking toolkit. Students can annotate their team-based information-literacy searches and can include that in a cumulative personal skill inventory, useful for skill-based résumés for assistantships, jobs, and graduate applications.

Here are two helpful resources on the usefulness of helping students develop genuine research-oriented skills and begin using them:

Jenkins, A. & Healey, M. (2010). Undergraduate research and international initiatives to link teaching and research. Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, 30(3), 36-42.

Mervis, J. (2016). Genuine research keeps students in science. Science, 352(6291), 1266.
DOI: 10.1126/science.352.6291.1266

Learn more about BIOPAC’s education solutions, including complete teaching systems for psychophysiology and the life sciences. BIOPAC also provides a wide range of research systems for recording, displaying, classifying, and analyzing psychophysiological measurements.

BIOPAC Systems, Inc. provides life science researchers and educators with data acquisition and analysis systems that inspire people and enable greater discovery about life. Visit us at www.biopac.com.

Professor Thorsheim is a licensed Psychologist, educator, and author. He has published or presented over 125 papers, journal articles, books, book chapters or monographs, and received a patent in 1985 as a co-inventor for an educational book design with interactive elements. His work has been funded by marquee foundations across the globe. His most recent work is Doing Psychophysiology: Getting Started, available from Knowledge Growers, Inc., available as an iBook download in 51 countries.

How to Promote Cooperative Thinking

By Howard Iver Thorsheim, Ph.D., St. Olaf College. How to promote cooperative thinking of team members doing psychophysiology, draw from their richly diverse interests and ideas, and in the process teach a “soft” skill that could transfer to later life.

(Photo © 2016 Knowledge Growers, Inc.)

By Howard Iver Thorsheim, Ph.D., St. Olaf College

Howard Iver Thorsheim is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA. In these blogs he offers his first-person insights into effective teaching techniques gleaned from a combination of scholarly research and over 40 years in the classroom.

The Challenge:

The challenge was how to promote cooperative thinking of team members doing psychophysiology, drawing from their richly diverse interests and ideas, and in the process to learn a “soft” skill that could transfer to later life.

The Solution:

I adapted a tried-and-true group process to help team members doing psychophysiology research identify diverse ideas and think about their group project in a cooperative way. (The technique can be scaled up to engage many teams simultaneously). The technique is called the Nominal Group Technique, first developed by DelBecq and Van de Ven (1975).* The reason for the word nominal is evident in Step 1.

Step 1. Each student in a team was given a stack of 25 or so Post-it® notes. Because each student is working alone at this point, they are a group in name only (i.e., nominally a group). Their homework assignment was to think independently about ideas and interests that came to mind for them, and jot down a few words identifying their idea or interest on each of the Post-it notes. Interaction comes in step 2.

Step 2. The next class, the team members gathered together near a whiteboard. In a round-robin interactive fashion, one at a time, the students placed their Post-it notes on the board: One person started by placing the top Post-it from their stack on the board; the second person placing their first Post-it note close or further away from the first person’s Post-it note, depending upon their sense of closeness of the ideas. So it goes with the other students, with the round robin continuing until all Post-it notes are placed on the wall. Step 3 is the convergence!

Step 3. Again in a round-robin fashion, students take turns with a non-permanent marker drawing dashed lines around clusters they observe, and jotting down their idea for a name for each cluster. The result from the large group of individual ideas or interests becomes a smaller cluster of related ideas. The result is more coherence of ideas, engagement, social cohesion, and team focus. It works every time in any team or group!

See how the Center for Disease Control adapts the technique in this Nominal Group Technique (NGT) Evaluation Brief.

*Delbecq, A. L., Van de Ven, A. H., & Gustafson, D. H. (1975). Group techniques for program planners: a guide to nominal group and Delphi processes. Glenville, Illinois: Scott Foresman.