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Active Learning Booklet
Psychology
Eighth Edition
Douglas A. Bernstein, Louis A. Penner, Alison Clarke-Stewart, and Edward J. Roy
Sandra Goss Lucas
William S. Altman
Douglas A. Bernstein
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Sponsoring Editor: Jane Potter
Marketing Manager: Amy Whitaker
Marketing Assistant: Samantha Abrams
Senior Development Editor: Laura Hildebrand
Editorial Associate: Henry Cheek
Copyright © 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Houghton Mifflin Company hereby grants you permission to reproduce the Houghton Mifflin material contained in this work in classroom quantities, solely for use with the accompanying Houghton Mifflin textbook. All reproductions must include the Houghton Mifflin copyright notice, and no fee may be collected except to cover the cost of duplication. If you wish to make any other use of this material, including reproducing or transmitting the material or portions thereof in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including any information storage or retrieval system, you must obtain prior written permission from Houghton Mifflin Company, unless such use is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. If you wish to reproduce material acknowledging a rights holder other than Houghton Mifflin Company, you must obtain permission from the rights holder. Address inquiries to College Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116–3764.
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Contents
Preface IV
Chapter 1—Introducing Psychology 1
Chapter 2—Research in Psychology 4
Chapter 3—Biological Aspects of Psychology 7
Chapter 4—Sensation 10
Chapter 5—Perception 12
Chapter 6—Learning 15
Chapter 7—Memory 19
Chapter 8—Cognition and Language 22
Chapter 9—Consciousness 25
Chapter 10—Cognitive Abilities 28
Chapter 11—Motivation and Emotion 31
Chapter 12—Human Development 34
Chapter 13—Health, Stress, and Coping 38
Chapter 14—Personality 41
Chapter 15—Psychological Disorders 44
Chapter 16—Treatment of Psychological Disorders 47
Chapter 17—Social Cognition 50
Chapter 18—Social Influence 53
Chapter 19—Neuropsychology 56
Chapter 20—Industrial/Organizational Psychology Summary 59
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Promoting Active Learning
As Chickering & Gamson (1991) suggest, “Learning is not a spectator sport” (p. 6). We know from our own student days that actively engaging with the material helped us to understand and retain the information. This booklet has been designed to provide an “active way” for you to understand and remember the information from your textbook.
We have designed activities that encourage you to go beyond passively reading. We want you to engage in higher-order thinking about course material (e.g. “what does it mean?” rather than just “what am I supposed to remember?”) and to have a chance to explore your own attitudes and values in relation to the course material (Bonwell & Eison, 1991).
Of course to receive the maximum value from these exercises you need to actively do them. Just reading about the purpose and procedure will not produce the results that doing the activity will.
So, we encourage you to follow the directions closely—including rereading sections of your textbook and writing summaries of what you learned when requested.
We hope that you enjoy these active learning experiences and that they increase your interest in the course. We believe that if you actually do these activities you will go beyond memorizing isolated facts and think more deeply about the course material. We also encourage you to consider how the material relates to information you already know and to try to apply what you have learned to new and different situations. There is evidence that engaging in this more elaborate thinking about course material makes the material easier to remember and results in better test performance.
We are especially interested in your experiences with the activities. If you found them particularly useful or not helpful, please let us know. You can contact us at .
Enjoy!
Sandra Goss Lucas, Ph.D.
Director of Introductory Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
William S. Altman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Broome Community College
Douglas A. Bernstein, Ph.D.
Courtesy Professor of Psychology
University of South Florida
References
Bonwell, C. & Eison, J. (1991). Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University School of Education and Human Development.
Chickering, A. & Gamson, Z. (Eds.) (1991). Applying the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 47, Appendix 4–11.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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CHAPTER 1
ACTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
ACTIVITY 1.1: Culture
Purpose: To understand how culture influences your perception of yourself.
Procedure: Finish the sentence “I AM” twenty different times. Go fairly quickly and don’t try to analyze what you write. When you finish, go back and look at what you have written. Can you see any cultural influence on what you think about yourself? If possible, find an acquaintance from another culture (or even subculture) and ask them to do the same activity. Compare the responses.
ACTIVITY 1.2: Approaches to Psychology
Purpose: To understand the approaches of psychology and be able to apply them to a real-life situation.
Procedure: Jenny B., a fifty-year-old woman, has suddenly become very aggressive and angry. Once a very kind person, she now is abrupt with people and pushes away anyone who gets in her way.
§ How would each approach (biological, psychodynamic, etc.) to psychology explain her behavior?
§ What intervention would they be most likely to propose?
§ Which subfields would be most helpful to refer Jenny to?
ACTIVITY 1.3: Fields of Psychology
Purpose: When many people think about psychology they picture some sort of therapist—perhaps Sigmund Freud listening to a client who’s lying on a leather couch, or Dr. Phil yelling at some person to change his life. But psychology encompasses a great deal more. This exercise will introduce you to some of the rich diversity of psychology’s theoretical approaches and how it applies to daily life and work in other fields.
Procedure: Go to the Web site that lists the various divisions of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apa.org/about/division.html) and look at the different groups. Explore some of the various divisions’ Web sites. Which divisions conformed most to your own ideas about psychology? Were there any divisions that surprised you?
ACTIVITY 1.4: Psychology’s Founders
Purpose: Psychology is rooted in the work of many different theorists with widely divergent philosophies and perspectives. This activity will help you learn more about some of the people who shaped the approaches that psychologists use, and the ideas and concerns that guided their thinking.
Procedure: Visit the following Web sites to learn more about:
§ Sigmund Freud: http://www.freud.org.uk
§ Wilhelm Wundt: http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Wundt.htm
§ Edward Titchener: http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Titchener.htm
§ John B. Watson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson
§ William James: http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jphotos.html
§ Max Wertheimer: http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Wertheimer.htm
§ Ivan Pavlov: http://www.ivanpavlov.com
§ B. F. Skinner: http://www.bfskinner.org
How did the lives and cultures of these psychological theorists influence their work? What similarities do you see in their approaches?
ACTIVITY 1.5: Introspection
Purpose: Wilhelm Wundt believed that the mind could be explored through the process of introspection. This exercise will give you some experience with introspection.
Procedure: Close your eyes and have a friend hand you an ice cube. With the ice cube in your hand, describe the sensations you feel, in terms of the qualities of the experience (e.g. coldness, wetness) and the intensity of the sensations (how strong is the sensation?), as your friend records what you say (either with a recorder or as notes on paper). Try this exercise with several other objects. Then ask four friends to do the same activity. Be sure to ask each separately, so that they can’t be influenced by what any of the others say.
Compare your descriptions with those of your friends. What does this exercise tell you about the workings of the mind?
ACTIVITY 1.6: Psychology and You
Purpose: Psychology is integral to many different professions. This exercise will help you reflect on how psychology can help you, in whichever profession you choose.
Procedure: Write a short essay describing the ways in which a thorough understanding of psychology might influence your career.
CHAPTER 2
ACTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
ACTIVITY 2.1: Experimental Design
Purpose: Understanding how experiments are designed is often tricky. By setting up an experiment to explore your research question, you can become familiar with research terminology.
Procedure: As a researcher, you believe that children who use calculators in class understand math concepts better. (You believe this because you think using the calculator to perform tedious mathematical procedures gives the children a chance to think more about the general concept.) Devise an experiment to test this theory. Be sure to follow the guidelines listed below.
1. What is your hypothesis?
2. Provide an operational definition of your variables.
3. Provide an explanation of how you would structure your experiment. This should include identifying the experimental group, control group, dependent variable, independent variable, and confounding variables.
ACTIVITY 2.2: Experimental Design: Double-Blind
Purpose: To understand how a double-blind experimental design could be implemented and the importance of such procedures.
Procedure: In the previous activity, one of the possible confounding variables was experimenter bias. The double-blind experimental design was developed to avoid experimenter bias—either inadvertent or blatant. Given the experimental design in the previous activity, explain how the previous experiment could be designed to eliminate experimenter bias.
ACTIVITY 2.3: Statistics
Purpose: To help you to learn to use statistical concepts to interpret data.
Procedure: You have just taken your psychology and chemistry midterm exams. When your psychology test is handed back you find that you received a score of 50. When your chemistry test is handed back you find that you also received a score of 50. Given the statistical information of each test, explain how your “50” in each class can be interpreted. All in all, did you do equally well in each course? If so, why? If not, explain why not.
Test / Mean / Mode / Median / Standard Deviation / RangePsychology / 60 / 58 / 56 / 5 / 40
Chemistry / 30 / 30 / 30 / 10 / 50
ACTIVITY 2.4: Choose Your Method
Purpose: Researchers often come up with a research question and then have to decide which research method would be best to answer that question. This exercise will give you practice deciding which research method works best for particular research questions.
Procedure: Given the following research questions, pick the best method for studying the question and explain why you chose this method. Remember, your options include naturalistic observation, survey, case study, quasi-experiment, or an experiment.
1. Do babies who are cuddled immediately after birth have a higher IQ as a toddler?
2. When do Alzheimer’s patients stop recognizing significant family members?
- Are college students happier during their first semester of college if they live close to their hometown?
4. Does an unborn child get auditory stimulation in utero?
5. Do women use more hand gestures when they are talking than men?
ACTIVITY 2.5: Myth-busting
Purpose: To see how people are sometimes fooled into believing in scientific-sounding myths, and how critical thinking about the evidence can help dispel those myths.
Procedure: Surveys report that men have a median number of 7 female sex partners and that women averaged only 4 male sex partners. This has been reported in scientific journals as well as in the popular press. But as mathematicians point out, it isn’t actually possible. Both men and women should have roughly equal numbers of partners (Kolata, 2007). Are some of the numbers accurate? How can you explain the discrepancy between the responses of the men and women?
ACTIVITY 2.6: Non-intrusive Observation
Purpose: In order to learn about someone’s behavior, sometimes it’s best to use methods in which there is no possible contact between the observer and the subject. Non-intrusive methods allow psychologists to gather data while eliminating any possibility of the subjects changing their behavior when they know they’re being watched.
In one non-intrusive study, researchers wanted to know which exhibit in a museum was most popular. They put down cheap new carpeting throughout the building’s exhibit space, and after a few weeks looked to see which galleries’ carpets had the most wear. The wear patterns told them that foot traffic in those spaces was higher, so they concluded that those galleries were more popular. In another example, researchers wanted to find out which radio stations were most popular among local drivers. Rather than survey people, they went to local repair facilities, opened up the cars, and checked people’s radio presets. In both of these cases, there was no need to contact any of the subjects, and since the subjects had no way to know they were being studied, there was no reason for them to alter their behaviors.
Procedure: A local school wants to know which foods in its cafeteria are the most popular and which the children really don’t like. Design a non-intrusive study to help them find out.
CHAPTER 3
ACTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES
ACTIVITY 3.1: How Brain Structures Are Related
Purpose: To understand the parts of the brain as they relate to each other. To organize brain structures in a manner that helps you see how they work together.
Procedure: Draw a concept map of the brain. A concept map is not the same as a picture, but is a way for you to organize information about the brain in your own way. Don’t worry about how the brain or the structures themselves actually look—just draw a set of boxes that represent each part and that show how they are related. Position the boxes representing the most primitive, vital functions at the bottom and the most advanced functions at the top. Feel free to use diagrams in the book to remind yourself of all the structures and how they are related. The diagram in the book that shows the organization nervous system is one kind of concept map. You should make yours more detailed than that one, with all the specific structures included.
ACTIVITY 3.2: What Brain Structures Do What?
Purpose: To be able to relate activity in particular brain structures to particular behaviors.
Procedure: For each behavior listed below, identify which brain structure(s) would be particularly involved: