Steve Joordens

Last updated
Steve Joordens
Born (1965-08-14) August 14, 1965 (age 58)
Alma mater University of New Brunswick
University of Waterloo
McMaster University
Known formemory, consciousness, Research Ethics, Peer-Assessment, TUse of Technology for Education, Critical Thinking
AwardsNational Technology Innovation Award,
Scientific career
Fields Psychology
Institutions University of Toronto Scarborough

Steve Joordens is a Canadian psychologist who is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He teaches introductory psychology and a seminar course on the scientific study of conscious and unconscious influences. Joordens research areas include conscious and unconscious influences, memory, and the effective use of technology for education.

Contents

Education and career

Joordens earned his bachelor's degree in Psychology at the University of New Brunswick in 1989 and gained his PhD in Psychology at University of Waterloo in 1994 and postdoc at McMaster University on models and empirical studies of human memory. [1] He is also part of the Teaching Academy at the University of Toronto. [2] Joordens has been a faculty member of the University of Toronto Scarborough since 1995.

Research

He is an active researcher in Cognitive Psychology and Educational Psychology. In the field of cognitive psychology, he primarily researches issues related to human memory and consciousness. In the field of Educational Psychology, he primarily researches issues related to peer-assessment, critical thinking, engagement, and the effective use of technology for education. [3]

Teaching

With his Ph.D. Student Dwayne Pare, he co-developed peerScholar, an internet-based tool to support the development of critical thought and clear communication in any course context. In 2006 CUPE 3902, the trade union representing TAs and sessional lecturers at the UofT, filed a grievance alleging that Joordens was using this programme to create a pool of "cheap labour" as a means of avoiding hiring teaching assistants to grade term work for his introductory Psychology class. In January 2009, an arbitrator upheld the grievance—noting that Joordens was indeed looking for "free" labour—and ruled that the University of Toronto needed to pay $283,000 to compensate the more than 1500 students who had been forced to work for free. [4]

In 2018, he accidentally played a porn video at a start of a class of 500 students. [5] [6] Shortly after the incident, on September 28 Joordens released a statement: “With respect to the event that happened prior to my class on Monday the 24th, I want to be clear that what happened was completely unintentional and I feel absolutely terrible about it. I have apologized to my class and now I want to move on. Thanks to my students, colleagues and my amazing family for their support and understanding.” [7]

MOOC

In 2013, Joordens taught Introduction to Psychology to more than 68,000 registered students on Coursera. [8] This course was developed as part of a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [9] Joordens also teaches Memory and Human Lifespan Course on The Great Courses. [10]

Joordens has been involved in using technology in online learning experiences. His online courses offer a range of psychology concepts for students to explore, incorporated with technology measures such as Digital Lab Coat, mTuner, peerScholar, and using Wikipedia as an educational tool. [11] [12] [13]

Teaching awards

2012 – Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Teaching Award. [14]

2010 – President's Teaching Award, the highest teaching honour at the University of Toronto. [15]

2009/10 – One of Ontario's top 10 post-secondary lecturers as part of Television Ontario's "Best Lecturer" competition [16]

2009 – Joordens and Pare win 2009 National Technology Innovation Award for peerScholar. [17]

Society memberships

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind</span> Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or in other words is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive neuroscience</span> Scientific field

Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognition</span> Act or process of knowing

Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's soul. Introspection is closely related to human self-reflection and self-discovery and is contrasted with external observation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Toronto Scarborough</span> Satellite campus in Ontario, Canada

The University of Toronto Scarborough is a satellite campus of the University of Toronto located in Scarborough district, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Global workspace theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s. It was developed to qualitatively account for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. GWT has been influential in modeling consciousness and higher-order cognition as emerging from competition and integrated flows of information across widespread, parallel neural processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychonomic Society</span>

The Psychonomic Society is an international scientific society of over 4,500 scientists in the field of experimental psychology. The mission of the Psychonomic Society is to foster the science of cognition through the advancement and communication of basic research in experimental psychology and allied sciences. It is open to international researchers, and almost 40% of members are based outside of North America. Although open to all areas of experimental and cognitive psychology, its members typically study areas such as learning, memory, attention, motivation, perception, categorization, decision making, and psycholinguistics. Its name is taken from the word psychonomics, meaning "the science of the laws of the mind".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanislas Dehaene</span> French cognitive neuroscientist

Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".

Implicit cognition refers to cognitive processes that occur outside conscious awareness or conscious control. This includes domains such as learning, perception, or memory which may influence a person's behavior without their conscious awareness of those influences.

Sara J. Shettleworth is an American-born, Canadian experimental psychologist and zoologist. Her research focuses on animal cognition. She is professor emerita of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David LaBerge</span> American neuropsychologist

David LaBerge is a neuropsychologist specializing in the attention process and the role of apical dendrites in cognition and consciousness.

The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embodied cognition</span> Interdisciplinary theory

Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.

Unconscious cognition is the processing of perception, memory, learning, thought, and language without being aware of it.

Arthur S. Reber is an American cognitive psychologist. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and a Fulbright Fellow. He is known for introducing the concept of implicit learning and for using basic principles of evolutionary biology to show how implicit or unconscious cognitive functions differ in fundamental ways from those carried out consciously.

Anthony Marcel is a British psychologist who contributed to the early debate on the nature of unconscious perceptual processes in the 1970s and 1980s. Marcel argued in favour of an unconscious mind that "…automatically re-describe(s) sensory data into every representational form and to the highest levels of description available to the organism.” Marcel sparked controversy with his claim to have demonstrated unconscious priming. As of 2013 Marcel was working at the University of Hertfordshire and Cambridge University where his research focused on consciousness and phenomenological experience.

Fred W. Mast is a full professor of Psychology at the University of Bern in Switzerland, specialized in mental imagery, sensorimotor processing, and visual perception. He directs the Cognitive Psychology, Perception, and Research Methods Section at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bern.

Philip M. Merikle is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is known for his published work on attentional processes, memory and anaesthesia see anaesthesia awareness, perception without awareness, and synaesthesia Merikle's early contributions rebutted against Daniel Holender's 1986 criticism of prior experiments which claimed to demonstrate unconscious priming following Anthony Marcel's work on unconscious processes. Merikle's work sought to shift the debate from indirect-without-direct effects determined by Holender to be the only way unconscious perception could be proved, to what he defined as objective and subjective thresholds as a means to distinguish stimuli presentation. He believed that the indirect-without-direct effect was too stringent of a requirement for proving unconscious perception and analyses. Merikle claimed that the subjective threshold is a better boundary between the conscious and unconscious rather than direct and indirect measures on the basis that to distinguish the two, all that is required is a qualitatively different effect between when information is consciously perceived than when it is unconsciously perceived.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry L. Jacoby</span> American cognitive psychologist

Larry L. Jacoby was an American cognitive psychologist specializing in research on human memory. He was particularly known for his work on the interplay of consciously controlled versus more automatic influences of memory.

References

  1. Beckerlab Neural Computation Laboratory, McMaster University, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  2. University of Toronto, Steven Joordens Profile, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  3. TVO, Big Ideas: Steve Joordens on Critical Thinking Archived 2013-07-05 at archive.today , The Ontario Educational Communications Authority, March 05, 2010. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  4. Sequeira, Peer graders get belated payday Retrieved 2015-02-18.
  5. "U of T's porn prof given hard time over sexxx-rated lecture | Toronto Sun". 26 September 2018. Retrieved 28 August 2019.
  6. "Monday psychology lecture at UTSC begins with a bang". The Varsity. 25 September 2018. Retrieved 28 August 2019.
  7. "Monday psychology lecture at UTSC begins with a bang". The Varsity. 25 September 2018. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  8. Coursera, Introduction to Psychology, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  9. UTSC, Joordens wins Gates Foundation grant, University of Toronto Scarborough, Dec 10, 2012. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  10. Steven Jordeens Profile, The Great Courses, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  11. Digital Lab Coat, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  12. Kelly Rankin, Wikipedia goes to university - U of T first Canadian university involved in foundation’s classroom initiative, University of Toronto News, October 26, 2011. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  13. Laurie, Active Learning Online – More Ideas from Prof. Steve Joordens, University of Toronto Online Learning Strategies, February 22, 2013. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  14. OCUFA, University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus’ Steve Joordens wins top teaching award, OCUFA Press Release, September 17, 2012. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  15. Elaine Smith, Psychologist named recipient of U of T President’s Teaching Award, University of Toronto Scarborough, Apr 26, 2010. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  16. Amina Stella and Andrew Rusk, Two U of T profs finalists in TVO's Best Lecturer Competition, The Varsity, 22 February 2010. Retrieved 2013-05-13.
  17. NTIA, Congratulations to 2009 Award Winners! Archived 2013-06-28 at archive.today , The Learning Partnership, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  18. Queen's Printer for Ontario, 2013, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, Retrieved 2013-05-13.
  19. Pandora - Australia's Web Archive, Noetica: a cognitive science forum, Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  20. Merikle, P. M. & Joordens, S., Parallels between Perception without Attention and Perception without Awareness Archived 2013-06-26 at the Wayback Machine , Consciousness and Cognition, 1997. Retrieved 2013-05-25.