System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP) is a collaborative project designed to maximize the use of E-Prime, PsyScope, and other experiment-generating systems for teaching undergraduate classes in experimental psychology. It is a database of scripts based on classic and student-created psychological experiments, tutorials, utilities, and course frameworks. The project is directed by Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University, and other major contributors include Ping Li of the University of Richmond, Chris Schunn of the University of Pittsburgh, and James St. James of Millikin University. Support for STEP comes from the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation. [1]
PsyScope is a graphical user interface (GUI) software program that allows researchers to design and run psychological experiments. It runs on Apple Macintosh computers and was originally designed for use with the Mac OS 9 platform. PsyScope was originally developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, including Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney, and Jefferson Provost. It has been ported to Mac OS X by a group of researchers and programmers coordinated by researchers at SISSA, Italy and the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. It is still under active development. The program and its code are freely available under the GNU GPL license. It runs under Mac OS X, from version 10.7 onward. With respect to its Mac OS 9 incarnation, PsyScope X has a much more complete control of movies and sounds, can interact with the underlying Unix environment, and allows researchers to design programs that use several external devices, such as response devices to record participants' responses, or Evoked potential and eye tracking recording devices.
Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the processes that underlie it. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation & perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.
A scripting or script language is a programming language that supports scripts — programs written for a special run-time environment that automates the execution of tasks that could alternatively be executed one-by-one by a human operator. Scripting languages are often interpreted. Primitives are usually the elementary tasks or API calls, and the language allows them to be combined into more complex programs. Environments that can be automated through scripting include software applications, web pages within a web browser, usage of the shells of operating systems (OS), embedded systems, as well as numerous games. A scripting language can be viewed as a domain-specific language for a particular environment; in the case of scripting an application, it is also known as an extension language. Scripting languages are also sometimes referred to as very high-level programming languages, as they operate at a high level of abstraction, or as control languages, particularly for job control languages on mainframes.
Students in psychology need to learn to design and analyze their own experiments. However, software that allows students to build experiments on their own has been limited in a variety of ways. E-Prime is the standard for building experiments in psychology, STEP is a Web-based resource that uses E-Prime as the delivery engine for a wide variety of instructional materials. The goal of the STEP Project is to provide instructional materials that will facilitate the use of E-Prime in various learning contexts. STEP is compiling a large set of classic experiments implemented in E-Prime and available over the Internet from http://step.psy.cmu.edu. The Web site also distributes instructional materials for building courses in experimental psychology based on E-Prime.
STEP Resources include:
The e-prime mailing list that is used to share ideas and issues regarding the use of E-Prime to build experiments.
SCRIPTS-Classic: Runnable E-Prime scripts that can be used to demonstrate classic experiments in Experimental Psychology. These are accompanied by descriptions of the original articles.
SCRIPTS-Plus: Additional E-Prime scripts for certain commonly used paradigms. These are not accompanied by descriptions of the original articles. Some of these are recent contributions.
SCRIPTS-Techniques: E-Prime scripts contributed by various users and PST designed to illustrate specific programming techniques and tasks.
SCRIPTS-Student: E-Prime scripts contributed by Brian MacWhinney's students in Cognitive Research Methods in 2002 and 2003.
MATERIALS: The E-Prime Getting Started Guide and various PowerPoint tutorials from PST, as well as additional technical documents for response boxes, etc.
UTILITIES: Utilities for working with E-Prime and PsyScope
COURSE FRAMEWORK: Complete material set for a Lab course based on E-Prime from Chris Schunn at George Mason University
A psychologist studies normal and abnormal mental states, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior by observing, interpreting, and recording how individuals relate to one another and to their environments. To become a psychologist, a person often completes a graduate university degree in psychology, but in most jurisdictions, members of other behavioral professions can also evaluate, diagnose, treat, and study mental processes.
A tutorial is a method of transferring knowledge and may be used as a part of a learning process. More interactive and specific than a book or a lecture, a tutorial seeks to teach by example and supply the information to complete a certain task.
A Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) is a graduate professional degree which prepares students for work as a teacher in schools, though in some countries additional work must be done in order for the student to be fully qualified to teach.
A lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history, background, theories, and equations. A politician's speech, a minister's sermon, or even a businessman's sales presentation may be similar in form to a lecture. Usually the lecturer will stand at the front of the room and recite information relevant to the lecture's content.
A teaching assistant or teacher's aide (TA) or education assistant (EA) is an individual who assists a teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), who are graduate students; undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs), who are undergraduate students; secondary school TAs, who are either high school students or adults; and elementary school TAs, who are adults. By definition, TAs assist with classes, but many graduate students serve as the sole instructor for one or more classes each semester as a teaching fellow or graduate student instructor. Graduate and adult TAs generally have a fixed salary determined by each contract period ; however, undergraduates and high school students are sometimes unpaid and in the US and other countries with the credit system, receive course credits in return for their assistance. Teaching assistants often help the main teacher by managing students with learning disabilities, such as ADHD, Autism, or even physical disabilities, such as blindness or deafness.
Sheltered instruction is an approach to teaching English language learners which integrates language and content instruction. The phrase "sheltered instruction," original concept, and underlying theory of comprehensible input are all credited to Stephen Krashen.
Physics education or physics education research (PER) refers both to the methods currently used to teach physics and to an area of pedagogical research that seeks to improve those methods. Historically, physics has been taught at the high school and college level primarily by the lecture method together with laboratory exercises aimed at verifying concepts taught in the lectures. These concepts are better understood when lectures are accompanied with demonstration, hand-on experiments, and questions that require students to ponder what will happen in an experiment and why. Students who participate in active learning for example with hands-on experiments learn through self-discovery. By trial and error they learn to change their preconceptions about phenomena in physics and discover the underlying concepts.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem". This "block" limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.
Mastery learning is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968. Mastery learning maintains that students must achieve a level of mastery in prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to learn subsequent information. If a student does not achieve mastery on the test, they are given additional support in learning and reviewing the information and then tested again. This cycle continues until the learner accomplishes mastery, and they may then move on to the next stage.
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
William David "Bill" Winn (1945–2006) was an American educational psychologist, and professor at the University of Washington College of Education, known for his work on how people learn from diagrams, and on how cognitive and constructivist theories of learning can help instructional designers select effective teaching strategies.
The IBM 1500 instructional system was introduced by IBM on March 31, 1966, and its primary purpose was to implement Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). Based around either an IBM 1130 or an IBM 1800 computer, it supported up to 32 student work stations, each with a variety of audiovisual capabilities.
E-learning theory describes the cognitive science principles of effective multimedia learning using electronic educational technology.
Fred Simmons Keller was an American psychologist and a pioneer in experimental psychology. He taught at Columbia University for 26 years and gave his name to the Keller Plan, also known as Personalized System of Instruction, an individually paced, mastery-oriented teaching method that has had a significant impact on college-level science education system. He died at home, age 97, on February 2, 1996, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The jigsaw technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed. It breaks classes into groups and breaks assignments into pieces that the group assembles to complete the (jigsaw) puzzle. It was designed by social psychologist Elliot Aronson to help weaken racial cliques in forcibly integrated schools.
Universal instructional design (UID) or universal design for instruction (UDI) is an educational framework for applying universal design principles to learning environments with a goal toward greater accessibility for all students, including students with disabilities. UDI involves considering the potential needs of all learners when designing and delivering instruction by identifying and eliminating unnecessary barriers to teaching and learning while maintaining academic rigor. UDI is thus proactive and benefits all students, in contrast to providing accommodations for a specific student.
Statistics education is the practice of teaching and learning of statistics, along with the associated scholarly research.
A flipped classroom is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning that reverses the traditional learning environment by delivering instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom. It moves activities, including those that may have traditionally been considered homework, into the classroom. In a flipped classroom, students watch online lectures, collaborate in online discussions, or carry out research at home while engaging in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of a mentor.
Cloud-based quantum computing is the invocation of quantum emulators, simulators or processors through the cloud. Increasingly, cloud services are being looked on as the method for providing access to quantum processing.
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