Dear Colleagues, I have to share this story because it surely helps us understand the generation gap that we are dealing with in training our students in experimental methodology. But more importantly, it's hilarious.
In my experimental procedure, I have an observation room and a control room. The baby, mom, and experimenter are in the observation room, sitting at a a table, running through a series of fast-paced, tightly choreographed, word-learning trials. Students in the control room are supposed to time the events taking place in the observation room, using a stop watch, and then to cue the experimenter each time a one- or two-minute period has passed. For the last two or three babies, none of whom I had a chance to observe, my students have been mentioning that the stop-watch isn't working properly. It ticks off about 15 seconds and then stops. In my mind, I'm thinking that the stop-watch battery probably needed to be replaced. So I go into the control room to find out which battery it takes, when I discover that the stop watch we were using was an old-fashioned, hand-wound type. Not a single student (out of perhaps 10), realized that the stop-watch simply needed to be rewound! In fact, many had never even heard of this phenomenon, let alone how to go about rewinding the stop-watch. Sure enough, ever since I rewound the watch it has been working perfectly. *sigh* wedj ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. | Chair and Associate Professor | Rocket science is child's play of Psychology | compared to understanding Department of Psychology | child's play East Tennessee State University | -unknown Johnson City, TN 36714 | (423) 439-6656 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
