on Sun, 09 Apr 2006 15:18:10 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Scott Lilienfeld wrote: >>Chris: We may have to agree to disagree (respectfully, of course...) >>on this issue. The question before TIPS, as I understood it, was >>whether teachers who conduct research tend to be more better >>(more effective) teachers than those who don't. > >It is you who glossed "better" as "more effective," not me.
Please excuse me for stepping in but there is a point that I would like to make below. >By contrast, what I have been consistently arguing here is >that researchers have ready access to a body of (practical) >knowledge that non-researchers do not have as ready access to. I believe that this assertion can only be made in the context of explicit knowledge and not what Michael Polanyi would call "tacit knowledge". For those unfamiliar with Polanyi's position on this, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge and a more comprehensive review at: http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/tacitknowledge.html As pointed out on Wikipedia, the aphorism "We know more than we can tell" is relevant. This position seems to suggest that a researcher teaching a research methods class or a lab course may in fact be able to behaviorially manifest knowledge (e.g., "do this, don't do that") which others can observe and imitate but this advantage is lost in lecture based courses because such courses rely upon verbalizable or explicit knowledge. One wonders to what extent do researchers rely upon tacit knowledge developed over the course of many years of research experience which can only be shown to others and not told/explained. If much research experience is in the form of tacit knowledge, it is hard to see how such experience/knowledge would provide a benefit in lecture-based courses. >This difference cannot be tapped by comparing students >evaluations because the students in the non-researchers' >classes, as much as they might like the teacher, do not >even know that this kind of knowledge could have been >a possibility for the class, and cannot reliably assess what >kind difference it might have made in their course. This raises the question of how such experience would cause a person to teach differently. I've conducted research on semantic memory with the lexical decision task -- how would this affect my presentation of the Collins and Loftus model of semantic memory? How different would this presentation be if it were given by someone who had no experience with research on semantic memory or with any aspect of human memory? How readily perceivable would these differences be, especially to novices? If they are not perceivable, what good do they do? -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
