Steve
Could there be a change in the way the words woman and girl are used among college students? My nonscientific perspective is that there used to be much more concern in the use of those words than there is now. If the students aren't making a distinction in their use of girl and woman than their assessment of age would not vary. How's the snow by you. Classes have been closed in Oswego since Monday morning. Gary Gary J. Klatsky, Ph. D. Director, Human Computer Interaction M.A. Program Department of Psychology [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oswego State University (SUNY) http://www.oswego.edu/~klatsky 7060 State Hwy 104W Voice: (315) 312-3474 Oswego, NY 13126 Fax: (315) 312-6330 **************************************************** ------__o --------__o ----------__o ----_`\<, _ ------_`\<, _ --------_`\<, _ ---(_)/ (_) -----(_)/ (_) -------(_)/ (_) **************************************************** All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field. Albert Einstein _____ From: Steven Specht [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2007 3:49 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] curious Dear Colleagues, For over a decade I have been using a neat (and tidy) experimental exercise in my methods course modeled after the work of the famous psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. I show a 30 second video clip of a scene in which there is a female screaming. She is definitely NOT the focal point of the scene (which is a man being held over the side of a bridge about to be dropped into the river below as a result of a drug deal gone bad. BTW, it's the opening scene from the movie "New Jack City"). Anyway, after I show this video, I distribute a short questionnaire (4 questions to be exact). The third question asks "What is your estimate of the age of the woman who was screaming in the video?" However, for half of the class, the word "Woman" is replaced by the word "girl". The responses to the question vary, but there has typically been a statistically different response (p<.01 in many instances) when the word "woman" is used, compared to when the word "girl" is used. This short demonstration is very effective in starting to discuss experimental manipulation (and the importance of careful word selection) and tends to capture students' attention. Semester after semester, the results had been predictable (15 or 16 semesters in a row I would get impressively similar and statistically significant results... on average the woman is estimated to be a bit over 29 yrs and the girl around 23 yrs). What is curious to me is that in the last 5 semesters I have done this exercise in class, it has only "worked" 2 of 5 times (and one of those two the results were barely significant). So I've asked myself "why has there been a change in the results of something that had worked MANY, many times consecutively?" One of the hypotheses I have to entertain-- especially given that the experimental manipulation is so subtle-- is that students may becoming less concerned about "details" when they read a sentence. They may be becoming "gist" readers (i.e., get the gist of the sentence and don't worry about the details). That interpretation would certainly be consistent with some of the other academically-related problems I seem to be encountering with some of my students. Just thought I'd share these curious observations. Cheers, -S ======================================================== Steven M. Specht, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Utica College Utica, NY 13502 (315) 792-3171 "Mice may be called large or small, and so may elephants, and it is quite understandable when someone says it was a large mouse that ran up the trunk of a small elephant" (S. S. Stevens, 1958) --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
