At 9:02 AM -0600 12/6/00, jim clark wrote:
>I would be cautious in how a course such as you are
>proposing was cast, especially if there was a chance that others
>(with a less scientific orientation) might teach it. I once
>taught a graduate course on systems in which I thought that I
>would expose students to alternative views of psychology. Turns
>out they found those views very attractive to their natural way
>of thinking. You might want students to have a solid foundation
>in scientific approaches as a requirement.
God forbid, here is a place where Prof. Clark and I agree.
In teaching similar courses, I find students consistently attracted
to the claims of alternative approaches and insufficiently skeptical
of those claims. I regularly use an assignment "design a study to
test X claim" as an antidote to this.
Where Prof. Clark suggest a "solid foundation" in science, I would go
further (if there were no explicit assignments to continuously point
out the empirical-and thus testable-claims being made). Without this
consistent scientific scaffolding, I think this would work only with
seniors who had taken stats/research methods and several lab courses.
-Chuck
- Chuck Huff; 507.646.3169; http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/
- Psychology Department, St.Olaf College, Northfield, MN 55057
