> I've seen those lists, and I think they're useful.
Useful in some respects, though not entirely accurate. We've seen
the exact same list for at least three years now (surely there must be
*some* differences between this year's freshmen and those of three
years ago. . .). In addition, a couple of years ago, I polled my students
to see if they really "had no meaningful memory of the Reagan
administration" and the like. In some cases, they had a lot of difficulty
answering. However, they remembered very well not having an
answering machine, cable, or microwave popcorn (things which,
supposedly, they couldn't remember).
I posted the results to TIPS, so it should be in the archives for those
who weren't subscribed then.
> with an us v. them approach to students, but it's good to keep in mind, as
> the years pass, that what is common knowledge to you may not be to them.
>
> I was once a teaching fellow for a professor in social psych who gave a
> long, long lecture about attitude change and persuasion using the Patty
> Hearst case as an example. The students, many of them, had never heard of
> it. (I'd heard of it, but I'm 34 and was a kid when it happened, so it was
> vague to me as well.)
>
With that said, I have to agree that we need to keep in mind that things
we take for granted as common knowledge are often unknown to our
students. When lecturing on flashbulb memory last week, I described
the Neisser & Harsch (1992) study concerning memory of the space
shuttle Challenger explosion. Out of curiosity, I asked how many of
my students remembered the explosion. The answer: zero.
Afterward, I realized that of course they would not have remembered it;
they were only three or four at the time.
Jeff
Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False
recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In Eugene
Winograd & Ulrich Neisser (Ed.), Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies
of "flashbulb" memories" New York: Cambridge University Press
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Jeff Bartel Department of Psychology
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~jbartel Kansas State University
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