On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:22:06 -0700, William Scott wrote: >I agree with others that the memory problem is one of encoding failure.
I'm not so sure that it is as simple as that. I think that students and even faculty may have known and been able to use certain types of knowledge but for whatever reason, this info had become inaccessible (implying that it may still be present but its retrieval is blocked or otherwise inhibited) or non-reconstructable. >However, I remember the authors of my introductory text in 1966. >Morganand King. Does that mean I was meant to become a psychologist? Do Tipsters not remember the textbooks they used in their undergraduate classes? The book that clinched psychology for me was Skinner "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" which I read during the summer between high school and college -- the magazine Psychology Today had excerpted the book into two issues (I think I might have the first issue somewhere). This is what I remember of my undergrad psych texts: Intro psych: an early edition of Hilgrad & Atkinson (the intro course was 2 semesters with one semester on experimental and the second semester on social, development, clinical, etc.) Social Psych: a text by Leigh Marlow (who taught the class) Personality: can't remember author of text, also taught by Leigh Marlow Group Dynamics: I can't remember the author though I think I have my copy (black cover) somewhere; primarily focused on interpersonal exercises (it was the early 1970s and EST was a big thing) Learning: the prof didn't have an official text and used original readings but I used an early edition of Hilgard & Bower's Theories of Learning (3rd ed? with the black and brown binding common to books used by Appleton-Century-Croft at the time). Statistics: the Underwood, Spence, & about 4 other authors' statistics text (I never understood why there were so many authors for such a small book); I subsequently relied upon verious editions of Runyon and Haber which I used the first time I taught statistics. Experimental/Ratlab: Used Michael D'Amato Experimental Psychology text but also used parts of Woodworth & Schlosberg's Experimiental Psychology (the green book) and Kling and Riggs' update (we used the big gray "phonebook" instead of the two volume set). Physiological: a text by Richard Thompson which might have been "An Introduction to Physiological Psychology" And I think there was maybe one or two semesters of supervised research which didn't have a textbook but other readings. By the way, the D'Amato text introduced me to Signal Detection Theory and I read other books and articles about it (not for courses) as well as theories on information processing (and Information Theory, such as Attneave's little book). Maybe these are false memories but I have used some of these texts or updated editions when I first started to teach. >>> Claudia Stanny <[email protected]> 03/28/10 6:05 PM >>> [snip] >I'd be happy as a clam if my students forgot the author of the textbook >and even forgot my name, if they DID recall why inferential statistics are >important and the underlying logic of a t-test! -- or even why elaborate >coding and attention produces memories that last longer than superficial >codings! :-) I have worked on funded research projects where psychology Ph.D.s who should have known things like how to do a t-test and its logic but apparently didn't. The strangest conversation I had with a Ph.D. in social psychology who asked me whether he could use the t-test procedure in SPSS to compare means after an ANOVA provided a significant F (this was back in the 1990s and I don't remember why he didn't use one of the built-in multiple comparisons procedures with, say, Oneway). I told the guy that as long as you have homogeneity of variance for the conditions, the t-tests would only calculate the error term based on two groups instead of the Mean Square Error from the ANOVA which uses all of the info and, since it is has a larger df error make it more powerful. I said that it would be better to do this even if one had to do the calculations by hand (I had notes statistics classes I taught for how to do LSD, Tukey, Bonferroni tests with examples that he could use). But a puzzled look came over his face and he said "I don't understand what you're saying?" I tried to explain again what the t-test and ANOVA F were, and so on but I could see in his face that he wasn't following. It was now my turn to not understand how a Ph.D. in social psychology could not know these basic things (he was also project director for the project that I was working on). I was pretty sure that at one time he had to have known it from his grad stat courses. I guess even Ph.D.s forget what they (allegedly) learned in grad school. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1611 or send a blank email to leave-1611-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
