Blog Announcements!
Blog rules: Make sure to end your comments with your name and course on the last line.Do you want to "block quote" text or italicize your comments, please click here to find out more.
Please note that links to downloadable files expire in a timely fashion given particular due-dates.
Hello. The blog will be taking a hiatus until the Fall quarter begins. If you’re a future student of mine, feel free to take a look around. (Please note that most hyperlinks for downloadable assignments and readings will have expired and no longer function.)
After Wednesday, June 10, 2009, a new license authorization code for SPSS 16 and PASW 17 (the name for SPSS 17) will be available for current Drexel students.
Please visit the software download site, log in, and read the Readme txt file and follow the instructions.
UPDATE: a new authorization code has been posted!
If you participated in extra credit research during Spring 2009 and wish to confirm that you received credit, please send me an email. I now received a printout for all my courses this term. On behalf of my fellow researchers, thank you for contributing to the science of psychology!
Please feel free to post any questions you have as you approach your final exam here.
Questions can be conceptual or applied (e.g., SPSS).
We will do our best to answer in a timely fashion, but feel free, as well, to help each other out by hitting REPLY. Sometimes a good student-translation of a professor or TA’s point makes all the difference.
Hello, everyone. As discussed in class, Sean and I care most about your understanding the material at course’s end. Homeworks are designed to get you thinking in the right way in preparation for your—in this case—final examination. Thus, I think of homeworks as teaching opportunities. (This is why, for example, I often include tutorial elements to them.) So, if you happen to miss points on some them, the course is designed so that this is not especially punitive. If you can demonstrate that you understand the material on your final examination, it would be odd to hold you back by a past homework grade. Notice also how I differentially weight your exams so your best counts the most. Do best in the end of the course and your final outweighs your midterm (35% to 25%).
Special of the day: You have the opportunity to replace your lowest homework grade from the entire course, even if it was a zero (turned in and awarded 0 points or not turned in at all). Complete this new optional, make-up assignment and its grade will take the place of the lowest homework grade of the course. (Ties for lowest grade are broken by replacing the earliest lowest grade, so if your make-up grade is an .85, and if both HW 1 and HW 2 are .76, then HW 1 is the one that gets replaced.)
Your completely optional make-up assignment is a downloadable PDF in Comment #1 of this post.
Emailed answers are due to my email by Monday at 11am. Please send your SPSS output file, as well, having named the file with your last name. No physical copy is required. Please number your answers and answer questions in order.
Hello, everyone. Your assignment—due Thursday 11:59pm—is to read your fellow classmates’ blog posts and hit REPLY to two different comments.* Go back to the previous post by following this link. Describe what you think was good about the post and what could be improved. Think of APA style and the logic and purpose of scientific writing.
(Please spread your comments around and do not gang up with suggestions for any one. If anyone doesn’t yet have a REPLY, try them; don’t add a second REPLY to someone else.)
Be sure to check back and see what your fellow classmates said about your own. Remember to avoid ad hominem attacks; let’s be civil while being critical. This is a good learning experience for your final paper and how you communicated vs. how you think you communicated.
In addition, please review the articles about which you wrote so that we can discuss them in class and make sure to continue reviewing your APA style handouts regarding manuscripts and references.
*The posts at the first level are credited for the homework assigned Monday June 1. REPLIES at the second level and beyond in the thread are credited for today’s homework.
Units 10 and 11 of the course deal with non-human animal language and the evolution of language (e.g., are there neurological underpinnings specifically for language?) and wrap up our coverage of the psychology of language.
Are human beings alone in the animal kingdom as the sole possessors of language? Is it necessary for human beings to be unique in this way? Is the study of language in nonhuman populations the struggle for something outside of the scientific method?
Please comment on the most recent presentations and readings for Pinker (1994; Chapter 11), as well as any optional readings you tackled (Gardner & Gardner, 1969; Savage-Rumbaugh, McDonald, Sevcik, Hopkins, & Rubert, 1986), and the footage we have seen of Schroeder’s (1978/2006) Koko: A talking gorilla. Please then consider the following:
What are the biological and evolutionary arguments for the innateness of language? That the brain is involved in the production and comprehension of language is obvious, but how does this fact inform us about language ‘as special’ for human beings?
Please comment on Pinker (1994; Chapter 10) and Martin, Wiggs, Ungerleider, & Haxby (1996), which will be presented on Friday, as well as Pinker (Chapter 8), which will also be presented on Friday. Your blog assignment is due on Friday June 5th by 5pm.
As we end our coverage, what is the big picture? What is language? How is it learned? Who and what possesses it? Importantly, what is entailed by how we answer these questions (e.g., whether human beings have a unique place in the world) has much to do with how you answer questions about language and mind.
I genuinely hope you have enjoyed the course and learned a lot. You certainly have been exposed to a lot! But I believe firmly that you deserve that: to be presented with a wide variety of viewpoints, methodologies, and topics so that you can make up your own mind. Having one textbook or one constant lecturer takes away from the mysteries that drive a field forward. That’s why I like to present contradictory positions in this course, sometimes in the same unit. Tension is good, though it may not feel alright in the beginning. It is certainly easier to present an easily digestible, uncontroversial story, but that’s not reality in any discipline. Progress comes through trying to resolve differences in perspective. I wouldn’t be entirely comfortable if you walk out of this class feeling that the field of psychology of language has been decided. I hope you walk out interested in a few things here or there and willing to pursue the matter further on your own. (I’m always there if you ever need an article. I have many many PDFs and photocopies.) I hope that you see opportunities for further debate and contributions in psychology of language and that you might join. My passion is language. My views have changed over the years because I have kept reading and exposed myself to different perspectives. I now study aspects quite different than those with which I started off, but I have always found the field thought-provoking. Defining language and delimiting its possessers, one of our first assignments, is an ongoing task inasmuch as it is fundamentally the existential task of defining what makes us the way we are.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009, 5:00p.m. to 7:00p.m.
A.J. Drexel Picture Gallery, 3rd floor of the Main Building (32nd & Chestnut)
In spite of the nearly universal scientific acceptance of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species,” the theory of evolution is often greeted by skepticism and even rejection. Many of these anti-evolutionary thinkers propose alternative explanations that claim to provide a more intuitive explanation for the history of life on earth.
Join us for a panel discussion led by experts on pseudoscience, paleontology, and educational law, as we highlight the nature and history of this controversy while illuminating the distinctions between the scientific theory of evolution and the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
This event is free and open to all. A light reception will follow.
For more information, please contact Amy Weaver at amw55@drexel.edu.
Panelists:
Dr. Ted Daeschler
Curator and Chair of Vertebrate Zoology, Academy of Natural Sciences
Co-discoverer of Tiktaalik Rosae (transition fossil between fish and tetrapods)
Dr. Peter Dodson
Professor of Anatomy, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine
President of the Philadelphia Center of Science and Religion
Dr. James Herbert
Professor of Psychology and Expert on Pseudoscience
Interim Head of the Department of Biology, Drexel University
Honorable Judge John E. Jones, III
Federal Judge, US District Court for the Middle District of PA
Presided over Dover, PA trial on the teaching of intelligent design (Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al.)
Hello. Your homework is available as a downloadable PDF in Comment #1.
Please make sure to post any questions you may have on the blog. Sean and I are always happy to help.
Hello, everyone. Here is an update on SPSS for PSY 365:
**IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT EXPIRATION DATE**
There is a 30-day grace period for this license and, hence, users will be able to use this product until the end of June 2009. As soon as an updated license becomes available, it will replace the current license and will be posted here for download.
For this past Monday’s class, you were to have read Nairne, Pandeirada, Gregory, and Van Arsdall’s (in press) and consider it’s methodology. I suggested that by considering only the beginnings of each paragraph of the introduction, a reader could get a basic flow of the argument and that this was good craftsmanship. That is, set up the reader and then fill in specifics. Many beginning science writers will give specifics of individual studies first and then sum it up in the end. This is not what you want to do! For your blog assignment, due Tuesday at 11:59pm, please write a one paragraph entry integrating Naire et al. and Hill and Barton (2005). Set up your reader with a topic and a point (i.e., argument) and then back it up with specific evidence for that point (i.e., telling me about the relevance of specific papers). You have no specific word count, but more is not necessarily better. Like your paper assignment in this course, write what you need to back up your argument.
APA style reminders: There is only one space after periods (or punctuation) ending sentences. The abbreviation “et al.” has a period after the second word, which is the one abbreviated, not the first. There is a comma before the last “or” or “and” in a series. The Latin terms “e.g.” and “i.e.” are always only within parentheses and must be followed by commas. That is, if you want to start a sentence, please use “that is” and not “i.e.”, and if you want to give an example, for example, please write it out in English outside parentheses. If you want to give an off-hand example (e.g., putting something inside parentheses), then make sure you use “e.g.” and have a comma after the term.
Is there a language of the body, a ‘language’ that does not involve verbalization or even the putative concepts that underlie normal oral language? What does this tell us about what language is and for what the human mind is?
Please comment on your already-obtained PDFs (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998; Senghas & Coppola, 2001; Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005) and today’s presentations. Your blog assignment is due Tuesday night at 11:59pm. You can also check out this site on American Sign Language (with videos).
Please also concentrate on making progress on or otherwise wrapping up their assignments (e.g., annotated bibliography, paper, remaining presentations). Make use of the Psychology of Language page as a outline for future assignments and their order (e.g., your annotated bibliography).
Everyone yet to present should be in contact with me concerning your presentation.
For Monday’s class, I will want to discuss Nairne, Pandeirada, Gregory, and Van Arsdall’s (in press). Please have this read before class. Take careful note of the design of the study (e.g., how variables are controlled; how competing interpretations of data are dealt with), the operational definitions of its independent and dependent variables, and its hypotheses.
The introduction is approximately 930 words, which is quite tightly argued and efficient wordcount-wise. If, however, we take only the first sentence of each of the paragraphs, we can get the basic flow of the entire introduction at approximately 160 words (Nairne et al., in press, pp. 1-2):
Central to the functionalist agenda in human memory research is the assumption that human memory systems are functionally designed (e.g., Klein, Cosmides, Tooby, & Chance, 2002; Nairne, 2005; Sherry & Schacter, 1987)….
In the prototypical survival experiment, participants are asked to imagine themselves stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land, without any basic survival materials….
As a product of natural selection, human memory evolved because it enhanced fitness in specific environments of evolutionary adaptedness (Bowlby, 1969; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), that is, the environments that were present during the extended periods of human evolution….
At present, psychologists know little about the evolutionary determinants of human memory, although some relevant research does exist (e.g., Anderson & Schooler, 1991; O’Gorman,Wilson, & Miller, 2008)….
Participants in the experiments reported here were asked to rate the relevance of words to scenarios that were specifically designed to mimic prototypical hunting and gathering activities….
In addition, these experiments offer a significant methodological advance over previous work in this area….
(For the record, there is no reason to end a quote with ellipses, but I have done so to remind you that this is a list of the first sentences of paragraphs.)
The reason we get the basic flow of the argument is that Nairne et al. (in press) have properly crafted their text. Almost 770 words are used to flesh out an argument that could basically be made in 160 words—a word count which includes citations! The reader is properly led along the way into thinking a particular thought, such that the ultimate experiment to be executed (in the next section of the manuscript) seems justified and inevitable. There is no mystery story here. This is the art of persuasion, or rhetoric. Note also how citations are used. Every major point made is backed up by a nod to the existing literature. It says to the reader that the authors have paid their dues and done due diligence by reading the appropriate texts. You will want your paper to follow this lead! Please also reexamine your previous handout on the APA manuscript, which details where in the publication manual you can find additional information about major sections and style points.
Next week you should expect a few tests of your APA knowledge.
Your homework on correlation and regression is available as a downloadable PDF in Comment #1. Please post any questions you may have on this unit right here on the blog. Sean and I are happy to help!
Remember, if you are a graduating senior, please email me as soon as possible so that we can now start scheduling when you might take your final for the course, should you wish to choose this option in your grade calculation. All students who are not graduating your final exam is scheduled June 10, 2009 from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM. Room will be announced in class.
SPSS on Macs and PCs: Licenses are set to expire shortly. Presumably if you go to this site, where you downloaded SPSS, there will be a new version in place. Clearly the expiration dates are based on semester and not quarter schedules. This is the license information that is currently posted:
This license will expire on 5-31-2009. An updated license information will be posted before the expiration date is due.
To recap: In the most recent blog posts, we have been working on editing our content to its barest essentials. Being concise and direct is critical to good scientific writing and communication. We have also looked at the outline for a manuscript’s introduction and its ‘funnel’ logic. Argument involves using substantive material to make a novel point. In the last two blog posts, you were to have written 140-150 words to weave together two articles to make a novel point.As I mentioned then, these assignments foreshadow your paper for the course. (Please review your syllabus.) Let me quote from a past blog post:
When you write a paper, you must make a novel point by using literature to support your position and the import and inevitability of your particular study. In the end, your results need to strike your reader as obvious. This, however, is because you set them up, not because they were really obvious. A good paper makes the methods necessary and the results inevitable. That is the power of a good argument.
You have posted a 140-150 assignment on Koch, Holland, Hengstler, and van Knippenberg (2009) and Williams and Bargh (2008), as well as one on Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yaxley (2002) and Meier and Robinson (2004). You are now to write 200-225 words, combining points from all four articles. Please do not merely enumerate summaries of these works. One must make a point about how they are related or not. That is, weave these papers together and tell me a single, coherent point that utilizes these papers as evidence.
Print three copies of your assignment and bring them to class. Email me—before the beginning of class—your text in the body of an email.
