Articles, Presentations & Papers

Here are some presentations and class work I’ve written, as well as presentations I’ve given at conferences. Teachers of psychology may find them interesting. Feel free to use these resources in your classes.

Using a Survey on Romantic Attraction to Engage Students in Learning Research Methods

One of the persistent challenges when you teach a class in Research and Statistics is keeping students interested in the topic. Since I typically have students work together to create and administer a survey, I decided one year that the topic of that survey would be interpersonal attraction. College students are interested in why people are attracted to one another and why relationships last (and don’t last), so why not create a survey on this topic? It was a big hit and a few of my grad students worked with me to write this paper (which was also a conference presentation).
Survey on theories of interpersonal attraction.

• Feel free to use the Attraction Survey if you’d like. Click here to down a Microsoft Word version of the survey.
• Click here to download a Microsoft Excel file containing the data.
• Click here to download a csv file containing the data.

How To and Why To Use a Blog and Podcast in Your Class

If you’re a teacher and you’re wondering what you might use a blog or podcast for in your teaching, then this article is for you. I was asked to write an article for the PsychTeacher discussion list on the topic of blogging and podcasting and while there is some information here on the technical side of this topic (the “how to”) I also wanted to list some of the purposes for putting in the time to create a blog or podcast for a class. If you’re asking yourself these questions then I think this article might have some good suggestions and advice.

• Article on the How and especially the Why of blogging and podcasting in an educational setting.

Research On Trial: A Method to Encourage Critical Thinking About The Results of Research

I always felt that when you read a research article you have to do so with a sound critical eye. Was the study carried out carefully enough that you can have confidence in the results? To help students in this regard I created a project I called Research On Trial (which, unfortunately has the acronym of “ROT” and thus became known among students as the “rot project”). I hand out a research article (which I know has some flaws) and one group of students becomes the “defense attorneys” while another group becomes the “prosecuting attorneys”. The groups conduct a trial in which the research article is debated section by section. The rest of the class functions as the jury and in the end they decide whether or not the research was conducted properly and we can have confidence in the conclusions of the authors. I videotaped it one semester and it became the basis of a conference presentation (Britt, M. (1996). Research on Trial: A Pedagogy for Research Methods Instruction. Proceedings from the 9th Annual Conference on undergraduate teaching of psychology, published in Resources in Education, April, #ED 389 374.)

• How to conduct a Research On Trial in your class.

Video Puzzle

Okay. This isn’t an article – it’s a project. But I think it’s so cool and I didn’t know where else to put it! Since I’m interested in language learning I thought it would be fun to take a conversation between two people and break it down into separate video clips and then have students reconstruct the conversation by correctly ordering the video clips. This project came out okay, but I hope someday to make it even more challenging by adding more video clips. You’ll see what I mean.