BCS 205: Lab in Development and Learning

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Schedule

Description

The purpose of this course is to provide majors in Brain & Cognitive Sciences with a hands-on laboratory experience in human development. As preparation for this course, you are expected to have some background in statistics, general psychology, and the neural or cognitive foundations of behavior. Because this is an upper-level writing course, you will each produce two formal papers in the format of a journal article. In addition, you will present your results to the rest of the class. Overall, you will gain general experience with the process of carrying an idea from its inception to the completion of an empirical piece of research.

In particular, this course will guide you through the process of conducting research in cognitive development and to give you experience working with children as research subjects. You will design and implement a research project with 2 or 3 other students. That is, you will generate a detailed empirical question, devise data collection methods to address this question, collect the data, meet to analyze the data, write a journal-article style report, and present your findings in a class "conference" in early December. Along the way, you will have learned the basics of experimental design, statistics, scientific writing, and presentation to an audience of your peers.

The course is also intended to give you some of the flavor of academic or research psychology as a profession, and is good preparation for those considering graduate school in psychology or cognitive science. To that end, your work will be relatively independent and your time largely self-scheduled, particularly in the second half of the semester as you conduct your group projects. Do not be fooled by this freedom. Resist the temptation to procrastinate. Child participants do not always cooperate with the goals of science or your personal schedule, and it can take longer to collect your data than you expect. Don't let last-minute problems like a printer breaking down or a bout of chicken pox at a daycare center make you miss a deadline.

Instructor

Ben Faber
bfaber [at] bcs.rochester.edu
275-4534 (use email if possible)
Meliora Hall 127
Office Hours: After class, or by appointment almost anytime

Readings

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th Edition.
and other readings available above.

Requirements and Grading

• Attend class, do the readings in advance, and participate [15%]
• Written report of in-class research project (data provided) [20%]
• Written report of out-of-class research project [50%]
  Note: 15% will be assigned to your “draft” version and 35% to your “final” version
• Group oral report of out-of-class research project [15%]

My grading scale is the standard one: 93.3% and up is an A, 90-93.3% is an A-, 86.7-90% is a B+, etc.

One of the main ideas behind the advanced writing requirement at the University of Rochester is to provide students with feedback regarding their work so they can improve their writing. At any time during the semester, feel free to bring me earlier drafts of your report and I will provide you with comments to help you improve it before you pass in your official "first" draft. These earlier drafts will not affect your grade. You must provide me with at least one draft of your out-of-class report by November 28.

Projects

There are three possibilities for data collection. You can work with children in their homes, you can ask that they be brought to campus, or you can go to a local preschool. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. At the preschool you will have access to several children of different ages (mostly 3-5 year olds) and could do a nice comparative study. At home and at the University you can set up a video camera and code the videotapes afterwards, thus capturing more detailed responses. Think about how many children you want to study and how much time you want to spend with each child as you plan your experiment. You also should consider transportation issues. If you would like to work in a preschool, let me know very early in the semester so we can start obtaining permission from school administrators and parents.

Select an area of cognitive development and do some background reading. You might start with a textbook to be sure you have a general understanding of the topic, and then look at some recent articles for specific methodologies and findings.

Where to look? Try the Annual Review of Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Science, or one of the mainstream journals in development: Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Development, Infancy, or Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. I also highly recommend the search engine at: scholar.google.com. And of course you should check out the Voyager system to conduct a literature search or to access journals electronically.

NOTE: Room 178 in Meliora Hall has several Macintoshes available for your use to access the Web and to perform statistical analyses using Prism.

Be sure to choose a topic pertaining to cognitive development, such as sorting and naming abilities, language acquisition, Piagetian stages (e.g., performance on conservation or object permanence tasks), concept development, reasoning, memory, problem solving, expertise, etc. Steer away from physical or social development (such as motor control, aggression, toy choices, play styles, etc.).

Think about classic questions in development. What factors (biological or experiential) might account for children's variability in performance on cognitive tasks? How do they vary systematically by birth order, sex, age, or life experience? What kind of training or exposure might affect children's performance? What does this reveal about how that particular ability develops? Often the best course for good research is to look at the literature, determine what is known and what open questions still remain, and then use a slight modification to an existing and well tested procedure to discover something new and answer one of those open questions.

I am truly looking forward to teaching this class.

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Last modified: 03/23/2009
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