Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 1, Day 2) – Social Psychology 101

Posted by hallep on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 in Grade 5, Grade 6, SAVY.

Today we learned about learning! Here’s what went down:

• We began by reviewing some of the ideas we talked about yesterday in a rapid-fire guessing game. Our students did a great job learning all those ideas – they were right on the ball!
• Next, we practiced our study designing skills by devising our own observational, correlational, and experimental studies. There were so many great studies coming up in the classroom! We’ll be working the rest of the week to refine some of these ideas to the point that we can actually run our studies in class.
• Then it was time to get started on today’s new ideas: Social cognition and social learning! We began by learning some of the key terms that social psychologists use when talking about social cognition, including social norm, social group, social category, and attitude. Our students did a great job learning the new vocab and teaching them to each other in demonstrative skits.
• Our next question was figuring out the source of these principles of social cognition. How did we learn them? To figure this out, our students worked in groups to learn about some of the biggest names and studies in psychology history. Together, they learned about classical conditioning with the work of Ivan Pavlov and John Watson, operant conditioning with Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner, and observational learning with Albert Bandura.
• To finish our day, we practiced what we learned about positive and negative punishment and positive and negative reinforcement by trying out some crazy MadLibs. Students almost didn’t finish telling each other the hilarious stories they created about learning because of giggle fits – almost.

Tomorrow we’ll be applying some of today’s important ideas – especially our social cognition terms and observational learning theory – when we examine how people use persuasion to change each other’s ideas!