Fall SAVY 2016 (Day 2) – Media Mania!
Dear Media Mania parents,
Today we continued our conversation concerning the positive and negative consequences of media by having the class consider the pros and cons of the media platforms they created last week as well as critique an app from the Apple app store. In groups of two, your students found an app that could make a daily activity easier and proceeded to critique the app the way a developer or app reviewer would. We were very impressed with the students’ ability to think critically about the features and usability of these applications!
Next, we began our introduction into psychological research related to media. We discussed a few areas of focus and talked about some of the interesting ways in which researchers are using media to examine the brain and behavior as well as the consequences of media use. The students were very excited about the current state of the field and had many thought provoking questions on the topic.
Our final task for the day was to connect the scientific method to psychological research. As a class, we brainstormed strategies to evaluate a specific app’s effect on fine motor skills. Being able to think of creative ways to determine if an app actually works is quite difficult, trust us we know, but your students were covering all the bases! With little guidance, they thought of ways to control for past experience and began to brainstorm ways to measure motor skills and length of app use, for example.
Now that the students have all the basic skills needed to begin to think like psychologists, it’s time to move on to the real challenge! Next week your students will be developing their very own experiment that we will implement in a real research lab in the coming weeks. They will figure out what question they want to address, what materials they need, and exactly how to conduct the experiment. We will also begin to talk about the use of statistics in psychology research.
We look forward to seeing everyone soon!
Israel and Emily
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