Fall SAVY 2016 (Day 4) – Media Mania

Posted by hallep on Monday, October 17, 2016 in Grade 3, Grade 4, SAVY.

Dear Media Mania parents,

Today was another great day learning about media and psychology! After reviewing how to use the scientific method and establishing that it was clear the students were thinking like real researchers, the students went to work developing their own Media Mania studies! The class was very enthusiastic as they split up into “research teams” and chose to examine how their favorite apps impacted factors like language learning, motor coordination, or social processes.

Following study design, we then introduced the class to how to use descriptive statistics in psychology research. The students learned how to find the mean, median, and mode as well as how to use graphs like boxplots, scatterplots, and histograms to depict study findings. The class had fun applying their new knowledge to real datasets with, for example, their classmates’ ages and media use. We were impressed with the detailed, well thought out graphs they came up with!

Next week we have asked undergraduate research assistants to come in and participate in the students’ experiments. Not only will the class work with real participants, but we will also have a class field trip to collect the data in a real, Vanderbilt research lab!

We are looking forward to next week!

Israel and Emily