When testing a new drug there always has to be volunteers for the first human participants to take the drug. But what happens if the trial fails. Like, fails really badly? This is what happened in 2006 when eight male volunteers signed up to be participants in a “first in humans” study. The treatment was a proposed cancer treatment, but …
So you want to assess population validity?
If you’re reading this it might be because you’ve written something like this in your answer and tried to fob it off as critical thinking: “One of the limitations of this study was that it has a small sample size and so lacks population validity.” The thing to remember when trying to show critical thinking is that it takes …
5 reasons why evaluating every study is a bad idea.
I’ve been teaching the new IB Psychology course for two months and haven’t evaluated a single study in my class. In this post you’ll see why. If you’re evaluating all the studies you’re using in your course, I’d strongly recommend dropping this approach in favour of some alternative approaches. In this post I’ll explain why I think “evaluating as you …
5 teacher tips for evaluating studies
This post goes with my other post about why it’s a bad idea to evaluate studies “as you go.” Tip 1: Drip-feed critical thinking extensions when students are ready… I introduce evaluative points of studies when individual students are ready for it. In all of my lessons I follow the very basic CHACER structure. The E is for Extend and …
Clinical Drug Trials, PTSD and SSRIs
This post is designed to be used in lesson 4.6 in the PTSD unit plan. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of drug therapy using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat PTSD, we need to consult the research. The most common way the effectiveness of drugs are tested is through a carefully controlled experiments. These experiments are also known …
Key Studies: Dopamine and Love (Fisher et al. 2005)What happens in the brains of people in love?
What happens in our brain when we see the person we love? Why do we fall in love and stay with one person? What is the relationship between love and dopamine? These are some of the questions Helen Fisher and her colleagues set about asking in their 2005 fMRI study, “Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for …
Flashbulb Memory Theory (Brown and Kulik, 1977)
Flashbulb memories are “memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event.” (Brown and Kulik, 1977). For example, remembering where you were when you found out you got accepted into your dream college, that a loved one had passed away or a public news event like the death of a …
Teaching Idea: Question Counters
Question-driven lessons are by far the most effective way to cause learning and the students that ask the most questions tend to achieve the highest. But if your students are anything like mine, there’s always a few who like to hide in the shadows and never ask questions, or they struggle and toil away on their own thinking that it’s …
Wason Task Studies
Wason Task studies provide some evidence to support the idea of two systems of processing, as described in the dual processing model of decision making. To recap, the dual processing model of decision making posits that we have two systems for processing information: System One: fast, automatic and intuitive System Two: slow, controlled and rational In the Wason Task, participants …
T.E.A.C.U.P…and why I don’t use it.
Yesterday I posted about how to evaluate psychological theories in three simple steps. I mentioned John Crane’s popular acronym T.E.A.C.U.P, which stands for: testable, evidence, applications, construct validity, unbiased and predictive validity. (It can be found on John’s website, too). This is an alternative to my “Let’s make a DEAL” framework for evaluating theories. You can see that my DEAL framework …