Activity #6

Nancy Melucci describes several activities and demonstrations that help students learn to question their preconceptions and to better understand scientific methodology.

Thu, 17 Aug 2000
Nancy Melucci
Los Angeles Community College District
Drnanjo@aol.com

On the first day of class, I give a version of the T/F quiz on general psychology that is included in the instructor guide for Myers' Psychology textbook. The answers always defy the students' "common sense" notions about psychology and life.

On the first or second day, depending upon class length, I run the M&M memory experiment I got out of the APA Teaching Psychology exercise series [see below], and encourage the students to criticize the "experiment" liberally.

After this, I review the types of research that are done, with special attention to surveys, which receive so much publicity and are so infamously unreliable. I encourage the students to think and share their own speculations about why surveys (usually) suck.

And I show two short videos from the "Beyond Science" episode of Scientific American frontiers -- the one on graphology and the one concerning the famous Therapeutic Touch debunking experiment of Rosa (this also includes some nice analysis of the problems of using scientific method with a "paranormal" phenomenon).

The M&M experiment is very basic, maybe a little silly but is good for getting things going in intro psych or intro stats. Write the hypothesis "10 minutes after ingestion of a small dose of chocolate, a person will demonstrate improved memory capacity" on the board.

Pick 10 students names randomly from a hat, divide into 2 groups of 5, give one group M&Ms and another none. Give everyone in both groups a list of nouns to memorize. After 10 or 15 minutes have all the treatment and control subjects (don't refer to them by this terminology yet) repeat as many words as they can remember back to two judges who keep score. Compare the group means.

Usually I get a small difference between the two groups. If the difference favors the treatment group, I strut around facetiously saying that this proves conclusively that chocolate is a miracle memory aid. If the difference favors the controls, I look forlorn and say that this proves conclusively that chocolate does nothing for memory. Both bits of play acting usually get students to produce a long list of reasons why no conclusive claims can be made on the basis of the "experiment."