How to do your own experiments in psychology and education
1a. Choose a great partner
Homework:
Fill out three copies of the Team Data sheet -- it's here.
Don’t work alone.
A partner will help you divide up the work, keep your sanity, buy you a drink, talk through technical issues, keep you on track, double check your writing, and help in a dozen other ways. You will work with your partner for the whole semester: you will have to research together, be confused together, write together, help each other, and present together in public.
Choose a partner who shares similar interests with you. You need a partner who communicates well and who is someone you can rely on to do his/her work on time. Reliability is hard to judge at first sight, so it’s best to work with people you’ve worked with before.
Check your schedules to find a partner who you can meet with in person at least once a week outside of class. Triple check that you can identify times in your schedules when both of you are available to work together in the same place.
Read this topic next: Choose a psychological process.
There are more technical reasons that lead scientists to work with others. Scientists devised a very important strategy to overcome the limitations of individual observation. That strategy is collaboration with other researchers. (Salomon, 1994). Knowledge is produced by whole communities, not by individuals acting alone. The role of the individual researcher is to provide the input (data, hypotheses, arguments, theories) for this process. The objectivity or “intersubjectivity” of scientific hypotheses that Popper (1959) placed so much importance on is only one aspect of this strategy. Comparison of the observations of different researchers can contribute to determining which aspects observed are likely to be subjective or individual and which are not. The same argument is doubly true for hypotheses and theories, which are initially produced from individual intuitions, imaginations, and interpretations of available data. The key to collaboration in learning and research, then, is knowing how to deal with multiple perspectives: how to compare and contrast them, how to evaluate their relative merits, how to accept none as the truth but each as a distinct and valid contribution. Multiple perspective taking leads to more complex and complete ways of looking at things and it also expands the kinds of observations and data that will be useful for checking these perspectives. This is a major improvement over individual learning. The collective evaluation of hypotheses and theories is more complete and more demanding than individual evaluation, ensuring greater reliability of those hypotheses that are accepted. This is just a more systematic reformulation of the prosaic “two heads are better than one” (and two thousand better still).
This is also another reason why simplistic “right” and “wrong” judgments are useless: these judgments assume one true perspective and in so doing, they undermine collaboration. This same approach is making its way into the workplace: companies have seen that having people who are more diverse leads to more ideas about how to understand their customers, products, and business processes.
The necessity for collaborative research is why the scientific community thinks publication is so important: publication is the main channel of communication and therefore most important tool for the evaluation of ideas. An unpublished hypothesis or theory is worthless because the parts of it that are true do not contribute to the progress of the research community and the parts of it that are false go undetected. Similar considerations hold for non-professional learners: “peer teaching” and communication among learners allow the individuals to adjust their understanding to reflect the group's consensus, thus building collective knowledge. Also, in research and in collaborative learning, one person’s insight advances several people’s understanding simultaneously, but only if the insight is published and discussed.
Collaborative research also compensates for the fragmenting nature of idealization cited above. Collaboration and communication are needed to sum existing studies, with their differing simplifications and different perspectives. Only this sum is what can be evaluated in terms of completeness, coverage, and progress of learning.
Fill out three copies of the Team Data sheet -- it's here.
Don’t work alone.
A partner will help you divide up the work, keep your sanity, buy you a drink, talk through technical issues, keep you on track, double check your writing, and help in a dozen other ways. You will work with your partner for the whole semester: you will have to research together, be confused together, write together, help each other, and present together in public.
Choose a partner who shares similar interests with you. You need a partner who communicates well and who is someone you can rely on to do his/her work on time. Reliability is hard to judge at first sight, so it’s best to work with people you’ve worked with before.
Check your schedules to find a partner who you can meet with in person at least once a week outside of class. Triple check that you can identify times in your schedules when both of you are available to work together in the same place.
Read this topic next: Choose a psychological process.
There are more technical reasons that lead scientists to work with others. Scientists devised a very important strategy to overcome the limitations of individual observation. That strategy is collaboration with other researchers. (Salomon, 1994). Knowledge is produced by whole communities, not by individuals acting alone. The role of the individual researcher is to provide the input (data, hypotheses, arguments, theories) for this process. The objectivity or “intersubjectivity” of scientific hypotheses that Popper (1959) placed so much importance on is only one aspect of this strategy. Comparison of the observations of different researchers can contribute to determining which aspects observed are likely to be subjective or individual and which are not. The same argument is doubly true for hypotheses and theories, which are initially produced from individual intuitions, imaginations, and interpretations of available data. The key to collaboration in learning and research, then, is knowing how to deal with multiple perspectives: how to compare and contrast them, how to evaluate their relative merits, how to accept none as the truth but each as a distinct and valid contribution. Multiple perspective taking leads to more complex and complete ways of looking at things and it also expands the kinds of observations and data that will be useful for checking these perspectives. This is a major improvement over individual learning. The collective evaluation of hypotheses and theories is more complete and more demanding than individual evaluation, ensuring greater reliability of those hypotheses that are accepted. This is just a more systematic reformulation of the prosaic “two heads are better than one” (and two thousand better still).
This is also another reason why simplistic “right” and “wrong” judgments are useless: these judgments assume one true perspective and in so doing, they undermine collaboration. This same approach is making its way into the workplace: companies have seen that having people who are more diverse leads to more ideas about how to understand their customers, products, and business processes.
The necessity for collaborative research is why the scientific community thinks publication is so important: publication is the main channel of communication and therefore most important tool for the evaluation of ideas. An unpublished hypothesis or theory is worthless because the parts of it that are true do not contribute to the progress of the research community and the parts of it that are false go undetected. Similar considerations hold for non-professional learners: “peer teaching” and communication among learners allow the individuals to adjust their understanding to reflect the group's consensus, thus building collective knowledge. Also, in research and in collaborative learning, one person’s insight advances several people’s understanding simultaneously, but only if the insight is published and discussed.
Collaborative research also compensates for the fragmenting nature of idealization cited above. Collaboration and communication are needed to sum existing studies, with their differing simplifications and different perspectives. Only this sum is what can be evaluated in terms of completeness, coverage, and progress of learning.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Krystle on -
I was wondering if we can work in groups as opposed to pairs. Nasrine, Michelle and I have worked together before and the three of us would like to team up for this project.
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Permalink Reply by Mike Dillinger, PhD on -
Thanks for posting your question here.
I've organized the course for people to work in pairs -- each person will be responsible for a different factor. If you work on three factors, the workload is much, much bigger. We'll talk about that more later on in the semester.
In sum, you need to work in pairs this semester.
However, it'd be a good idea to have the third person bring in someone new and all four of you can work on two closely related experiments. The more collaboration, the better.
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Permalink Reply by Michelle Woo on -
What happens to the odd man out, I counted the emails and there is an odd number of people in the class.
-Michelle
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Permalink Reply by Mike Dillinger, PhD on
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There's always someone who adds at the last minute or someone who drops out. On rare occasions, someone decides to work alone.
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