The journey begins. . .

Hello! My name is Harrison Vieth, and I’m a PhD candidate in Psychology. I study language production, specifically the nature of lexical access. While my ego requests, nay demands that I continue with an exposition about how wonderfully accomplished and amazing I am (feel free to insert sniggers as you see fit) what I shall instead write of is a general account of an ordinary day in the PhD life.

Having awoken to discover that I’d had roughly 4 hours of sleep, (due in part to not being able to sleep, but also due to an obsession with a certain video game or two) the immediate concern is the acquisition of coffee. If you saw some disheveled, semi-zombified homunculus of a 20-something year-old shambling about the SBS building or at Merlos last Thursday, that was almost certainly me. As you might be able to tell, I love coffee to an amount that many regard as being slightly concerning if not at a clinical significance just yet.

At the moment, I have several deadlines to meet. The first and most powerful is a marking deadline. I tutor a second-year course, and the first set of assignments has returned and thus we tutors must nose-to-the-grindstone and mark. For the more painfully capable tutors *coughNoniecough* this is the course of a weekend's work. For those of us far less practiced, it takes a week or so, especially given I have a near OCD-like tendency to go back and check things. Over, and over. . . .and over again. While I am told this is a normal symptom of New Tutor Syndrome, it's still painful. Still, the pleasure one gets from tutoring outweighs this, for the most part, save when one must resist the consequent urge to take some kind of non-lethal firearm to my next tutorial in order to more forcefully educate the philistine undergrads in my care of the finer points of concision and clear writing. Of course, I wrote some shockers in my undergrad career and thus my rampant hypocrisy remains checked for the foreseeable future.

I'm also designing my third experiment, still in its infancy as a result of tutor deadlines looming. The nature of the behavioural experiments I run (to be the subject of the next blog post) requires a great deal of fine-tuning the stimulus, and thus this week and the following week will be finalising that. While it does sound like most of what I do involves sitting in front of a computer screen, it's just as tiring in many ways as any other activity, and also just as fulfilling.

Alas, the candle burns down and I must return to my marking, but fear not (if you were afeared in the first place), I shall almost certainly write again in the near future about any number of things, including experimental testing, data analysis, and the various legal proceedings involved in rationalizing a marking-based psychotic breakdown.

-Harrison

Hard Work Has to Happen in the Learners' Minds

This week we were very fortunate to have renowned Harvard physicist, Professor Eric Mazur present three seminars at UQ. One hardcore academic lecture on optical physics (an area for which Eric is a world leader), and two seminars on teaching and lecturing style (another area for which Eric is a world leader). I decided to sidestep the optical physics lecture and attend the two teaching and lecturing seminars because effective communication of science is a skill I’ve recently become interested in.

Eric noticed that, while his students were passing his introductory physics course, most were only memorizing facts and not grasping the key ideas of his lectures. To show his students lacked conceptual understanding, he gave two forms of the same test, which were about content his students should have had a solid grasp; one test in traditional form that could be passed with rote learned knowledge, and the other test in conceptual form that required deeper understanding. What he found was that 40% of his students did really well on the traditional test, but tragically poor on the conceptual test. Only 10% of his students performed well on the conceptual test but, critically, they also performed really well on the traditional test.

Modestly, rather than assuming his students were stupid (a hard case to make about Harvard pre-Med students), Eric began looking at how he could change his teaching style to make it easier for his students to better understand those basic concepts. His eureka moment serendipitously occurred at a hastily-organised study session the panicked students requested after their dismal performance on the test they should have aced. Whilst trying to force the concept into his students’ brains with varying diagrams, some students who did understand the ideas were able to explain it to those who didn’t in terms they could appreciate.

The important discovery was that students who understand the content are also more likely to appreciate the barriers to understanding, having recently overcome them themselves. As an expert who had understood these ideas for more than 20 years, Prof. Mazur couldn’t remember what made them difficult to learn. He said “The longer you teach, the less qualified you become to teach.”

From this, Eric developed his Peer Instruction method, which can be seen here. The method has become hugely popular in the US, where it has been shown to improve learning over twice as much as traditional lecture styles. We are now starting to see similar changes in how UQ lecturers think about teaching.

You can watch Eric’s lecture “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” here and look at his slides here


- Morgan

Are you studying Psychology@UQ and want to contribute to theuqpsycblog??
Send Will an email to find out how: will.harrison@uqconnect.edu.au