- Hi, I am Dana Malone and I teach
in the Cedar Rapids Iowa area, at Kennedy High School.
And I have been teaching for about 18 years,
and AP Psychology and other behavioral science electives
have been part of my schedule for all 18 years
of that teaching.
- Hi everyone.
My name's Codey Fickes.
I teach AP Psychology.
I've been teaching for four years
at Palmyra High School in Palmyra, Pennsylvania.
- All right.
I am gonna start
by giving us a little bit of background on this lesson.
This lesson is a three-day lesson on Cognition.
And when you look at the lesson
it's broken down for different timing structures,
'cause I know various schools do things
on different types of schedules.
We covered three main areas in this lesson:
cognitive processes, problem solving,
and judgment involved in decision-making.
And within each of those areas
is a really great content outline
and really great activities that can be used
in a number of different ways.
- I worked mainly on lesson one which is titled,
Cognitive Processes Involved in Understanding Information,
and lesson one is really all of the background information
that students need to know about
how our cognitive and thinking
and decision-making system works.
All of the concepts and prototypes and all
of the ways that we mentally represent our world,
they need that information in order to go on and study
and learn about some more complicated topics in cognition;
like the availability heuristic, confirmation bias
and other biases and processes in judgment
and decision-making.
I have three activities in my lesson.
The first is just a good introduction activity.
It's called,
"Is a Hotdog a Sandwich?"
Where students are going to have
to just quickly argue whether or not that a hotdog fits
into their category of what they consider a sandwich
or whether a hot dog is something different.
Which is great to then jump start the lesson
and begin talking about concepts and the different types
of concepts, and how we represent our world
through mental representations and concepts.
My second activity is called,
"Name That Concept".
So, this can be done either at the beginning
of the lesson or after talking about the different types
of concepts where students are given a list of items
and they have to guess what concept they belong in.
The first set of things
they get are probably things they are not as familiar with.
Things that might fit into multiple categories,
or things that they have never heard of.
So they're gonna struggle a bit
with that first list until
they work on that as much as they can,
until they turn it over
and see the other side of the worksheet.
And they see a list of information in the list
of items and concepts that
they are probably much more familiar with,
that fit into the surprise
at the end is both lists,
there are items that fall into the exact same categories.
So for example,
nephritis falls in the same category as asthma.
Students are probably much more familiar
with asthma as being a disease
and not as familiar with the concept of nephritis
which would fall into the same concept.
And my last activity
in the first lesson is a commercial analysis
of a commercial that is called, "Like a Girl".
This is a great activity to bring it all together
and to kind of answer the question of, "So what?"
Why is the study of cognition important,
and why is this idea of concepts important?
And it allows students to take what they've learned
about the idea of a concept and our mental representations
and see how it applies in the real world and how
it can then be a way to jumpstart
their study of things like stereotyping and prejudice
and availability heuristic
in later topics by applying it to a real world setting
and analyzing a commercial that involves issues of gender
and sexuality, and how that is a construct of our cognition
and our mental representations of the world.
- Hello.
My name's Cedar Reiner.
I am Professor and Chair of the Psychology
and Neuroscience Department here at Randolph-Macon College.
I'm eager to join you
on your lesson today with your students
on Problem-solving in Cognitive Psychology.
I love teaching the section on problem-solving
in particular because it gives students a chance
to gain a window into their own mental processes.
They can go from the activities
of riddles or video games or laboratory tasks,
and see their own mental process at work
and the things that change their mental processes
and the things that affect their mental processes.
They also can go from that to how cognitive scientists
and cognitive psychologists study the mind
as it solves problems.
One of my favorite class activities
is the remote associate task
in which students see three words like this;
show,
life
and row,
and they have to decide what fourth word is associated
with each of those three words.
In this case,
the answer would be, boat.
And students as they look at those three words
and think through the possible associates,
they can get a sense of the mental process in which they run
through the possible associates and find the answer.
The nice thing about this task is that
it can vary in difficulty
and it can give students a little window into which words
are more associated with other words.
And again, reach out to other topics in psychology
and the mental process of solving problems.
So, thank you for your attention.
And I hope that you and your students
enjoy exploring Cognitive Psychology
through Problem-solving.
- The section that I worked on the most was section three.
And that section mostly looked
at Judgment Involved in Decision-making Processes.
And my first activity that I covered was looking
at student fears, having them rank their fears,
and then comparing those
to the actual main causes of death in the United States.
And it's a really fun activity
for students to compare what they're actually scared of
versus what is actually showing harm.
It's a good opportunity to introduce availability heuristic
or to have them determine
which of the heuristics it might be.
It can also be used to collect some data and analyze data;
so it can be used in a number of different ways.
The second activity was a "Guess My Pattern" activity
where students are given a pattern
by their teacher and the pattern can be a number pattern,
something like 1, 2, 3, 2, 4, 6, as an example.
And they in turn have to guess what the pattern is
and rank their percent confidence.
As the teacher walks around the room,
you tell students if they're right or not
and then they can keep on guessing.
And oftentimes their confidence level starts out really high
and as they don't get it,
don't get it,
that confidence level starts to drop.
You can start to give them hints and so forth.
And it's a great example again
to either introduce overconfidence, to have students go in
and determine which problem-solving
and judgment error might be involved here,
or collect data, use as a lab, et cetera.
And the third activity is actually my personal favorite part
of the cognition lesson plan.
And it is applying the cognitive biases and other judgment
and problem solving terminology to their actual school.
How do they see these things happening
in their school and how can they help students
and teachers overcome those types of problems?
It is a great activity.
Again, as a review of those terms
it can be a great formative assessment.
So, students can actually then in turn
use it to make some differences within their school.