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6650 results in Educational psychology

Page 144 of 333

  • 10 - The Arrangement of Abilities

  • from PART III - THE ALGORITHMIC CONFLUENCE
  • José Hernández-Orallo
  • Book:
    The Measure of All Minds
    Published online:
    19 January 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 259-282

  • Summary

    No classification of the mental powers has been universally accepted.

    – Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)

    IN THE PREVIOUS chapters we have focused on tasks and their difficulty. In a way, difficulty can be seen as the height of a task. Arranging tasks by their difficulty is an insightful way of analysing the proficiency they need and how discriminating they are, in order to choose items, compare subjects and determine aggregate indicators. To complete what could be referred to as a ‘task theory’, we will now deal with the breadth of a task, its pureness and how tasks can be composed and related to each other. From these relations we will investigate the notion of cognitive ability and how these abilities could also be arranged. The approach in this chapter basically replaces empirical correlation between tasks and abilities by a non-empirical notion of similarity, using AIT. This is not done with the description of the task, but again with the description of its acceptable policies, using information distance or the previously introduced notion of difficulty.

    FACING THE TASK CONTINUUM

    When we are interested in one particular task, we can define a test using that task. This would be perfectly right from the psychometric functionalityoriented point of view (e.g., if the task is required for a job), as we discussed in Chapter 3. This is natural from an evolutionary fitness standpoint (e.g., if the task happens in the species's environment), as we discussed in Chapter 4. Similarly, it would fit well the task-oriented stance in artificial intelligence (e.g., if the task corresponds to a particular application), as we discussed in Chapter 5. In the end, the set of infinitely many possible taskswould lead to infinitely many tests. However, deriving a cognitive profile for each creature in the machine kingdom in these terms would be mostly useless to determine how an agent is going to behave in a different situation. In other words, working at the level of particular tasks has no explanatory power or predictability beyond the tasks for which the agent has been evaluated.

  • 9 - Commonly Misused Words

  • from Part II - Presenting Your Ideas in Writing
  • Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Karin Sternberg, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 176-199

  • Summary

    This chapter explains the meanings of some of the most commonly misused words in student papers. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part deals with meanings of nontechnical terms. Dowling (2008) provides an extensive overview of misused words, and Garner (2009) provides a complete dictionary of American usage. The second part of the chapter deals with meanings of technical terms. The psychological dictionaries and encyclopedias described in Chapter 3 provide much more extensive lists of psychological terms.

    NONTECHNICAL TERMS

    1. adapt, adopt. To adapt is to accommodate, to adjust, to bring into correspondence. To adopt is to embrace, to take on, to make one's own.

  • a. Organisms adapt to their environment.

  • b. Children adopt the attitudes of their peers.

    • 2. adopt. See (1).

    3. affect, effect. Both words can be used either as nouns or as verbs. An affect is an emotion or something that tends to arouse an emotion. An effect is a result or outcome of some cause. To affect is to influence or to have an effect on something. To effect is to accomplish or to bring about.

  • a. His display of affect in response to the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) picture seemed artificial and contrived to gain the psychologist's sympathy.

  • b. The effect of the experimental treatment was negligible.

  • c. Shoddy procedures affect the outcome of an experiment.

  • d. She was able to effect a change in behavior by desensitizing the patient to snakes.

    • 4. aggravate, irritate. To aggravate is to intensify, to heighten, or to magnify. To irritate is to annoy, to inflame, to provoke.

  • a. Don't aggravate his frustration by telling him that he answered all the questions incorrectly.

  • b. Experimenters who deceive subjects often irritate the subjects.

    • 5.allusion. An allusion is an indirect reference. An explicit statement about X is not an allusion to X.

  • a. The first experimenter made an allusion to a reward for exceptional performance, but she never came out and directly told the subject that the subject would receive a reward.

  • b. The second experimenter told the subject he would receive a reward for exceptional performance. (He did not allude to a reward.)

The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
  • A Guide to Success for College Students
  • Robert J. Sternberg, Karin Sternberg
  • Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017
  • Tailored specifically for undergraduate students, this Companion offers uniquely comprehensive coverage of the topics necessary for successful communication in psychology, making it a valuable resource for research methods and introductory psychology courses. Readers will learn how to effectively plan and write papers in accordance with the latest style guidelines from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition; present data in posters and talks; and evaluate their own and others' work. The clear writing style and reader-friendly format, meanwhile, allow students to absorb information easily, even when reading chapters selectively or out of order. The book includes numerous up-to-date examples drawn from career experiences to engage students and help them apply what they've learned to forward their own careers, while questions encourage them to think more deeply about larger issues in the field, preparing them for future research.

  • 14 - Communication Abilities

  • from PART IV - THE SOCIETY OF MINDS
  • José Hernández-Orallo
  • Book:
    The Measure of All Minds
    Published online:
    19 January 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 370-391

  • Summary

    For tongues were an invention that men sought to communicate amongst themselves, and express one to another their concepts.

    – Juan Huarte, The Examination of Men's Wits (1575)

    HUMAN LANGUAGE AND INTELLIGENCE are thought to have evolved together. Several degrees of intelligence and other cognitive abilities are found in animals and AI artefacts, but fully fledged intelligence has only been found when some language proficiency takes place – and vice versa. Despite the relevance of language, hitherto we have tried to consider assessment tools that do not require language, by a combination of the abstract character of many non-verbal psychometric tests and the interfaces found in animal cognition and several areas of artificial intelligence. In this chapter we finally turn the spotlight on communication abilities. In psychometrics, many tests incorporate tasks for verbal abilities, and verbal factors have been found in many test batteries. But, what happens when we apply them to AI systems?Will the tests be falsified for computers? If so, can we overhaul the evaluation of communication abilities in a more principled way, using situated tests, where the transmission of orders, concepts, facts and policies is required, or perhaps through the use of artificial languages, as has been done with primates? Given the challenge, we will mostly focus on understanding how language comprehension, acquisition and construction may affect evaluation.

    THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION

    From the perspective of the social contexts seen in the previous chapter, communication is nothing but a sequence of actions involving two or more agents. An agent uses ‘communicative’ actions to influence other agents’ behaviour. If successful, the effect can develop into a conspecific being set alert, a predator being scared, a child being educated, a partner being decoyed or a citizen being convinced to change her vote. If the receiver is also able to respond, then communication becomes a social game, which can be co-operative or competitive – or simply exploratory. Under this view, most animals and computers are capable of some sort of communication. Indeed, in biology, animal signals are understood in this way, where communication goes much beyond the transmission of information towards the realm of manipulation (Dawkins and Krebs, 1978; Smith and Harper, 2003).

  • 6 - Planning and Writing the Experimental Research Paper

  • from Part I - Planning and Formulating Papers
  • Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Karin Sternberg, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 88-131

  • Summary

    When research psychologists talk about writing a paper, they are talking about a lengthy and complicated chain of events that includes a great deal more than just reporting research results. In this chapter, we outline these events from start to finish:

    1. Planning your experimental research project

  • ■ getting an idea

  • ■ selecting independent variables

  • ■ selecting dependent variables

  • ■ deciding on between-subjects and within-subjects variables

  • ■ deciding how data will be analyzed

  • ■ selecting participants

  • ■ choosing experimental materials

  • ■ choosing a means of presenting experimental materials

  • ■ writing directions

  • ■ deciding on a means of scoring data

  • ■ writing a consent form

  • ■ writing a debriefing sheet

  • ■ getting approval from the institutional review board

  • ■ conducting a pilot study

    • 2. Executing the experimental research

    3. Data analysis

    4. Reporting the experimental research

  • ■ title

  • ■ author's name and institutional affiliation

  • ■ abstract

  • ■ introduction

  • ■ method

  • ■ results

  • ■ discussion

  • ■ references

  • ■ appendix

  • ■ order of sections

    • PLANNING EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

    Getting an Idea

    The basis of any good research is a viable idea that results in a study that contributes to the current state of knowledge. However, getting ideas, and especially getting good ideas, often turns out to be one of the hardest parts of research. If you need help forming ideas for your research, please read Chapter 2.

    Selecting Independent Variables

    After you have come up with an idea, you need a way to test it. To test the idea, you need one or more independent variables. In random-assignment experiments (i.e., experiments in which participants are randomly assigned to groups), independent variables are those variables that are manipulated by the experimenter. In an experiment to test people's susceptibility to persuasive communications, for example, possible independent variables include (a) amount of exposure to persuasive communications, (b) content of persuasive communications, and (c) level of agreement between participants’ initial attitudes and the position advocated by the persuasive communications. Once you have chosen your independent variable(s), you must decide how many and what level of them to use. For example, you might include in a persuasibility experiment three levels of exposure to the persuasive communications (no exposure, 10 minutes of exposure, and 1 hour of exposure) and two communications (one message dealing with capital punishment and one message dealing with compulsory use of seat belts in cars).

  • Preface

  • Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Karin Sternberg, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates is intended for college students seeking inspiration and definitive guidelines for better scientific communication and success. The book covers topics such as misconceptions about psychology papers; rules for writing literature reviews and experimental papers; how best to make use of the Internet in research; content, language, and style guidelines; commonly misused words; guidelines for data presentation; standards for evaluating papers; preparing posters; and how to write talks and papers.

    Some readers will work their way through this book from cover to cover. Others will read only selected chapters. For the sake of the latter readers, we sometimes have repeated in later chapters material mentioned in earlier chapters. If a point is relevant to a chapter, we include it to ensure that readers can learn it.

  • 7 - Intelligence and Algorithmic Information Theory

  • from PART III - THE ALGORITHMIC CONFLUENCE
  • José Hernández-Orallo
  • Book:
    The Measure of All Minds
    Published online:
    19 January 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 175-200

  • Summary

    It would be nice if we could define intelligence in some other way than “that which gets the same meaning out of a sequence of symbols as we do”.… This in turn would support the idea of meaning being an inherent property.

    – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

    WE CAN HOLD a heated discussion about what mathematical theory of the second half of the twentieth century is most explanatory about the world. My stake is algorithmic information theory (AIT). AIT has shed light on various important questions such as what simplicity is, what a random number is, where the limits of mathematics are and how inductive inference can work. But what does AIT have to say about intelligence and its measurement? For good or for bad, AIT contaminates everything, and intelligence will not only be different, but a prototypical example. Of course, there are pitfalls and hurdles in AIT, and this third part of the book becomes more technical as a result, but we will not be able to dowithout AIT from now on. In this chapter we will introduce the main concepts of AIT with illustrations of how cognitive systems – ants or humans – are pervaded by the main ideas in AIT. As a first application of AIT, we will see how to generate cognitive exercises that are very much like those that appear in many IQ tests. This will unveil what these tests really are.

    INFORMATION AND ALGORITHMS

    Nuances apart, there seems to be general agreement in the view of cognition as some kind of information processing. But what is information processing? Shannon's information theory connects the notions of information coding, probability and communication, but the notion of ‘processing’ is diluted, as the coding procedures are performed in an idealistic way, as mathematical functions. In cognitive systems, we have much more than coding and communication. How are behaviours executed, modified and transmitted? How many resources are required for each behaviour in a given organism? What we know is that some behaviours are deeply coded into the DNA, retrieved, transformed and deployed into the phenotype. Likewise, other behaviours are composed into neural (or non-neural) control systems, stored, retrieved and deployed back again. In all these cases, there is some kind of computation involved.

  • 13 - Identifying Social Skills

  • from PART IV - THE SOCIETY OF MINDS
  • José Hernández-Orallo
  • Book:
    The Measure of All Minds
    Published online:
    19 January 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 341-369

  • Summary

    There be three degrees of this hiding and veiling of a man's self. The first, closeness, reservation, and secrecy; when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is. The second, dissimulation, in the negative; when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not, that he is. And the third, simulation, in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be, that he is not.

    – Francis Bacon, Essay on “Simulation and Dissimulation” (1718)

    EVOLUTION INVOLVES SEVERAL organisms and species struggling for resources. The resulting ecosystems foster environmental changes for which adaptation is required. If real environments include other agents, and several types of interaction, from competition to co-operation, should not evaluation tasks be social by also including these agents and interactions? However, by including other agents in a test, their evaluation becomes dependent on the other agents’ abilities and their interaction in such a multi-agent system. While this looks circular, it can be turned into a recursive population-based approach, much like evolution has done. But social skills can also be seen in terms of the policy acquisition process as introduced in Part III of the book and the developmental perspective of the previous chapter. Different degrees of ‘mindmodelling’, imitation, manipulation, learning by demonstration and even self-modelling can be understood – and, eventually, measured – in this way.

    WHAT IS DISTINCTIVE ABOUT SOCIAL CONTEXTS?

    Social contexts are characterised by the existence of relevant interactions with other agents (conspecifics or not). Behaviours seem to be very different in these scenarios, since appropriate actions must contemplate what other agents are doing or are expected to do. More precisely, there is a continuum of contexts, being more or less social. For instance, giant pandas follow a solitary life and barely interact with their conspecifics (except for mating or marking their territory).

  • 7 - Ethics in Research and Writing

  • from Part I - Planning and Formulating Papers
  • Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Karin Sternberg, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 132-146

  • Summary

    Ethics is of utmost importance when doing research and later writing about it. There are many ways to get tripped up ethically in both research and writing. This chapter summarizes some of the pitfalls and gives you advice as to how to avoid them.

    RESEARCH ISSUES

    A number of ethical issues arise in psychological research (as well as in medical and other research). Some of the main issues involve deception, pain, the ethics of research on animals, and confidentiality.

    Deception

    Sometimes, for research to work, participants must be kept unaware of the purpose of the research until it is completed. In some cases, however, psychologists have used extreme forms of deception. Stanley Milgram (1974) led participants to believe that they were delivering painful electric shocks to another person, when in fact they were not. When Milgram carried out his studies, researchers were generally not required to obtain advance approval of their plans to conduct a psychological investigation. Another ethical issue arises when researchers pay participants to indulge in a vice, as when researchers pay alcoholics to drink to study their drinking behavior. Today, deception is permitted in research only when the benefits clearly outweigh the costs.

    Informed Consent

    Before participants begin their involvement in a study, they are required to give informed consent to participate in the research. In the informed-consent procedure, the individuals are told what kinds of tasks they may be expected to perform and what kinds of situations they may expect to encounter, with specific qualifications on the use of deception. They are also told that they may withdraw from the study without penalty. It is unethical to run a study without informed consent. For children or others who are not capable of giving fully informed consent, it is necessary to obtain informed consent as well from a parent or other guardian.

    Experience is the Best Teacher

    Bob knows a tenured faculty member who planned a series of experiments and decided informally to test some pilot subjects in order to fine-tune his materials in advance of submitting them to his IRB. The IRB caught wind of what the faculty member was doing and made a formal accusation of academic misconduct against him. He ended up losing his privilege of testing subjects for an extended period of time.

  • 2 - Eight Common Misconceptions About Psychology Papers

  • from Part I - Planning and Formulating Papers
  • Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Karin Sternberg, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Psychologist's Companion for Undergraduates
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 10-25

  • Summary

    Students often have misconceptions about the writing process and characteristics of good papers that effectively prevent them from writing as good a paper as they possibly could. Here are eight common misconceptions you should be aware of before you even begin writing:

  • 1. Writing the psychology paper is the most routine, least creative aspect of the scientific enterprise, requiring much time but little imagination.

  • 2. The important thing is what you say, not how you say it.

  • 3. Longer papers are better papers, and more papers are better yet.

  • 4. The main purpose of a psychology paper is the presentation of facts, whether newly established (as in reports of experiments) or well established (as in literature reviews).

  • 5. The distinction between scientific writing, on the one hand, and advertising or propaganda, on the other hand, is that the purpose of scientific writing is to inform, whereas the purpose of advertising or propaganda is to persuade.

  • 6. A good way to gain acceptance of your ideas is by refuting someone else's ideas.

  • 7. Negative results that fail to support the researcher's hypothesis are every bit as valuable as positive results that do support the researcher's hypothesis.

  • 8. The logical development of ideas in a psychology paper reflects the historical development of ideas in the psychologist's head.

    • Misconception 1. Writing the psychology paper is the most routine, least creative aspect of the scientific enterprise, requiring much time but little imagination.

    Many students lose interest in their research projects as soon as the time comes to write about them. Their interest is in planning for and making new discoveries, not in communicating their discoveries to others. A widely believed fallacy underlies their attitudes. The fallacy is that the discovery process ends when the communication process begins. Although the major purpose of writing a paper is to communicate your thoughts to others, another important purpose is to help you form and organize your thoughts (Pinker, 2014).

    Reporting your findings in writing requires you to commit yourself to those findings and to your interpretation of them, and it opens you to criticism (as well as praise) from others. It is perhaps for this reason as much as any other that many students are reluctant to report their research.

  • 6 - The Boundaries against a Unified Evaluation

  • from PART II - THE EVALUATION DISCORDANCE
  • José Hernández-Orallo
  • Book:
    The Measure of All Minds
    Published online:
    19 January 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2017, pp 152-172

  • Summary

    [Edsger Dijkstra] asked me what I was working on. Perhaps just to provoke a memorable exchange I said, “AI”. To that he immediately responded, “Why don't you work on I?”

    He was right, of course, that if “I” is more general than “AI”, one should work on the more general problem, especially if it is the one that is the natural phenomenon, which in this case it is.

    – Leslie Valiant, Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World (2013)

    IN THE PREVIOUS three chapters, we have seen three very different approaches to the evaluation of behaviour. Psychometrics use well-defined test batteries, usually composed of abstract culture-fair problems or questionnaires, different from everyday tasks. Comparative psychology also presents tasks to animals, not necessarily so abstract, but careful attention is put on interfaces and motivation, with rewards being key. Artificial intelligence evaluation is significantly different, using benchmarks and competitions. What happens if we use definitions, tools and tests from one discipline to evaluate subjects in other disciplines? How often has this been done and advocated for? Why has it not worked so far?

    THE FRAGMENTED EVALUATION OF BEHAVIOUR

    There was a time when a certain fragmentation existed between psychology, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence. However, with the increasing relevance of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the boundaries between these disciplines have well been trespassed and new areas have appeared in between, such as artificial life, evolutionary computing, evolutionary robotics and, human-machine interfaces, developmental robotics and swarm computing. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for the evaluation of behavioural features. The preceding three chapters present different terminologies, principles, tools and, ultimately, tests.

    Table 6.1 shows a simplified picture of some of the distinctions between psychometrics, comparative psychology and AI evaluation.

    Each discipline is extremely diverse. It is very different if we evaluate a small child or an adult, a chimpanzee or a bacterium, an ‘intelligent’ vacuum cleaner or a reinforcement learning system playing games. Hence, the simplification would be turned into distortion for other differences, which are therefore not included in the table, such as what is evaluated (individual, group or species), whether the measurement is quantitative or qualitative, how difficulty is inferred and the relevance of physical traits in the measurement (e.g., sensorimotor abilities).

Page 144 of 333