Background before we begin

A. First of all, welcome. My intention is to keep instructions brief and simple.

B. You are always welcome to ask for clarification. It is helpful to your instructor if you try to ask the class first because often the class can be helpful. So, please first ask a question in slack. If it’s personal, please use my email account

C. It is absolutely crucial that students, teachers, all of us, respect that everybody comes to this class with different experiences, abilities, and intentions..

D. It can be embarrassing to ask for help. Please try to ask anyway.

E. My intention as the instructor is to teach you ways to evaluate quality knowledge and to practice quality thinking and quality writing. The context of this endeavor is going to be in psychology.

F. Computer requirements:

  1. You must have access to a real computer for writing. If you cannot afford a laptop or do not have a laptop or computer please contact me because we actually have free rentals for students.

  2. A tablet or smartphone will be insufficient. It’s fine to do some communication (texting etc) using those tools, but for real writing you’re going to need a real computer or a laptop.

  3. You’ll need to have quality access to the internet. IF you don’t have consistent access to the internet from home, we have loaner hot-spots that you can borrow for free. They should give you internet at home.

G. Software (apps)

  1. A web browser, like Firefox, chrome.

  2. A free Google doc account. If you have Gmail you already have a Google account for documents and spreadsheets. This is a requirement; no other word processing software will be allowed. I have reasons and we can talk about them but unless it is related to a disability accommodation you must be using Google docs.

H. Here is the pattern of the course:

  1. Each week you will be given a list of things to read and it’s list of things to do.
  2. Most of what you’ll do is some type of writing assignment in google docs. I will give you instructions and support for how to do this.
  3. When you have finished the weeks assignment, you will post a link to your work in slack.
  4. Assignments should be submitted in a timely fashion. Friday is the standing due date, with reasonable flexibility.

Week 1 April 1

Summary of what really needs to get done before Monday

I recognize this document has become a bit disorganized. At the risk of making it worse, I thought I could just give a quick summary of what needs doing before Monday here:

Read

  1. The 9 standards of Critical thinking (in the syllabus)

  2. Read/skim Chapter 2 of your textbook. This means you should read the first page and the summary page of the chapter, and then skim the chapter for things relevant to your work or interests. Take notes on what you find. You can put them into the google doc if you want.

  3. Read Schwartz (2008), The importance of stupidity in scientific research

  4. Read This evaluation

Do

  1. Write a synthesis of the 4 sources above (1. the critical thinking standards, 2. stupidity in science, 3. red scare evaluation–the evaluation, not your thoughts, and then 4. chapter 2). You may want to consider a comment about whether you think knowledge is static.

Please do not summarize these articles. Synthesize. Use the lecture just below to help.

Okay..the following is what you’ve already seen before

What do you want to focus on

Think about what you want to learn:

Some topics in the past that I have taught include the following and you may find them useful starting points to think about your own process for this quarter.

  1. Critical thinking
  2. Technical writing new paragraph finding published research
  3. Evaluating the quality of published articles, for example contrasting popular sources from academic or scholarly.
  4. General introduction to the content of psychology
  5. Theories within psychology
  6. Criticisms of psychology
  7. Limits of psychology
  8. Philosophy of science
  9. Working within groups
  10. Psychology as it relates to other disciplines
  11. Power structures
  12. How to have inclusive group meetings
    • what are good ground rules for meetings

Any and all of these above could qualify. The goal here is for us to individually and collectively think of about what you’d like to learn in our time together.

This list is not exhaustive. There’s some things that you may want to focus on or add. Perhaps this might include cognitive dissonance about being a white person and being told that you’ve got white privilege. What are some ways one can think about opening up to that feedback?

Although I have some expert content knowledge in psychology, I don’t know everything. I have my own biases. But I might be someone who can help guide you.

I’m sure there may be things you’d like to learn about and practice and I would be open to hearing those about things, maybe find ways to incorporate them into the overall class.

Read Some stuff

  1. The syllabus

  2. Miller’s law of communication (in the syllabus)

  3. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 (in the syllabus)

  4. The 9 standards of Critical thinking (in the syllabus)

  5. Textbook, chapter 1: What is Psychology?

  6. Dictionary/Wikipedia definitions on:

    *Anthropomorphize

    *Ethnocentrism

Okay, the following items ( 7 & 8) deserve a little bit of explanation on my side, and patience on yours. You may be a very practical sort of person who very much does not like philosophy. Still, without it, we would not have science. It’s True! Do you know what Ph.D stands for? Check it out.

Anyway. While watching these videos, and reading the sources, just down some notes, including reactions, emotions and thoughts, try to track where your mind wanders (if it wanders), also notice when you get distracted, for example, what part of the reading or video were you just watching? And don’t be afraid to keep asking the question ‘so what?’ about any and all content.

That’s the kind of question you can put in your one-document-to-rule, or even ask questions on the muddy point Forum

Also, I hope to make these videos a lot better in terms of production. I think I made them at the beginning of the pandemic and well, bleh.

  1. Watch intro lecture on epistemology

Epistemology 8min

  1. Read about “stereotype threat”. Not stereotypes. There is a difference. You’ll need to find a source or two on your own and be sure to keep track of your sources; include them in your writing as necessary.

  2. Watch video on writing guide

  3. Re-read the critical thinking items in the syllabus

    • Write them in your one document to rule them all and give a one-sentence description of each using your own words.

  4. Read/skim Chapter 2 of your textbook. This means you should read the first page and the summary page of the chapter, and then skim the chapter for things relevant to your work or interests. Take notes on what you find. You can put them into the google doc if you want.

  5. Read Schwartz (2008), The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Do the following

  1. Introduce yourself in #introductions

  2. Take a look at the Getting_started, in particular the menu item Using Google Docs.

  3. Frequently asked questions

  4. Write something about what interests you about psychology in your one google doc..remember, have one document. Be sure to give it a title. Write about things that interest you and ponder whether psychology is related. Don’t write a book report. Be honest, here. I’m not interested in what you think you should be interested. So if you aren’t interested in psych, that’s okay!. Some people take this course because it’s a prereq for other courses. That’s okay!

  5. On the same google document, make a new page, title it, and write some thoughts down to the following prompts.

    1. What is your process for thinking clearly?

    2. How do you know something is true?

  6. Red scare assignment

    • Do this one without over thinking it.
    • add this to your google doc. You can add it as a new page.

  7. Read some of your classmates’ posts and comment on some.

  8. Read This evaluation

  9. Reminder to write down descriptions of the critical thinking standards in your own words.

  10. Write a synthesis of the 4 sources above (1. the critical thinking standards, 2. stupidity in science, 3. red scare evaluation–the evaluation, not your thoughts, and then 4. chapter 2). You may want to consider a comment about whether you think knowledge is static.

Please do not summarize these articles. Synthesize. Use the lecture just below to help.

  1. Put your writing into the ‘one doc to rule them all’. Give that page a new heading, a title. Highlight that title and go to the ‘insert’ menu item and insert “bookmark”. You should see a little blue ribbon and a “link” that you can copy and paste.

  2. When you are done, post to the #week-1 channel by including a link to your document from step 2 above.

Please note that slack has a bug that makes my URL links to channels automatically go to the #resource channel. That means you’ll need to use the slack search bar at the top to find and join channels

  1. Read and comment upon some of your classmates submissions. In google docs, you can highlight any part of their page and then create a comment by right clicking or using the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + alt + m”

  2. Please fill out this Importance of Sexuality Survey. It is anonymous. I do not collect information that can be personally tied to you. If you are logged into your google account, google will show you your email address and say that you can use your account to ‘store’ your work so that you can come back to it. But that’s google and not the survey. I don’t track your email.

  • It’s not required, but it’s helpful for my classes because it is useful to see how surveys are supposed to work.

Note on References and only using URLs

Your instructor will frequently remind you to not rely on URLs when referencing. If the URL is available, you should include it in the reference, but whenever you are supporting a claim with a reference you should fill out the full reference, including the author, the year it was published, its title, and the publisher. The reason is that URLs will change from time to time as this happened to your instructor with the bloom taxonomy link.

Conversation Questions

These are questions that I’d like to discuss in class/zoom sessions. I think that if you’ve done the reading/watching of videos, you may have the ability to contribute to the conversation.

  1. What is the confirmation bias?
  2. What is a workflow?
  3. What value is there in synthesizing information?

Week content in class

Basic Workflow for Critical Thinking and Writing

Introduction to critical thinking and writing

Steps in the critical thinking and writing process

Developing a thesis statement

Structuring an essay

Causal inference in graphs

Correlations and statistics

Week 2 April 8

It’s a pretty dense unit.

Do, Watch, and Read the following

A. Make a note of how much you think you understand about biological influences of psychology. For example, you might simply “I understand 20% of biological influences on our lives”. If you aren’t sure what this means, post a question to the #muddy-point-board. For what it’s worth a lot of students mistakenly interpret this question as “how much does biology cause our behavior”. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking to assess how much you think you understand about biology causing behavior. And don’t over think it. You are just estimating some amount of confidence in your understanding.

B. Pick a behavior; it could be a feeling, an action, a thought, but try to keep it simple (thoughts may actually be too hard) and write a few sentences that explains how biologically it happens. Do this before watching/reading below

C. Layers of Psychological explanation–10 min

D. Biopsych youtube playlist, 10 videos of various lengths

E. Read Chapter 3 of your textbook

F. Skim Nancy Chick, Metacognition

G. Skim Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades

Do the following

  1. Reassess your understanding from above A.
  2. What would you add to your understanding in B?
  3. Ask chatGpt to what the neuronal threshold is, and then ask it what changing the threshold would do to “selective signal transmission”. Ask it questions, challenge it, drill down a bit. Share both your questions and its answers in your google document. Include some of the back and forth between you and GPT.
  4. Whether or not the textbook and videos led to any new learning, identify what you would like to know more about in biological psychology. What is still missing for you? Put this into your one google doc to rule them all by placing it in a new page
    • On that new page, write a quick title like “psycho-biology I’m interested in”
    • highlight that title, and then go to the “insert” menu and insert “bookmark”. You should see a little blue ribbon
    • if you click on that text, you should see a “link” option. Copy that link and…
  5. …share your ideas from # 3 above to the the #week 2 channel—notice this is a clickable link

Please note that slack has a bug that makes my URL links to channels automatically go to the #resource channel. That means you’ll need to use the slack search bar at the top to find and join channels

  1. Read some other posts from classmates and comment about some areas of interest.

In Class/zoom Conversation Questions

These are questions that I’d like to discuss in class/zoom sessions. I think that if you’ve done the reading/watching of videos, you may have the ability to contribute to the conversation.

  1. How does your brain know the difference between real and imaginary?
  2. Where is “information” in the brain?
  3. what metaphors are useful to think about how the nervous system works?

Week 3 April 15

Do, Watch, and Read the following

Please first fill out this anonymous survey on how many hours you spent on class during LAST week: Survey on week 2 workload

A. Like last week, Pick a new behavior–a feeling, an action, a thought, but try to keep it simple (thoughts may work here) and write a few sentences into your google doc that explains how the environment causes the behavior. Make sure it’s different from week 2.

Said another way, explain what is happening in the environment to elicit the behavior. For clarification, you could say last week the biology is how a behavior works while this week you are explaining when it works. Do this before watching/reading below

As an example, consider driving a car down a street and you hit the brakes. The behavior is the stepping on the brake. What environmental stimulus ‘caused’ the stepping on the brake?

This is an example; you should come up with your own.

B. Read/skim Chapter 6 of your textbook

C. Learning theories youtube playlist, videos 1: 2 (this reads as 1 through 2)

D. Video on the law of effect

E. Remaining Learning theories youtube playlist

F. Naik (2001)

Do some stuff:

  1. Reassess your understanding from above, week 3, part A. Can you see what has changed in your understanding? Can you jot down some ideas that shows this new learning? Maybe some vocabulary? Maybe some vocab that is still confusing.
  2. Is your chosen behavior better explained by classical conditioning or operant conditioning? What key feature led you to this choice?
  3. Whether or not the textbook and videos didn’t lead to any new learning, identify what you would like to know more about. What is still missing for you?
  4. Choose a new behavior that you want to change its frequency. Like eating more chocolate. I mean less. Less chocolate. How might you change the environment so that you eat more, damn I mean less chocolate? This is Brian’s example. You should come up with your own.
  5. Link your writing for what you just wrote in #3 and #4 to channel #week-3.
  6. Comment and try to engage with a few of your classmates on this assignment.
    • In particular, try to give feedback–kindly–where you found someone’s writing clear or unclear.
    • Don’t simply say this is clear or not.
    • Share your interpretations of what they wrote. You could say something like “when I read this section, I see a couple of different ways to understand it. Here is 1, here is another. Do one of my interpretations line up with your intentions?”

Please note that slack has a bug that makes my URL links to channels automatically go to the #resource channel. That means you’ll need to use the slack search bar at the top to find and join channels

Week 4 April 22

Please first fill out this anonymous survey on how many hours you spent on class during LAST week: Survey on week 3 workload

Lots to do this week. Buckle up. Get moving.

New layer of explanation: Cognition background

So this week throws us into the deep end of the pool regarding the way that we think about the world.

Probably before human beings have been writing and painting on the inside of caves there has been some quality of activity that we would recognize as “thinking.”

Fast forward to the 60’s when computers began to displace workers in the workplace, the concept of ’computer as a machine” crept into the collective conscious of people across the planet and we began to recognize that in some ways humans have a cognitive ability that might be modeled as a computer.

In other words, during the fifties and sixties, Humanity received a new lexicon for describing things like memory, thinking, and processing information. You could call it the ’information processing model” of the Brain.

Our contemporary understanding of long-term memory is because we first had a computer part called a hard drive. I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but what I want to impress upon you is that a lot of the hypothetical constructs that we use today to describe thinking came about because we invented computers. Yes, we all had some concept of memory before computers. But computers gave us a new metaphor to operationally define how memory might work. Key phrase “operational define”

Once we had a lexicon about computers we then began to use that lexicon to describe humans. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s taught us a lot about the limits of our cognitive powers.

Instructions

To begin, and before you start doing more reading and writing, I want you to first imagine some scenario. Maybe it’s simple like watching a bird. Maybe you can do it right now as you read these instructions. If you want to write it in your google document, you can. But you don’t have to.

While you do this, imagine that you are able to witness your thoughts from the point of view of another person, or perhaps a different side of yourself.

“So, I can see myself, Brian, sitting at his computer writing these words and I notice that Brian looks up at the window and appreciates the leaves in the sun on the Rhododendron outside this room; it was around then that Brian thought to use ‘watching a bird’ as a part of the assignment. He also felt a little like he’d rather be out in the sun but a lot of people need him to finish this. Brian also considered not including that last sentence.”

It might be that you are watching your behavior and then noting the pattern of how/where your thoughts come about; it might be an auditory exercise where you’re able to listen and hear the words you’re saying. Most of you do this naturally, but some of you might not have a lot of experience in observing your own thoughts. This is a meta cognitive exercise.

Do One of the following (Part A)

I am only asking you to think of one of the following. You can write about this material, but you may want to keep it private, stored in another document. Notice that I’m not asking you to post your writings about this imagined scenario, described next.

  • Think about why you might not ask somebody out on a date. A lot of the first thoughts that come to your mind will be relatively broad and vague. A good example of this is going to be a fear of rejection. If you think about this particular example, try to think about a specific person that you do, but do not, want to ask out on a date, and think about the follow-up thoughts that arise when you say “I’m afraid of being rejected”. What comes after “afraid of being rejected?” Play with answers around “what if you are rejected?” you don’t have to put this in your one google doc

  • Or think about somebody you are romantically involved with but are afraid to bring up a topic. I’m not really interested in the topic itself, but what I am interested is to have you write down the obstacles you perceive to be present making this topic difficult, and then to analyze your thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about those obstacles. you don’t have to put this in your one google doc

  • Or, if you are not involved in a romantic relationship, think about a difficult conversation with an authority figure. Something you would like to tell them, But won’t because of what you perceive to be obstacles to that conversation. you don’t have to put this in your one google doc

Again, you don’t have to do all of these, I am asking you to identify 1 of the above and to think about your thoughts. Specifically, which thoughts arise and then think about the cascading thoughts that follow. Asking “so what” might be useful. For example, “I don’t want to ask that person out because I’m afraid they will turn me down.” So what? Because rejection means…. So what? do this a few iterations.

Do the following (Part B)

Biases

  1. Make a guess as to the number of cognitive biases there are. If you don’t know what this means, that’s okay. Guess anyway. Write down the guess in your one google document.

  2. Go to Wikipedia and look up “list of cognitive biases”. Use the full phrase. Now, right down how many cognitive biases you see on the page (estimates are fine…don’t count the actual number!)

  3. Pick 3 of your favorite biases from that Wikipedia list and describe them in your own words; include a link to them along with a proper reference. I don’t have a preference for which referencing style. But URL’s are not enough. They are helpful, but they can die/change. Always include the classic information (author, year, title, publisher).

Read the following

A. Read/skim Chapter 7 of your textbook

B. Read the following excerpt (just below in blue) from the book The Craft of research BOOTH et al. (2016)

Craft of Research Excerpt

Why write our research up?

For some of you, the invitation to join into a expert research conversation may still seem easy to decline but if you accept it you’ll

One answer is that we write not just to share our work but to improve it before we do.

Write to remember

Experienced researchers first write just to remember what they read. A few talented people can hold in mind masses of information, but most of us get lost when we think about what Smith found in light of Wong’s position, and compare both to the odd data in Brunelli, especially as they are supported by Buscovich but what was it that Smith said? When you don’t take notes on what you read, you are likely to forget or, worse misremember it.

Write to understand

The second reason for writing is to see larger patterns in what you read. When you arrange and rearrange the results of your research in new ways, you discover new implications, connections, and complications. Even if you could hold it all in mind, you would need help to line up arguments that pull in different directions, plot out complicated relationships, sort out disagreements among experts.

I want to use these claims from long, but her argument is undercut by Smith’s data. When I put them side-by-side, I see that Smith ignores this last part of Wong’s argument. aha! If I introduce it with this part from Brunelli, I can focus on one more clearly.

That’s why careful researchers never put off writing until they’ve gathered all the data they need: they write from the start of their projects to help them assemble their information in new ways.

Write to test your thinking

But even when they agree that writing is an important part of learning thinking and understanding some still wonder why they can’t write up their research in their own way, why they have to satisfy demands imposed by a community that they have not joined, or even want to, and conform to conventions they did nothing to create.

Why should I adopt language in forms that are not mine? Aren’t you just trying to turn me into an academic light yourself? If I write as you expect me to, I risk losing my identity.

Such concerns are legitimate (most teachers wish students would raise them more often). But it would be a feeble education that did not change you at all, and the deeper your education the more it will change the “you” that you are or want to be.

That’s why it is so important to choose carefully what you study and with whom. But it would be a mistake to think that learning to report sound research must threaten your true identity. It will change the way you think, but only by giving you more ways of thinking. You will be different by being freer to choose who you want to be and what you want to do with your life.

But the most important reason for learning to write in ways readers expect is that when you write for others, you demand more of yourself and when you write for yourself alone. By the time you fix your ideas in writing, they are so familiar to you that you need help to see them not for what you want them to be but for what they really are.

You will understand your own work better when you try to anticipate your readers inevitable and critical questions: how have you evaluated your evidence? Why do you think it’s relevant? What ideas have you considered but rejected?

Do the following Part C

  1. Without using an anecdote, defend this statement: “Multitasking is a myth”. Defend means to use a combination of logic and evidence, so be sure to do a bit of outside reading on the topic. When you do this part of your work, be mindful of the critical thinking standards. This work should be in your google doc.

  2. Link your work to the #week 4 channel

Please note that slack has a bug that makes my URL links to channels automatically go to the #resource channel. That means you’ll need to use the slack search bar at the top to find and join channels

Week 5 April 29

Please first fill out this anonymous survey on how many hours you spent on class during LAST week: Survey on Last week, week 4 workload

Read the following

A. Read/skim Primer for Behaviorism and Semantic networks. This will be a review, basically.

  • skim this but pay closer attention to the semantic sections with the schematics for cars
  • Think of a subject. Maybe it’s something academic like math, biology. Maybe it’s about sports, or in particular a single sport, like (the only one that matters) basketball.
    • in what specific ways would the semantic network be different between a novice and expert? I don’t expect you to know technical terms here (In graph analysis, nodes are the bubbles with concepts, while edges are the lines that connect) but I want you to have an appreciation for how people may differ in terms of their networks. How do experts differ from novices in terms of their networks. Are they more complicated? More lines? Different organization? It’s helpful to think of something you are knowledgeable about because if you are the novice, it’s hard to imagine what the expert knows. If you have a much younger sibling, think about how they approach something that you might be quite good at but they are still learning.

B. Read/skim Chapter 8 of your textbook

C. Read How to Study, By Brian Holt

Do the following

  1. Now that you’ve done the multitasking is a myth assignment,ask chat gpt to defend the claim that multitasking is a myth. In other words, see how GPT would do your assignment.

    • This list is to help you interogate chatgpt:

    • go to chat gpt: https://chat.openai.com/

    • Think of gpt as a person to converse with. Be skeptical of it, so if it says something as if it were all knowing, don’t believe it.

    • Ask gpt about whether cultural differences influence mutltitasking, or perceptions of multitasking. Ask it meta questions. In other words, don’t think of chat gpt as a source of content or correct, objective, knowledge. Think of it instead as someone who does not think critically but has access to a lot of information and can emotionally handle tough questions (because, of course, it’s not human.)

  • And then use the critical thinking standards to interrogate its claims.

  • Have it check it’s own confirmation biases.

  • Highlight and copy the exchange and then paste it into your google doc.

  1. Identify the metaphorical dragons (the dangerous, European kind) that interfere with your learning. Maybe one of them is anxiety about performing well. And this dragon makes it difficult to focus and to filter out extraneous distractions. Or maybe another dragon is the lure of interesting things in your social network making your phone buzz with texts or other activity. Maybe it’s a dragon of inertia, making it hard to start new things. There are many dragons.

  2. After you’ve listed a few (at least 2) of these dragons, what can you do to either slay these dragons, or can you use them, trick them to actually help you learn new material? If you aren’t sure where to begin, you might consider your textbook (ch’s 7 and 8) and to read that material again as if you’ve been given a secret scroll…a treasure map that helps you. Obviously the textbook is not going to give you a simple formula like ” problem x is solved by y”. But if you take this adventure, keep notes as you re-read the chapters. Ask the chapters questions…even if the chapter can’t answer it.

  3. Write down your solutions and post them, or at least the ones with which you feel comfortable sharing in the #week 5 channel

Please note that slack has a bug that makes my URL links to channels automatically go to the #resource channel. That means you’ll need to use the slack search bar at the top to find and join channels

  1. Once you have shared material to #week 5, Right click your post and notice the drop down menu that allows you “Reply in thread”, and tag 3 people in our class by using the @ symbol and their name. Ask them to take a look at your work and ask them for feedback on some part. Maybe it’s your writing–like word choice and/or clarity. Maybe it’s something about your critical thinking. This is hard ask to make of others but try it anyway. Also, because it’s still the pandemic and everything is just hard, don’t fret if people you invite can’t respond. It’s likely that they are just overwhelmed with something.

  2. If you are invited to give feedback to people’s writing, be kind.

    • Remember that they are trying things out and are sharing potentially vulnerable parts of their lives. If you need help giving feedback, send your instructor a /dm and I can help.

    • also, you don’t have to respond to everyone who invites you.

    • If you do respond, think about what was asked of you. Don’t try to solve any problems but instead find ways to ask questions. “I wonder if there is another way for this section to be more clear because I see a few different ways to interpret what you said.” That’s just an example. But the key is ask questions and to not simply say “this is wrong” or something aggressive like that.

  3. Another Sexual information questionnaire: Sexual Assertiveness

    -Like before, it’s optional an anonymous. But because I found errors in my Human Sexuality textbook, I’d like to provide better information to my students while learning a bit about our community college population

Week 6 May 6

On Thursday, May 9, there will be no classes held for the whole college district.

Faculty are expected to be doing other college work. It’s like a teacher’s workshop day.

Which means none of you can be required to attend any class on 5/9/24. For any class in the whole Seattle college district.

Read the following:

Piaget Videos

Brian’s workflow video

Two Videos you could watch if you are still unclear about workflow..they are a bit boring so watch at fast speed.

  1. This one is recent, shorter (~18 minutes), and a general psychology class. The document and video can be found here…it’s a past struggle regarding whether people have a natural or learned fear of snakes.

  2. In my abnormal psych class, a few quarters ago I was asked to show how I might use tools to solve a question. Here is a 36 minute video to that end. You might find it useful to see what I mean by “having a workflow” as a way to think critically.

Do some work:

  • Think about something in the developmental chapter (your choice), like attachment or Piaget (equilibrium), from a systems approach.

  • From a systems point of view, using some of Meadows (Meadows 1999) concepts, explain why upset toddlers go to mom. In a document, write down your ideas.

  • Now go to chatgpt and ask it why toddlers go to mom.

    • ask your question

    • when it answers, use the critical thinking standards to think about its answer. Is there an area that is weak? Ask GPT to explain, to reconcile itself, to consider things it left out.

    • Highlight and copy the chat gpt thread and paste it into your google doc. You might need to edit the formatting a bit.

  • Look at your “dragon” work from the past week again. Consider them from a systems point of view. What is the focal “stock” of the system? In the same document as above, write a bit about how positive and negative feedback loops help you avoid doing work.

Use the jargon correctly

Positive and negative do NOT mean good or bad, respectively. So be thoughtful about what a positive feedback loop is, and what it does.

  • Post your one-document again in the #week6 channel…remember if the link takes you to resources, just used the slack search bar.

Week 7 May 12

This week is a more proper assignment to practice self-reflection, metacognition, and critical thinking. It’s a little bit more involved so I’ve put the instructions into a google document so that this page isn’t overwhelming.

Be sure to ask questions in the muddy-point channel if they come up.

Also, take a look a head for the remaining weeks of the quarter. Lots to do and you’ll need to organize your approach so that you don’t fall behind.

(re)Read/watch some

A. Nancy Chick, Metacognition

Do the following

A. Complete the following metacog assignment posted in a google doc

B. Post to the #week 7 channel, invite 2 people to review your work by using the “@” symbol. So, simply post your URL, and then reply to that post and ask a few people to take look at your work.

Ask them to take a look at your work and ask them for feedback on some part–but be specific. Maybe it’s your writing–like word choice and/or clarity. Maybe it’s something about your critical thinking. This is hard ask to make of others but try it anyway. Also, because it’s still the pandemic and everything is just hard, don’t fret if people you invite can’t respond. It’s likely that they are just overwhelmed with something.

C. If you are invited to give feedback to people’s writing, be kind.

* Remember that they are trying things out and are sharing potentially vulnerable parts of their ideas.  If you need help giving feedback, send your instructor a message and I can help.

* also, you don't have to respond to everyone who invites you.

* If you do respond, think about what was asked of you.  Don't try to solve any problems but instead find ways to ask questions.  "I wonder if there is another way for this section to be more clear because I see a few different ways to interpret what you said."  That's just an example.  But the key is ask questions and to not simply say "this is wrong" or something aggressive like that.

The exercise of inviting people to look at your work gives the author some control on what feedback they’d like to receive, so honor that.

Week 8 Personality May 20

Friday, May 24, is the last day to withdraw from the course. This may be an option for students who are likely to not pass the course by the end of the quarter. If you withdraw, a ‘W’ appears on your transcript and it will not effect your gpa. But after May 24, you will not be able to withdraw.

Be sure to check out Week 11 Gun violence assignment on social psychology

As an assignment, it may be taxing so you’ll want to plan out your next few weeks.

Personality

This week is an introduction to personality.

You will want to read the textbook and to keep some ideas in mind.

The first is that there’s basically four major theories of personality. However, there are others. There are also offshoots and sub theories.

The four major theories that I think of include psychoanalysis (with several sub-types often associated with particular people), Humanistic (with existentialism as a sub-type), Cognitive-behavioral, and finally Trait/dispositional approaches (the Big-5 being the most researched).

The second thing to be aware of is that there are several persistent and likely impossible problems to solve in studying personality. The classic example: “is a behavior the consequent of a person’s personality–like an internal trait system, or is that behavior a result of environmental influence?”

Here are these persistent problems I mentioned:
1. Mind/body– Descartes split body from mind with his “I think therefore I am” bit. Some know this as Cartesian dualism, the viewpoint that mind and body are separate things. Body has matter, mind does not, and therefore not subject to scrutiny. Dualism fosters reductionism, the attempt to discover ‘truth’ by breaking things down into simpler units. In personality, we often talk about motivation and so a question that comes up is whether mind has anything to do with it…but right away, then, you are locked into a dualism.
2. Person vs situation– Both are correct. But for decades this was (and sometimes still is) the big friction within Personality studies. Behavioral psychologists tend to de-emphasize “person variables” as unimportant and insist that situations are responsible for eliciting, shaping, etc behavior. On the other hand, Personologists tend to de-emphasize situational factors as “nuisance variables or noise”. The debate is basically a draw.
3. Nature vs nurture– what is THE cause? Studying personality requires an acceptance of both causes are necessary. Another way to say this is that all behavior is 100% nature and 100% nurture because our biology doesn’t live in a vacuum; our biology develops in an environment and will be sensitive to that environment.
4. Determinism vs freedom– Mostly self explanatory; to what degree do we actually choose our behaviors? Free will is hard to study in the lab and philosophically difficult to prove (I’m trusting what philosophers tell me).
5. Stability vs change– personality traits consistently show stability. However, this does not mean uniformity. Here is one of those places I think one needs to think of interaction effects. So, personality seems to be quite stable after your mid 20’s, probably due to some biological maturation (eg, impulse control), but major life events, traumas, psychotherapy can also bring about some personality change.
6. Reification– treating a hypothetical construct as real. Intelligence is a hypothetical construct. It can be used to predict behavior pretty well, sometimes, for some people, but it’s not a real ‘thing’. Making it real would be to reify it.
7. Extrapolation– this is extending known data into new areas. Lots of science occurs in the lab in order to control variables and to determine effect sizes, but in the end we want to see the degree to which their findings apply to the real world. Often this shows up when studying ‘micro’ behaviors, as in how do neurons actually affect social situations.
8. Diversity– You will see that personality theorists often project their own personality and experiences into their theories. And given a lack of diversity in psychology for the past 100 years it’s fair to say that these theories may be lacking pluralistic values.

Read/Watch

Please don’t skip these following videos/pods–stroke of insight and words. Let me know if the links don’t work for you.

Do the following

  • take the big 5 test here
    • There are 2 versions to choose from, a short and long.
    • You may want to save your output for posterity. The output should include your score on the 5 dimensions (OCEAN) plus 6 sub-tests for a total of 30 results.

      Don’t publish this in your one-doc to rule…You can if you want but it is somewhat private information.

  • In 1- 2 pages, respond to the prompt: “what do we mean by ‘identity’?”
    • If you use chatGPT, do not have it write this for you. I will know because I’ve already given the prompt to it. If you have gpt write the answer for you, I’ll catch and report your plagiarism.
      • my hope is that people won’t cheat like this because there are no points lost for mistakes.
    • You can use chatGPT to help you think about your work. Ask it questions. That is fine. Just don’t let it do the work for you.
    • Be clear about your constructs,
    • use research outside (in addition to the above sources) of the things listed above,
    • support your thinking about what identity means. (support means use the critical thinking standards)
    • use what we’ve covered anywhere in the course.
    • This is an impossible assignment, which means that it’s huge. You can’t do a comprehensive job. You have to pick your approach, decide on what to include or exclude. Just be transparent about it)
  • Post your work in the #week-8 channel
  • Comment with the intent to engage 1-2 of your classmates and their writing.

Another way to think about this assignment: If students take an intro to psych class, should they not be able to reasonably answer the question “what is identity?” Not exhaustively answer it, not write a master’s thesis, but to be able to point to the complexity of the problem while still committing to some conclusion.

Optional assignment on Killmonger

Last quarter I made an offhand comment about killmonger from the marvel movie universe. It was in the context of a need to operational define terms like villain, hero, tragic hero, etc.

I offer it as an optional but different opportunity to think about psychology and to demonstrate critical thinking.

Is Killmonger a villain or a tragic hero?

Again, it’s optional and not obviously connected to Psychology but a reasonable argument that it’s related to personality, abnormal Psych, and social psych could be made. You don’t have to make a connection to psychology, but if you do this assignment, you really should use a workflow and the critical thinking standards.

Week 9 Abnormal May 27

Be sure to check out Week 11 on social psychology

As an assignment it may be taxing so you’ll want to plan out your next few weeks

Abnormal Psych

Abnormal psychology has a lot of hidden dangers. Which means I have a responsibility to call out a couple of things in a way that’s different than past weeks.

First thing is to Beware of the medical student syndrome. This is the tendency for medical students to self-diagnose when learning about new and exotic illnesses. The same thing happens in Abnormal psychology. The profession tries to make diagnosis clear to those who actually make diagnoses. But that means that non-experts will overestimate their own ability to accurately diagnose self and others.

So please don’t. Don’t diagnose yourself and don’t diagnose others. If you think that you or someone you know struggling with a mental disorder don’t try to diagnose them or even offer advice. Instead ask them what they need, and listen.

Read/Watch

  • ADHD youtube primer, about 30 minutes

    • if you ever wondered if you have ADHD, this might be helpful (thought don’t diagnose yourself with just this video. You need a trained diagnostician to do it right).

  • Abnormal Psych Chapter Textbook

  • Efran, Lukens, and Greene (2007) This has some nice controversial and provocative ideas. Not everyone will like them. You’ll need to look this up using the Library’s database.

The specific database is called Pro-quest. This schedule has instructions for doing this.

  • Lecture on Diathesis Stress Model 15 minutes

  • Lecture on how anxiety is about survival 7 minutes

  • Optional Lectures on depression 50 minutes’ish

  • Optional case study interview of a person suffering from Schizophrenia 7 min

  • Questions to ask yourself when thinking about abnormal psychology

    • What is normal versus abnormal? What does the textbook say? What is missing?

    • What dominates your thinking about human motivation? Is there a particular psychological theory that you tend to gravitate to? For instance, are all things biological? Cognitive? Do you feel a need to simplify?

    • Remember earlier in the quarter when I had you watch the systems within psychology video. This video was a brief introduction to the fact that human motivation is layered. Certainly there are biological reasons for why we do what we do, but there’s also learning histories, cognitive processes, personality variables, but also social influences. All of these things are happening all of the time. So somebody says that they’re depressed, do you have a tendency to say oh there’s something biological wrong? Socially wrong?

    • Keep in mind: how do we measure abnormal behavior?

    • Who has the power to say one thing is normal versus another? Does that power come from cultural norms? Somewhere else? Do we give up this power? Are we aware we have some power?

    • When a diagnostician gives a diagnosis, who do they serve?

Do some stuff

  • Respond to anything above. Write maybe 2 or 3 paragraphs. Yes, this is light.

  • Share your writing with the Channel #week9

  • Comment on 2 or 3 of your classmates work.

Week 10 June 3

Light week.

I would like you to point to examples in your google document where you have tried a new workflow technique.

For this, Workflow does not include getting yourself rested and calm.

Workflow is about improving quality of thinking. So, what have you tried this quarter to improve this quality? Can you point and explain the method used to reduce your confirmation bias?

Did you use a workflow to check for other biases? Or to catch common mistakes that you make? Or was it a workflow that got you to use one of the critical thinking standards more effectively?

Yes? Great! Copy your example from your google doc and paste it into your week 10 section of the google doc.

You may need to explain what you did because your final submission might the ending draft of work you did behind the scenes.

That’s it. No need to post it to a channel, just get it into your google doc.

Week 11 june 10

This week is a bit different as I’m giving a lot more instruction given the potentially provocative content.

Will still have the “read stuff, do stuff” but most instructions will be found here:

1. Assignments are here

2. Final Self-reflection

Do this final reflection last, after you’ve finished your work. You can not get a grade for the class unless you finish this reflection because it is here that you will give me your course grade.

3. All work should be completed by end of day, Wednesday June, 12 2024

Appendix

Critical Thinking

The closest thing to a rubric we may have in my class is a list of critical thinking attributes. You can find them in the syllabus here.

Though the critical thinking attributes are found there, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about critical thinking attitude, but they would include things like patients, humility, curiosity, etc. They are just as important but not something I focus on in this class.

Some Intro videos on Critical thinking

Here is a simple Introduction to critical thinking, broadly

It doesn’t go into detail about the critical thinking standards found in the syllabus; maybe a video on that will come later.

Using the library

The library has set up a simple library guide for our class. You can find it here: Abnormal Psychology library guide. I

Note: Don’t pay for articles

One important word of advice is to never pay for a scholarly article. If you go online and use Google, or even Google Scholar to find online sources, you may be directed to the publication that will charge you a large amount of money to access just one article. So don’t do that.

Generally there are ways to get articles through our library, so don’t pay for articles.

To get started with our readings, you’ll need to use our Library (online, of course) to obtain many of the articles.

Finding journal articles is a skill that gets better with practice. This happens to be why Librarians are so helpful. They’ve actually been trained so if you can’t find an article, it’s okay to ask librarians for help.

In fact, here is how you can get help from North Seattle’s library staff.

Relationship of an article to its Journal

Using hierarchies helps us organize information. Journal articles, or for that matter the file directories on your computer, work somewhat like an address for a person’s home. There are several different parts that give us information to track down and locate whatever it is we’re looking for, be it a computer file, or Journal article. Basically, a journal article has the following components, some of which may be familiar to you :

  Database (of periodicals)
    Periodical (eg., magazine, newspaper, scholarly journal)
     Year (of publication)
       Volume Number
        Volumne Issue number
         Page Number (optional, often unnecessary)
           Article Title
              Author

So, to find an article, you’ll need to know the parts above. When you are given a list of references, or citations, nearly all of the information needed above is given to you. What is not given, or at least is done implicitly with web searches, is access to the top part, the database.

Here is a typical citation:

Author(s). (year of pub). “Article Title.” Periodical title. Volume Number (issue number).

The information in a citation isn’t presented in the same hierarchy as above, but all of the necessary parts are there.

Here is an example citation (reference) for something we may read. Can you identify the periodical?

Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, Mitchell Greene. 2007. “Defining Psychotherapy: The Last 25 Years Have Taught Us That It’s Neither Art nor Science.” Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2).

Most of the items in the list above are self-explanatory. I want to focus a bit about periodicals.

Note on formatting citations: underlining publication titles

In print, publication titles are italicized. I have a very hard time noticing that subtle font.

When you submit a written manuscript for printing, publication titles are underlined because traditionally manuscripts were typed with typewriters, and to be able to type italicized words required an entire additional alphabet represented in the hammers. So, underlining was how you could emphasize a word, and the printer–a physical person–could notice the author’s formatting intent and correctly publish the final product in italics.

It’s a bit different now with our computers, obviously. Still, I have a hard time seeing italicized words and will occasionally use underline.

So, sometimes I’ll underline pub titles, sometimes I’ll italicize. I have no rule on this. I am chaos manifested. Beware.

Periodicals

These are just the names of the major publication. The New York Times, is colloquially known as a newspaper but technically it is a periodical. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology is also a periodical.

When we search for articles, we have to first know which journal, or periodical, owns that article. So it is a little counter intuitive but once we have identified an article we would like to read, we have to first find out whether or not our College has access to that periodical.

To do that, we have to use our colleges periodical locator.

Finding a journal using Periodical locator

Periodical locator

Notice the first link within North’s Article page. It should say “Periodical Locator”

There are many databases, inside of these databases are pages of journals, and inside those journals are articles.

We need to use the periodical locator to determine which database houses which periodical. With that, we can then open up that periodical and get the article

Note on ‘free’ articles and tuition/fees

Part of the fees that you pay as a student are used to pay subscriptions for these periodical databases. We have a small, but pretty good selection. Major universities have much larger collections due to their size and tuition/fee structure.

So in a way, you are not actually getting this for free because you are paying for library access. That’s the benefit of taking classes from a college. If you were not an active student, you would not be able to see many of these articles.

So, download them all!

Here’s the main point:

I’ve given you a list of Articles to read. To read them, you must first find them; some will be out in the internet, some will be in our schools’ databases. So, use the information I’ve given you to find out which location (database, Wikipedia, google, google scholar) you’ll need to search to obtain the full article. You will start by using the periodicals locator tool.

Let’s use that Efran, Lukens, and Greene (2007) article.

  1. Go to North’s Article page and click on the periodical locator.

  2. Type in the periodical for Efran’s piece.

You will see a link with the periodical’s name. Go ahead and click on this but beware of the next instruction:

  1. Once you have clicked on that link you may want to start searching within that publication. But do not do that. Instead, notice a little bit further down the search box you should see something that says “View online” and beneath that you should see something that says “proquest research library”. It’s this piece we need.

That Proquest research library is the database that you’ve all paid fees to access. So you need to remember that database name.

  1. While remembering that database name, you need to go back to North’s Article page.

  2. Notice what is presented here. You can see Periodical locator, but notice “A to Z” list of databases. (You might also notice just below two links; one to academic search and the other to Proquest).

North’s Find Periodicals
North’s Find Periodicals

  1. Click on “A to Z”

  2. You might notice that there are 67 databases that North Seattle has premium access to. In our case we’re going to be looking for the proquest direct database. And we can either click on the letter “P” or we can just type in proquest direct.

Note on Popular sources

You may also notice the little tag “popular” next to proquest link. That’s an indicator that the articles are not peer reviewed and so aren’t exactly cutting edge science. Even though this particular journal we are looking for, Psychotherapy Networker, is flagged as a popular type, it is a place for therapists to share their thoughts on the profession so there is a lot of value in it.

For help in distinguishing the different types of sources, the library has some guides:

  1. Opening Proquest from your home, or remotely, you will need to validate your credentials. In other words, you need to prove that your are in fact students of North Seattle before you can continue, which is why you’ve been prompted to give your last name and student ID number. Once you do that you’ll then be able to see inside of the proquest database. Then you can now search for the article.

  2. You should see you simple search box, where you can enter in important bits of information. I often start with the author’s last name, in this case, Efran,and then some unique identifying feature of the article. A few key words of the article title, or perhaps the full article title will be useful.

But notice that next to the text boxes there are drop down menus. You need to use those, otherwise the search engine will just search for your terms anywhere in the document and will provide too many ‘hits’. Instead, you should indicate ‘Efran’ as author, and “defining” in the document title. (of course, you could search any way you like).

When you search for those two terms in their respective fields, you will get two hits and one of them is the article we need. You should notice that it is a full text, not all databases provide full text documents. But in this case it’s a full text. You can either print it or read it online.

Yay. Now you can find the other articles.

A quick video of the process

Anatomy of a journal article

Title

Abstract

Introduction

Lit review
hypothesis

Methods

Participants
Materials
Procedure

Results

Discussion

References

References

BOOTH, WAYNE C., GREGORY G. COLOMB, JOSEPH M. WILLIAMS, JOSEPH BIZUP, and WILLIAM T. FITZGERALD. 2016. The Craft of Research. 4th ed. University of Chicago Press Books. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo23521678.html.
Efran, Jay S, Michael Lukens, and Mitchell Greene. 2007. “Defining Psychotherapy: The Last 25 Years Have Taught Us That It’s Neither Art nor Science.” Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2).
Meadows, Donnella. 1999. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” In. The Donella Meadows Project. http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/.
Naik, Payal. 2001. “Behaviorism as a Theory of Personality: A Critical Look.” http://personalityresearch.org/papers/naik.html.
Schwartz, Martin A. 2008. “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.” Journal of Cell Science 121 (11): 1771–71. https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.033340.