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Overview
of Technology Project #1:
- The Need for a New
Writing Assignment in an Undergraduate Psychology Course.
I have been teaching a
course on the Psychology of Adolescence for seven years
at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. During those
seven years I have developed several different
assignments to assess student understanding and written
expression and I continue to try new ideas. I
especially like assignments that allow students the
opportunity to apply their newfound knowledge from class.
Numerous instructors' manuals suggest having students
interview individuals and then apply information from
class to those interviews. However, I have been reluctant
to use such an assignment for two reasons. First, ethical
considerations must be taken into account when
interviewing people for a psychology course and when
analyzing their responses using psychological theories.
Second, students can easily fabricate interviews without
the instructor's knowledge. Therefore, the use of already
published interviews (such as those appearing on the
Internet) assures that students will not inadvertently
treat individuals unethically and will not fabricate
information.
- Incorporating
Technology into College
Teaching.
The current project utilizes
published "diaries" on National Public
Radio's"Teenage
Diaries" Web site. The
"Teenage Diaries" consist of tape recorded experiences
and thoughts by eleven different teenagers. The edited
recordings were originally aired on National Public
Radio. Currently, audio versions and transcripts of
the eleven diaries are on the "Teenage Diaries" Web site.
The eleven teenagers differ substantially in their
backgrounds and experiences, thus providing students with
information about individuals very different from
themselves. Each student must choose one of the diaries
to listen to and read and then must use six main
developmental psychology theories in an analysis of the
diary. In this way students learn to apply theories
to real-life examples, become familiar with the different
theoretical orientations, and view life situations from
multiple perspectives. Besides using technology to access
the teenage diary, students can use technology for the
written and visual presentation of their paper. Fifteen
percent of their grade on the assignment is allocated to
creativity; therefore, technology can also be put to use
in their creative expression.
Overview
of Technology Project #2:
- The Need for
Professional-Looking Conference Posters.
After years of using
scissors, construction paper, and glue to make conference
posters, I finally felt the need to produce posters that
were professional-looking, rather than looking as though
I recruited grade-school children to make them. I
attended a workshop on the UM-Ann Arbor campus that
taught me how to scan images and text into the Adobe
Illustrator program so that the entire work could then be
enlarged into a 3 foot by 5 1/2 foot poster. For a fee
the university then printed out the one-page
professional-looking poster.
Overview
of Technology Project #3:
- A Study of
Educational Software.
Part of the MITTEN project involved
having us become familiar with different educational
software packages and then evaluating the software for
its usefulness and appropriateness. As I perused the
educational software for young children, I noticed that
some of the software had very stereotyped images of males
and females. This inspired me to conduct systematic
research investigating gender role stereotyping in
educational software for young children. This is a
research topic that has not been previously explored. I
wrote a proposal and received funding from the university
to carry out the project with the help of two
undergraduate research assistants. We are currently
conducting a content analysis of 49 highly rated software
packages. The findings will then be submitted for
publication in an academic journal.
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