Talk Sex wtih Dr. S

A professor at UMSL has begun a YouTube sex advice channel. I had the pleasure to observe her teaching a research methods class and she is excellent in the classroom. While you may bot be able to sit in on her lecture, hopefully this venue proves just as enjoyable:

Award-Winning Science

Yesterday the Graduate School at UMSL and Sigma Xi hosted the annual Graduate Student Research Fair. My poster took first prize ($750) for social sciences! Thanks to my co-authors, collaborator, and mentor for all of their help and input. If you are interested I'll embed a close digital approximation of my poster.



UPDATE: Some of you were having trouble viewing the poster. Try this link.

Homework from The MacGuffin

Recently The MacGuffin asked for evidence of peer-review of a 2007 JAMA article showing the efficacy of Topiramate in treating alcohol dependence. I ran down 10 quotes from some papers citing the work.

1. "Topiramate has demonstrated efficacy in the treatment of alcohol dependence in two placebo-controlled trials." (Garbutt 2009; Johnson et al., 2003; Johnson et al., 2007)
2. "a 14-week placebo-controlled trial of 300 mg per day of the anticonvulsant topiramate reported up to a 16% reduction in heavy drinking days, although the rate of modest side-effects was high." (Schuckit 2009; Johnson et al., 2007)
3. "Medications such as methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone are beneficial for the treatment of heroin addiction and naltrexone and topiramate for the treatment of alcoholism." (Chandler, Fletcher & Volkow 2009 ; Johnson et al., 2007)
4. "The results of this study support the efficacy of topiramate in the relapse prevention of alcoholism." (Baltieri, Dar, Riberio & de Andrade 2008 from Abstract)
5. "Results of published trials are promising, showing efficacy for drinking outcomes and quality of life as well as general safety." (Olmsted & Kockler 2008 from Abstract)
6. "Topiramate is the best studied of the anticonvulsant medications that have been evaluated for the treatment of alcohol dependence. It has been shown to be effective in reducing a variety of drinking outcomes among alcoholdependent patients (see table 3 for
   mechanism of action) in both a singlesite study (Johnson et al. 2003) and in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, multicenter trial (Johnson et al. 2007)." (Arias & Kranzler 2008)
7. "Both topiramate and naltrexone were efficacious in the treatment of alcohol dependence, and the treatment costs were similar. There is a trend for topiramate to be superior to naltrexone on critical measures of drinking; however, the study did not have adequate statistical power to establish this fact." (Florenz et al. 2008 from Abstract)
8. "Topiramate compared with placebo significantly (P <.05 for all comparisons) decreased obsessional thoughts and compulsions about using alcohol, increased subjects psychosocial wellbeing, and improved some aspects of quality of life, thereby diminishing the risk of relapse and longer-term negative outcomes" (Johnson BA 2008)
9. "Interestingly, topiramate – an anticonvulsant compound that blocks AMPA and kainate receptors, in addition to having other sites of action – reduces relapse rates in alcohol-dependent patients and the harm of excessive drinking (Johnson 2003). Moreover, in a recently published study, continuously drinking alcohol-dependent patients reach their abstinence goal significantly faster when treated with 300 mg/day topiramate compared with placebo (Johnson 2007)." (Spanagel & Kiefer 2008)
10. Lastly, it's not a direct quote, but in JAMA 299(4) there are three letters to the editor with negative criticism of the Johnson 2007 publication, and two responses to those ciriticisims (one from Johnson).
    

Johnson, B., Rosenthal, N., Capece, J., Wiegand, F., Mao, L., Beyers, K., McKay, A., Ait-Daoud, N., Anton, R., Ciraulo, D., Kranzler, H., Mann, K., O'Malley, S., Swift, R., & , . (2007). Topiramate for Treating Alcohol Dependence: A Randomized Controlled Trial JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 298 (14), 1641-1651 DOI: 10.1001/jama.298.14.1641

Classroom memory activity

When teaching about memory I use all of the standard activities, where I read lists of words, letters or numbers to my students and have the repeat them back to illustrate serial position effect, chunking, and the passive organization of long-term memory. But this semester a student and I stumbled onto another illustrative exercise.

Lecturing on memory and forgetting and a student questions me:

Student: You asked me earlier what I had for breakfast and I told you a bagel, and you said it was an example of automatic encoding, and it was long term memory, which you said you keep forever. But I can’t remember what I had last year for breakfast…
Me: I think I see what you are getting at, but remember when we talk about forgetting from long term memory we are often talking about retrieval failures; the information is there, you are just having trouble accessing it.
S: Whatev.
M: … How about this: What did you have for breakfast in 7th grade?
S: What? I don’t know.
M: I’m not talking about a specific day, but maybe you can recall just the gist of what you ate.
S: Nope.
M: You do remember 7th grade right?
S: Sure.
M: Do you remember what your school looked like? The Building? The Lunchroom?
S: Yeah.
M: Good. How did you get to school?
S: On a bus.
M: A BIG yellow bus right?
S: Yeah.
M: Can you remember the smell of the bus?
S: Oh yeah, it was weird; the seats smelled.
M: Gross. How did you get on the bus; did it pick you up at your house, or did you walk to a bus stop?
S: I had to walk to a bus stop.
M: And you were the only kid there?
S: No there were some other kids from my neighborhood.
M: Do you remember your house? Your room?
S: Sure.
M: Great! So in your room, in your bed, did you wake up on your own? Or did you mom or dad wake you up in the morning?
S: I had an alarm clock.
M: Cool. Very independent. So you woke up and … you groomed and got dressed?
S: Yeah first thing, I had a perm and had to take care of my hair.
M: I don’t know anything about that. But you do remember what your hair was like. And you remember what kind of clothes you used to wear?
S: I do, I made bad choices.
M: Fair enough. But after you got dressed did you watch TV?
S: No, there wasn’t time in the morning.
M: You might miss the bus? You felt rushed?
S: Yeah.
M: Did you have time for breakfast even?
S: Yeah I had toast with grape jam.
M: Jam and not jelly?
S: Yeah I hated jelly.
M: [To the class] Okay, so in the space of about two minutes we went from “I don’t know” to “Toast with grape jam.” And I think that illustrates several of the concepts we have talked about. First, Student clearly had trouble retrieving information about her usual 7th grade breakfast, not surprising if use the Decay model of forgetting. It is likely that she hasn’t thought about 7th grade breakfast since… 7th grade. Second, by activating other memories from 7th grade we increase the likelihood of activating other memories similar in context, just as suggested by our semantic network model of long-term memory organization. What we did there is also shares many elements of a cognitive interview, like we discussed when we talked about hypnosis, right? We had context, extensive retrieval, varied retrieval, and multiple representations.

I repeated this exercise successfully in each of my four other classes. In each case they went from “I don’t know” to something they were relatively confidant about.

Philosophy of Teaching

I teach at a local community college. Last semester was my first semester teaching and one thing that has stuck out to me is the number of people who have told me about my students. That is to say people say things like, “You must really dumb it down for them” or “Most of SCC students are in remedial English, so don't expect them to read the book, let alone write a paper” or any number of statements of low expectations. It is important to know your audience, and I suspect that is what has motivated these comments. I don't want to prep my lecture based on where students have been when they entered my class, bur rather on where students will go once they leave my class. To that end I have grouped my students (with a guess as to the percentage of each type in my classes) into three outcomes which I use as a guideline for my lecture prep.

Type One – 14 or less years of education (50%)
These students are not going on in higher education. At most they will complete their Associates degree and enter the workforce, but others won't make it even that far. It is likely that my class will be their only exposure to the concepts of psychology presented in any sort of scientific fashion. I think the most valuable information I can give these students comes from the child development section of the course; they might possibly pick-up some useful parenting skills. Very few of my students disapprove of corporal punishment and fewer still consider the impact of exposure to violence in video games, tv, and other media. I would also like these students to come away with enough exposure to 'crank' science to be able to recognize charlatanism. Lastly,this may be the only opportunity to de-stigmatize mental illness and treatment-seeking behavior for this group of students.

Type Two – Non-Social Science Majors (40%)
These students will at some point transfer to a university and complete at least a bachelor's degree, although not in social sciences. In a lot of respects they are similar to Type One; these students may never take another psych course so the above exposures should be just as important to this group. But I think there is great value for these students in learning about learning. If they intend to continue academically then developing effective study habits will be beneficial. When I cover the learning, memory, and IQ chapters I have the opportunity to teach these students about effective study skills and how to use metacognition to enhance their own learning not only in my course, but all of their future classes.

Type Three – Psychology Majors (10%)
These students are going on in psychology. Even if they weren't psych majors when they enrolled in my class, they have been hooked and will continue on if not in psychology then in some other social science. The content of my course is likely of little importance to these students. Everything I teach them will be taught them again in greater detail in a later class. In fact, the only important issue in regards to content is not to sacrifice accuracy for convenience. Intro psych text books are often a bit behind the times, and they tend to over-simplify some concepts and if I didn't expand the curriculum offered by the text then it would hurt these students in the future. These students, like the Type Two students, will benefit from learning how to learn, but hopefully they also learn how to think about psychology. More than just recognizing charlatanism these students should be able to APPLY the scientific method.

There is one more concept that many of my students (independent of type) need to master: professionalism. High School has failed to train them how to comport themselves in a professional setting. To be professional they should attend class on-time every time, they ought focus their attention on the class during class time, they must complete assignments on time, and ultimately they need to accept the consequences of their behavior. On the first day of class I talk about the importance of attendance, I mention that it is rude to use your cell phone in class, and I explain what I mean by due date. Even so attendance hovers around 85%, I see my students text messaging during lecture, and weeks after an assignment is due they ask if they can still do it. Unfortunately due to the nature of professionalism, it isn't something I can teach to a student that isn't professional. My only option is to reinforce the idea that a student's behavior, regardless of motivation (excuse?), comes with consequence. The message I try to deliver to these students is, “You don't have to be here. Not everyone goes to college, maybe this isn't for you.” Last semester this seemed to sink in for some of my students, and at mid-term they made an effort to change their behavior. Being professional shows me that a student wants to be here, wants to learn, wants education to be meaningful.

Of course I would like to think that I have the power to encourage students to move from group to group, but unfortunately there are a lot more factors influencing their outcome than my teaching. So instead I can use these broad-stroke categories to steer my lecture, tests, and classroom activities towards the most valuable experiences for my students. There is no reason my class cannot meet the needs of each of these student types; I'm committed to providing value to all of my students without compromise.

I use a variety of strategies to engage my students in learning. I think the most effective is to use a human voice in my lecture. I try my very best to divorce myself from the institution as I talk. All too often students regard professors as the mouthpiece of academia. Never in their lives (and probably not in yours either) has an institution (corporation, government, academy, etc.) ever said anything meaningful. Whenever I use an example I try to tag it personally (I talk about my dog Ruby when we talk about conditioning), refer to researchers and not just their research (I talk about Watson's personal life when we talk about Little Albert), or at the very least use a real person's experience (We watch this video when we talk about diet and neurotransmitters). I also occasionally use the institution's voice to set-up a contrast. For example after talking about THC and sleep apnea, I'll state, “Of course it is the official policy of your professor and SCC not to condone the use of any illegal drugs.”

A few weeks into class I introduce the in-class group assignment. Generally these involve synthesizing information from both lecture and the book into some deliverable that they can turn in. The first of these assignments is well defined (create a table with the following information...), but it introduces them to self-selecting into small groups, and I explain how they will be evaluated (rank ordered where the best two get 100%, the next two get 90% etc..). But as the semester progresses they are assigned increasingly ill-defined problems to encourage them to work together to figure out how the assignment should be completed. When they are trying to write an essay about how day-care might influence a child's physical, social, cognitive, and moral development they have to understand each of those four domains, how they relate, and the time-course of development before they can even begin to discuss influences.

Lastly I try spend some time discussing how to take notes, how to use the textbook, and how to prepare for an exam. They may get this information elsewhere, but learning how to learn in the context of the actual content of my course will stick better. I'm always shocked when I see students trying to transcribe information from the slide presentation, not using their books in class, and apparently not knowing how to study. It is my intention to weave even more of these study-skills practices into my class in future semesters; it is my goal to see evidence of at least some students improve as students through my class.

The Importance of Operational Definitions

This morning a colleague of mine was discussing a recent survey from Business Week that ranked America's Unhappiest Cities. I decided to use this in my intro classes as a critical thinking exercise to recognize sensationalist media claims and the importance of an operational definition.

So I began by telling my students that St. Louis was ranked #2 on a list of unhappiest cities in America, and asking them what they thought about that. What does it mean to live in the #2 most unhappy city? My students wanted to know who was #1 and who was #3 (Portland and New Orleans respectively). Several students thought that the study must be bogus because they themselves are not unhappy. Finally someone hit on the issue, "What do they mean by unhappy?"

So we listed how we might measure unhappiness. My students had a lot of great examples:

• Depression (number of people diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder)
• Education level
• Sports teams performance (measured in World Series wins)
• Suicide
• Divorce rate
• Unemployment rate
• Obesity

Not a terrible list, but in each case could one make the argument that the measure is both valid (the score means what we say it means) and reliable (the score is 'true' ; consistent). For example with depression (as defined by my students), there is a clear bias based on cultural acceptance of treatment-seeking behavior. The large Hispanic population of the American southwest are less likely to seek treatment for depression (and are thus less likely to be diagnosed), compared to the pacific northwest where there is far less stigma associated with depression and therapy. Incidentally Business Week used a weighted amalgam of depression rates, suicide rates, divorce rates, crime, unemployment, population loss, job loss, weather, and green space.)

This ultimately led to a discussion towards the purpose of such a survey. Should this encourage St. Louisians to engage in marriage counseling? Build parks? Put bars on the windows? Buy some football players? My students decided that the survey did not in fact measure unhappiness and even if it did it wouldn't be a reliable measure that could be used to compare cities. So ultimately it means very little to them. Good for them!

Anyway, here are the "top" 10 unhappy cities:

1. 1. Portland, Or.
2. 2. St. Louis, Mo.
3. 3. New Orleans, La.
4. 4. Detroit, Mi.
5. 5. Cleveland, Oh.
6. 6. Jacksonville, Fl.
7. 7. Las Vegas, Nv.
8. 8. Nashville, Tn.
9. 9. Cincinnati, Oh.
10. 10. Atlanta, Ga.

Compliments from students

This morning I got the following email from the Division Coordinator of Psychology at my community college teaching gig:

"I ran into a girl that was a student last semester in your 101 class. She told me that it was the best college class she has taken so far. She said you are interesting, funny, and share great information about psychology. I thought the same thing when I sat in your class. She did not realize that it was your first semester. Great job!!"

Great news right? Except, I can't just take a compliment. Often times I have heard professors bemoan the course evaluations that students submit. The three common arguments against this process of evaluation I've heard are:

1. Students that get bad grades rate teachers poorly in vengeance.
2. Students evaluate the personality of the teacher instead of teaching ability.
3. Students don't have the qualifications to evaluate good or bad teaching.

I don't know who the student was or what her grade might have been in my class so I can't speak to point 1, but points 2 and 3 do concern me.

One of my teaching philosophies is to be human and to speak with a human voice to my students. I think that allows my personality to come through in class. While I don't have a necessarily strong personality - I don't often say things like, "I'm sorry, I've broken a glass here. Is that expensive? I'll pay for it. I'm sorry." I am a funny guy and a geek, so I think as the semester progresses students get to know my personality and perhaps this student just likes funny geeks.

Then of course, DO my students have the requisite abilities to judge me? I think it depends entirely on the questions that you ask them. I wrote about the SCC teaching evaluations back here, and you can see that I didn't think the questions were very valuable. Here are the equivalent (in that they satisfy the Missouri Senate Bill 389) questions from UMSL:

1. The syllabus clearly expressed the goals, expectations, and the nature of the course.
2. The instructor of this course has given my adequate ways to contact him or her, via email, phone, discussion board, office hours, or appointment time.
3. The course required that I come to class ready and prepared.
4. The instructor provided timely and useful feedback on my academic performance during the semester.
5. This course expanded my analytical thinking, my technical skills, my creativity, my knowledge, and/or my competence.

I think that any student has all the necessary abilities to accurately evaluate all of these items. In fact I'd also say that the first 4 are also proof against personality, and grudges (providing the grudge holder would still be honest). But then I think the answers to these questions would be of little value to me. Question 5 ("Did you learn anything? Anything at all?") is the only one that might mean something to me, but even then the bar seems very low there for me to feel like I did my job if I got anything less than Strongly Agree.

What about compliments like the one I got, that isn't in response to any survey? I'm glad that a student last semester enjoyed my class. I'm glad that she enjoyed it enough to share with my boss who in turn shared with me. But I'm afraid to take too much pride in this positive review lest I am forced to take all negative comments to heart as well. I suspect a number of my students have muttered angrily about my PowerPoint slides, or the rate at which I speak. Maybe they've complained about my tests, or quizzes. Does this mean I should change my style? It seems unlikely that I will even if I should. More immediately should I keep doing what I'm doing because a student liked it? I guess.

So what do you think? Not about what I should do, but rather:

Are the evaluations of a teachers abilities by students worthwhile?