• Question: With the prize money, what sort of sessions/ experiments would you conduct? (Before letting students come up with their own ideas)

    Asked by anon-351186 to Hannah, Birsu on 8 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Hannah Fawcett

      Hannah Fawcett answered on 8 Mar 2023:

      I would involve students in designing the research! Lots of small group discussions with a ‘student research team’ would help you to learn about the research process as we work together to design research project. I’d love for us to work together to find out about students’ knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and career plans in forensic psychology and jury duty. You could then work with me to collect the research data from your wider peer group and feed back the results afterwards. This would give you a chance to gain research assistant experience and have some active learning on the topic. It’s important that my input is beneficial to you students!

    • Photo: Birsu Kandemirci

      Birsu Kandemirci answered on 9 Mar 2023:

      I do a lot of research in an area called “Theory of Mind”. You might have heard of it before, it means our ability to understand other people’s point of view. It can be complicated to ask children to explain whether they understand other people’s perspectives though, especially if they are very young. For this reason, our experiments put them in situations where they need to guess what others would do in certain situations. This experimental procedure is always an interesting one, so this would be one of the tasks I would demonstrate to the students, and then explain the theoretical idea behind it. I’ve also conducted other cognitive tasks such as inhibition tasks (where two puppets tell children what to do and they should listen to one and ignore the other, a bit like the “Simon says” game) and some language tasks where they need to distinguish between the meanings of “I think” and “I know” before they decide who is more sure of the information they share. All these tasks are very child-friendly and also fun for students to learn about. So I would probably use these tasks before I ask students to come up with their own experiments based on what they have learned during the session.

      Are you familiar with any of these tasks? Do you think you would enjoy a session like this, or do you have any suggestions for me? I’m not sure if you can reply to this message, but I would love to hear your ideas too!

Comments

  • Photo: Greta

    Greta commented on :

    I have spent the last year working with school pupils in designing projects around citizens science. I would support students in designing their own project. I would then use some of the money to employ a graphic designer to disseminate the findings to multiple audiences, so that all students could access the information. I have put some of the images from a recent project that students designed in my gallery of photos.