Once again more than a month has gone by my since my last blog post. And boy I’ve been busy, but don’t want to take time here to update you on everything that I’ve been doing. But, a little more than a week ago I met the parents of my Intensive Freshman Seminar students, and the students themselves, for the first time in a classroom in the Kelley School of Business.
And since I said at that time… like I always do… that I would be publishing information about what their kids were doing to this blog, I can no longer procrastinate in writing. And, if I had to choose a way to return to the classroom after 10 months off, IFS would be the way.
This is the third time that I’ve talked the seminar and so you think that I’d be used to the fact that the “I” in IFS stands for intensive. But the time between each IFS session gives me just enough time to forget how draining it can be (and, of course, I’ve gotten a year older!)
But, whew, this has been a whirlwind of a week. Already this week. I have introduced him to the Herman B Wells library, showing them how to check out a book from the closed reserve system in the in the Media and Reserve department, plus they had a tour of the entire library including tutorial of the online databases including the Web of Knowledge research database. For the third year in a row, this tour and tutorial was completed by Telecommunications Librarian Jian Liu. He always gives the freshmen a fantastically interesting tour, and teaches them lots of tools they can use. And, for the third year in a row…I learned something new as well.
But beyond all this, we also talked a lot about attention since it was ATTENTION WEEK. We talk about the distinction between automatic and controlled attention, discussed a bunch of different ways that media psychologists have measured attention in the past–identifying strengths and weaknesses of each of the measurements–and related attention to media variables.
The most fun, of course, is the last day when half of the students… the attention group… get to collect data from their classmates in order to test an original hypothesis that they have come up with during the week. This year the students chose what is actually a common one when I teach this course to undergraduates. They were interested in what the effects of color versus black and white was on attention to video clips. But, they also added something interesting to their expeiment by also asking To the question by also asking whether the presence of sound, as opposed to television clips where the sound has been removed, impacted the attention being paid.
Here they are gathering data to test these hypotheses. They gathered heart rate data and self-reported questionnaire answers. This weekend they have have been busy analyzing that data and creating a presentation which they will deliver tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Britni, Kelsey, Ian, & Zach have fun with media psychology
Ian monitors heart rate data collection during the experiment
Since physiology data collection has to happen one-subject-at-a-time, there were other things we had to line up for the rest of the class to do. So, I have a “canned” attention experiment that I have recycled from a former semester’s class that uses a method called Secondary Task Reaction Time. Tomorrow I’m going to present the results from that experiments after The Attention Group presents their heartrate data.
Jennifer and Garrett participate in the STRT experiment
Oh, and btw, I was able to take advantage of the time the students paid in the lab by snapping a few pictures that I need for my book. (The students were thrilled that their hands will be included in the book…but of course I’ll be getting them to sign waivers!)
Two birds with one stone...a picture for 'how to clean electrodes' for my book!
