Blaine F. Peden

A Measure of Critical Thinking About Practice

This article describes a measure that assesses ability to think critically about whether to adopt a treatment method. The measure is called PRIDE1 (Principles of Reasoning, Inference, Decision-Making and Evaluation). PRIDE1 takes about 80 minutes to administer an emotional audiovisual argument and to obtain written responses. Scoring each response takes expertenced raters from 2 to 10 minutes. Pearsons r interrater reliability on 5 trials range from. .78 to 96. There was no statistically significant correlation between responses on PRIDE1 and research knowledge, as measured on the Kirk-Rosenblatt Research Knowledge Scale. This study suggests that there may be little or no association between research knowledge and ability to think critically about practice.

Data Graphs in Introductory and Upper Level Psychology Textbooks: A Content Analysis.

In this article, we report a content analysis of data graphs in introductory and upper level psychology textbooks. Three raters classified data graphs as either line, bar, scatter, 100%, or picture graphs. The results indicated that (a) only 5 types of data graphs appear in psychology textbooks, (b) the number of data graphs per page varies considerably in both types of textbook, and (c) comparisons of observed and expected frequencies revealed that proportions of 100% graphs were greater in introductory textbooks and proportions of scatter graphs were greater in upper level textbooks. We discuss implications of these findings for teachers of psychology and authors of undergraduate psychology textbooks.

Effects of Reward Magnitude on Key Pecking and Eating by Pigeons in a Closed Economy

Three experiments examined the effects of reward magnitude on key pecking and eating by pigeons in a closed economy. In Experiment 1, one deprived pigeon and two nondeprived pigeons key pecked on increasingly higher fixed ratios to earn access to food for the remainder of the session. In Experiments 2 and 3, deprived pigeons working in a closed economy key pecked on either six fixed-ratio or two variable-interval schedules to earn access to one of three short durations of feeding. All pigeons initially key pecked more frequently as the ratio (or interval) size increased or reward magnitude decreased. In Experiments 1 and 2, the point of maximum key pecking varied directly with magnitude of reward and occurred at similar prices (number of key pecks per gram of food eaten). Key pecking on interval schedules also varied inversely with reward magnitude; however, maximum key pecking was sustained over a wider range of prices. The implications of these results for economic models and regulatory models of learned performance and the concept of ratio strain in a closed economy are briefly discussed.

Assessing student's critical thinking skills and attitudes toward computer science

This report describes several evaluation procedures used to assess the effectiveness of a newly-developed introductory computer science curriculum. The authors describe the development of a tool to evaluate changes in students attitudes toward the computer science discipline. The process used to develop this survey is presented, along with several interesting preliminary results. The authors also describe the use of an existing tool in the evaluation of the development of students critical thinking skills.

Teaching the Importance of Accuracy in Preparing References

This article outlines and evaluates a technique for teaching students to recognize and prepare references for four types of works commonly used in research reports. Subsequent performance on the reference section of their research reports earns either an A or F grade (after Crown-Hillix, 1988). This technique helps students learn to prepare accurate reference lists and appears to sensitize them to other aspects of APA style.

Learning about Microcomputers and Research

This article describes (a) student use of the microcomputer before, during, and after an experiment; and (b) the benefits that students derive from learning about microcomputers, in particular, and from conducting research, in general.

FACES in the Lab and Faces in the Crowd: Integrating Microcomputers into the Psychology Course

This article describes an exercise that teaches students about methodological issues concerned with making reliable observations of behavior. After learning Ekmans (1972) Facial Affect Scoring Technique from a microcomputer program simulating expressions of emotion, students recorded the facial expression, gender, and age of people in natural settings, computed interobserver agreement scores, and submitted a laboratory report. This exercise generated much discussion about research methods, transferred skills from the classroom to a research setting, and illustrated our view that the microcomputer is a new tool that supplements, but does not replace, existing instructional techniques.