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My profile as project supervisor

This page is to hold my profile as a project supervisor, especially a supervisor of undergraduate level 4 maxi projects.

General areas

I am teaching a course on Positive Psychology. I have not yet thought of projects I want to do myself in that area, but would consider supervising a student in the area.

However I have quite often supervised projects in areas I knew nothing about, if the student has come with a specific idea and not required detailed technical knowledge from me but general support and someone to discuss their ideas with. (A recent example was theory of mind in ravens in Edinburgh zoo.) In fact these have been some of the best projects I've supervised. (But no left-over clinical psychology wannabes please, especially when it is a general interest area but not a specific project.)

Specific topics 2012-13

• Producing a test for students of qualitative understanding of psychology. Another way of putting this is: can we invent a simple method that students should apply to every bit of psychology they read, that summarises the importance of a study in 1 or 2 sentences? Most only remember the "effect": i.e. the mean effect: they remember nothing of the variation. Even better, what kind of critical points should you routinely look for and remember?

• Reflection e.g. keeping a learning diary. Several studies have shown that students required to do this get sig. higher exam marks. Can we replicate this? What kind of thinking is prompted, and why don't students do this automatically?

• Expectation effects on learning in education. A number of studies have shown how a tiny intervention, sometimes only a few words, change a learner's performance instantly and enough to change their grades. They use a number of different theories for this. Can all these be explained as expectation effects, and how might we apply this?

Specific topics 2011-12

• Producing a test of qualitative understanding for psychology. Hestenes developed a test (the "FCI" = force concept inventory) for physics at A-level / level1 HE that eventually showed that most HE students could pass complicated looking physics questions with calculations, but couldn't answer very simple questions that required qualitative understanding. This so shocked some academics (when they used it on their own classes) that it eventually led to the biggest, most powerful changes in teaching yet reported in the literature. Could we do something similar for psychology? It seems negligent not to try ...

  This ref. gives a brief account of the method (many later papers discuss results and developments):
  Halloun,I.A. & Hestenes,D. (1985) American Journal of Physics vol.53 no.11 pp.1043-1048
  The question for the project is: can we invent an analogue for psychology? What are the things that psychologists take for granted, but students may not pick up at all quickly, even if they pass exams? Not anecdote but the spread of human performance? ....

• Do a convincing test on whether and how the AAW website improves student writing.

• Investigate experimentally what reduces student anxiety: e.g. discussing problems, discussing solutions, being made aware of support services, ....

Specific topics 2010-11

• There's a very promising project in progress offering students online self-help for basic writing skills (since staff mostly refuse to help, yet students know they want to get better). The feedback seems great, but a direct controlled test would be good. So at least three kinds of project: a) controlled experiment, using the materials, seeing whether students' writing actually gets better if they study these materials (vs. just practising); b) collecting data from students in departments that have this installed: what are their attitudes, do they think they are getting better at writing, ....; c) What do students in general feel about such self-help facilities for skills such as writing/
• Summer projects: I may also have some summer studentships on education topics.
• Ditto for a spin-off offering self-help on basic maths (actually numeracy) especially for psychology students doing stats.
• I now have a contact in the university counselling service . who expressed some interest in co-supervising projects. These are unlikely to involve contact with clients, but to study things such as how useful the service seems to be to third parties such as academics; or running experiments designed to cast light on the peculiar properties of dialogue in counselling (e.g. that it is all about one person, and not about reciprocity as in normal conversations).

Specific topics 2009-10

• Dweck's "mindsets", and related studies.
• Peer assisted learning; study groups (what makes them really valuable, or not).
• What aspects of group work matter for learning?
• I'm interested in a project (following up on one this year) on: when will students who don't know each other nevertheless spontaneously collaborate on a task, and when is their judgement right or wrong as to whether this will improve their task performance? What role does shyness play (if any) in this?
• I'm collaborating with Jaye Richards, a teacher in a secondary school on the south side, who has demonstrated major learning gains using a VLE in her classes. There will be more research to do on what exactly the important features of her new method are, perhaps following up a classroom observational project. See here and here.
• How does feedback to students actually work? Is it really as important as the literature believes? is it always important, or just in some circumstances? When it helps, what are the conditions e.g. having a 2-way conversation not just a set of written comments?
• Creating (developing, piloting, testing) workshops for students that increase their study skills, exam skills, justified self-confidence in their knowledge and ability as students. I have done a few of these: many more would be good.

Still wider general areas

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [this page]
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