185
Beyond Standard Lectures
Participation in Experiments and Reflection
on the Meaning of the Data
We give students firsthand experiences with cognitive phenomena discussed in the text
and class meetings by having them participate in online and in-class experiments.
Participating online prior to class provides concrete experiences of phenomena before
discussing them, thereby enhancing meaning and retention of the material, whereas
participating during class accomplishes the same thing while increasing interest and
engagement. In both cases, students are acutely interested to see how the results came out.
The main benefit of these activities, however, is promoting the development of critical
thinking by getting students to make predictions and interpret the results once they are
presented in class. In this section, we review the types of experiments used for out-of-class
experiences and in-class demonstrations and illustrate how we make use of the data to
enhance critical thinking in class.
Implementation of Activity
For online activities, students either participate in selected experiments from the
commercially available CogLab 2.0 (Wadsworth, n.d.) or in tasks we have created and
hosted ourselves. Access to Wadsworth’s online CogLab can be purchased individually, or
it can be bundled with various textbooks at a reduced cost (e.g., Goldstein, 2005, which
we have used on more than one occasion). The CogLab Web site lists individual labs by
topic, and Goldstein’s text indicates relevant labs for different topics. Most of the labs
relate to basic cognitive phenomena (e.g., perception, imagery, episodic memory, simple
verbal reasoning) so we have created our own lab exercises to demonstrate more complex
cognitive phenomena not covered by CogLab, such as nonverbal reasoning, text compre-
hension, and skill learning. Table 16.1 presents a sample list of topics, the relevant labs,
and their relative popularity; both Wadsworth and locally developed labs are listed. To
promote critical thinking, we introduce the paradigm and theoretical background for a
particular experiment and then ask students to make predictions about the results. After
presenting the results, we interactively discuss their interpretation in light of typical,
sometimes competing theories. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) false-memory
paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) and the Stroop (1935) task are
two classic cognitive situations we have effectively used as online CogLabs as well as in-
class demonstrations.
False memories come in various shapes and sizes, but in all cases they are recollections of
experiences that never happened. Properties of the memory system that make it extremely
powerful, enabling quick interpretation and storage of events and efficient recollection of
memories for distant and previously irrelevant experiences, also make it susceptible to
distortions of various kinds. Theorists argue that schemas serve to help with the interpreta-
tion and storage of experienced events as well as subsequent reconstruction of memories of
those events when they are “retrieved.” These properties and mechanisms are easily demon-
strated using the DRM paradigm, which is based on Roediger and McDermott’s (1995)