Abstract 3C

Saturday, July 8 4:55pm

On-line demonstration experiments as experiential learning

Margaret Grant margaret_grant@sfu.c
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

Assigning participation in demonstration experiments is common practice in experimental or psycholinguistics courses, under the assumption that experiencing relevant methods and phenomena adds to student learning. This project explores students’ experiences of on-line experiments in an 82-student, first-year cognitive science course. Here we focus on a language phenomenon, the categorical perception of phonemes (e.g., Liberman 1957). We ask how the experience of participating in a demonstration experiments impacts students’ ability to relate their conscious experiences to research in the field, even if they may never conduct experiments themselves.

The exercise design roughly followed Schenk and Cruikshank’s (2015) model of experiential teaching, the Co-Constructed Developmental Teaching Theory. This model proposes five components of an experiential exercise: Framing, Activity, Direct Debriefing, Bridge Building and Assimilation. The experiment activity was framed by the instructor/author. Experiments were presented on-line on a freely available web platform. Direct Debriefing was done in pairs following the activity along with a written summary of the phenomenon of interest. Students submitted answers to debriefing questions that will be presented as qualitative data. Bridge Building was achieved by the presentation of class results in class along with opportunity for discussion. The extent of assimilation into autobiographical memory will be assessed through a reflection survey near the end of the course that included qualitative and quantitative components. 

Preliminary results indicate that students found the exercise to be novel, interesting and informative. However, debriefing responses highlight the need for the Bridge Building portion of the exercise, as only about half of student pairs were able to accurately summarize categorical perception prior to the Bridge Building component. Crucially, some students related what they had learned about phonetics and categorical perception to their experiences, for example with the minority languages and accents they encounter in their daily lives.