Table of Contents
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Teaching philosophy and methods
My primary teaching goal is to encourage students to think and create like expert researchers.
Online publishing of seminar research
Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making
This course encourages students to read advanced scientific literature the same way that experienced researchers do: by making connections with knowledge they already have, and by doing literature reviews to understand unfamiliar concepts.
The readings stretch beyond typical undergraduate material. Students learn to respond to the advanced readings by writing down what they don't understand in order to make those things explicit, and therefore less daunting. Students submit questions to a group document that range from background questions (“What is the ventral striatum?”), to questions challenging studies' conclusions, to questions about studies' practical implications (“How does learning rate impact decision making? If you have a faster learning rate will you be a better decision maker?”).
Students spend one day a week researching the submitted questions and documenting their answers. The answers, including bibliographic references, are compiled and documented online. Other students can then use these web pages as online resources for guiding their own learning and research.
Using neuroimaging methods to understand the relationships between cognitive skills
Neuroimaging meta-analysis assignment instructions
Creating and analyzing data
Video voting
I created a technique that measures students' judgments about perceptual features of a video that they watch together as a class, and then draws a bar graph on top of the video to summarize the class' decisions or “votes.” The technique only requires a cell phone to record a video of the class holding up cards of two colors. The video of the class is immediately blurred to obscure students' identities.
