Psychology as a Natural Science

Weekly learning lab design as Head TA

University: Western University
Course Code: PSYCHOL 1002A

Role: Head TA

Designed weekly active learning activities, and coordinated a team of 25 other TAs as I prepared them to facilitate these lessons to approximately 50 sections of around 40 students each.

Lessons

Introduction and Making Constructs Measurable

This lab will serve as an overview of Learning Lab policies, alongside the first activity on the topic of operational definitions. During this lab, students will also be put into groups -these will remain their groups for the duration of the semester.

Introduction to Neuroanatomy

This lab introduces the brain by examining some of the major structures. Students will be expected to take a leading role in research to appropriately identify the structures in the models.
The case study activity further provides an opportunity to explore some seminal findings in Neuroscience, as well as have a better understanding of functional neuroanatomy.

Nature and Nurture

The goal of this lab is to help students understand the roles of both genetics and environment in shaping who we are. Students will participate in several activities, in which they will discuss:

The strengths and limitations of behavioral genetics and heritability studies.
How heritability of intelligence (the proportion of genetic variation to individual variability in intelligence) increases from childhood to adulthood.

Measuring Sensation

This lab is aimed at getting students acquainted with how psychologists attempt to measure sensation objectively. Students will be tasked with conducting their own psychometric experiment and plotting a figure to visualize their data.

Don’t Spill Your Drink!

In this lab, students will experiment with the size-weight illusion and then compare the magnitude of the effect to when procedures are introduced to attenuate this effect. Finally, we will discuss the nature of illusions, and how previous life experience or other types of mental shortcuts can often lead to conflicts between material reality and perception.

Learning I

In this lab, students will work with Sniffy the virtual rat, to learn principles in Classical and Operant conditioning.

Learning II

The main role of this lab is to expand upon the previous one, where we discussed principles in Classical and Operant Conditioning using the Sniffy Pro software. Not in complexity, but in meaning. We want students to be able to relate all that is learned in the classroom, which is based on laboratory experiments, to their own daily lived experiences.

Memory in the Lab

This week we are using the topic of memory as the context through which we will practice working with individual and aggregate data.

We will also practice how to visualize data to demonstrate different effects of interest.