psy week1 post
MODULE 2
Social Psychology and Education
Social Psychology, 5th edition
© 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company
Pygmalion in the Classroom
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson published a study in 1968 called Pygmalion in the Classroom, examining the effect of teacher expectations on the intellectual development and achievement of students.
Increases in IQ scores seemed to indicate that teachers’ expectations for children operated as a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Intelligence: Thing or Process?
Incremental theory of intelligence
The belief that intelligence is something people can improve by working at it
Entity theory of intelligence
The belief that intelligence is something people are born with and can’t change
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How to Tutor: The Five Cs
Control
Challenge
Confidence
Curiosity
Contextualize
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Culture and Achievement
Why do Asians—especially Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans and their Asian-American counterparts—tend to show above-average performance on academic tasks?
Are they intrinsically smarter than people of European culture?
There is no good evidence that people of Asian heritage have a genetic advantage over Americans of Western origin.
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Confucius and Theories about Ability
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Blocking Stereotype Threat in the Classroom
Certain minority groups, such as African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, have lower average IQ scores and lower academic achievement than either Asian-Americans or European-Americans.
Women and minorities often perform more poorly on ability tests because of stereotype threat, the fear of confirming stereotypes about the abilities of their group.
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Blocking Stereotype Threat
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FIGURE A2.1
BLOCKING STEREOTYPE THREAT
Mean GPA scores in core courses the year after some students experienced an affirmation intervention (by being asked to write out their most important values). Initially low-performing black students improved their academic performance if exposed to the intervention.
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Social Fears and Academic Achievement
College is a social challenge for those who are first-generation college students—the first in their working-class families to pursue education beyond high school.
Researchers concluded that there is a mismatch between the values of working-class students and the new college environment—a mismatch that could impair academic performance.
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Teaching with Entertainment-Education
Entertainment-education
Media presentations that are meant to both entertain and persuade people to act in their own (or society’s) best interests
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Statistics, Social Science Methodology, and Critical Thinking
Taking statistics courses and science courses that emphasize research principles is an excellent way to start being able to use those principles for solving everyday life problems and for critiquing media accounts of scientific research.
Courses that teach those principles in the context of analyzing real-world events promote critical thinking to an even greater extent.
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