Integrative Literature Review

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology Sometimes a Demo Is Not Just a Demo: When Demonstrating Cognitive Psychology Means Confronting Assumptions Marianne E. Lloyd Online First Publication, April 16, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000192

CITATION Lloyd, M. E. (2020, April 16). Sometimes a Demo Is Not Just a Demo: When Demonstrating Cognitive Psychology Means Confronting Assumptions. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000192

PEDAGOGICAL POINTS TO PONDER

Sometimes a Demo Is Not Just a Demo: When Demonstrating Cognitive Psychology Means Confronting Assumptions

Marianne E. Lloyd Seton Hall University

Recent cross talk between cognitive psychology and education has yielded an onslaught of articles, books, and demonstrations to improve application of basic cognitive principles to educational settings. This essay will describe an example of how one of these demonstrations can also illustrate potentially incorrect assumptions about stu- dents. Specifically, a highly effective demonstration on the negative effects of task switching on performance also revealed assumptions about language automaticity and neurotypicality. Rather than avoiding these concerns, such demonstrations, in addition to highlighting cognitive phenomena, can also be a springboard to explicit discussions of issues of assumptions that may have implications for inclusion.

Keywords: demonstrations, assumptions, task switching

Several years ago, I started using a classroom demonstration from The Learning Scientists (Wein- stein, 2018) to demonstrate the impact of task switching on performance. In this demonstration, participants pair up and then time themselves per- forming three tasks. First, each person recites the alphabet from A to Z. Then each counts from 1 to 26. For the final task, the two previous tasks are com- bined (i.e., 1-A, 2-B, 3-C . . . 26-Z). The single tasks of reciting the alphabet and counting typically takes less than 10 s, whereas combing counting and the alphabet often takes 1–2 min. There is usually laugh- ter at people’s ability to speak with lightning pace for just letters or numbers, but there is often a very different, much quieter tone to the room for the interleaving task. During this third task, one can usually see the students using a variety of strategies to manage the difficulty of combining the two lists— closing eyes, plugging ears, using fingers as spatial markers, getting encouragement from their partner, and sometimes even giving up. In this way, it is a

very successful demonstration of the difficulties of task switching versus engaging in a single task.

I have implemented this demonstration in my one-off lectures for first-year students on im- proving college performance as an activity on the first day of many of my other classes to justify my no– cell phone policy and in faculty development events to encourage bringing cog- nitive psychology findings to pedagogy. It works beautifully every time. Although the stu- dents show some level of frustration, faculty especially groan at the task switching condition, and I remind them this can help build empathy to the difference between how we feel about material (crystal clear and fun) and a student’s experience (muddy and bleak). Students are readily able to understand that things that are easy on their own because of automaticity be- come difficult when combined. Overall, it was a perfect demonstration as far as I was concerned to show that easy is not always as such.

However, this summer, when I again pre- sented the demonstration as part of a program for boosting first-year student success in col- lege, I realized that some of my assumptions about it might not always be correct. First, I had always assumed that the first two tasks are easy because of their automaticity. As an English-

Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to X Marianne E. Lloyd, Department of Psychol- ogy, Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079. E-mail: [email protected]

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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology © 2020 American Psychological Association 2020, Vol. 2, No. 999, 000 ISSN: 2332-2101 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000192

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speaking monolingual person from Ohio, yes, this is true for me. However, it might not be true for students who did not grow up learning the same A-Z alphabet or counting from 1 to 26 in English. Consequently, these might not be au- tomatic tasks for all participants. Second, clas- sifying these tasks as easy or difficult assumed some level of neurotypicality among partici- pants. Presumably, this task would not be as easy for any of my students who have language or numeracy difficulties or working memory impairments. Lastly, I assumed the demo would be easy because it was a low-stakes task (i.e., done in pairs instead of in front of the entire class). However, performing for a partner could add additional difficulty to the task for a student with a lot of social anxiety or one with a speech impairment who does not feel comfortable re- citing the material under time pressure.

When the demonstration is finished and I collect the data to present to the class, we typ- ically start by discussing the main idea—that even tasks that are usually accomplished quickly can take more time when completing multiple tasks at once. I use this as a plea for keeping phones away during class. After all, what is happening in class and on the phones are both more complicated than reciting something likely already memorized, so following both lecture and one’s phone distractions at the same time should be even more difficult than com- bining numbers and letters. Once you add in that the phone is pretty much guaranteed to be of greater interest than what is happening in class, this kind of multitasking becomes an even bigger risk of becoming a barrier to learning. At least for that day, the students seemed con- vinced that task switching is not an ideal way to spend class time.

Now when I included this demonstration in my class, I follow the discussion on the main idea that switching tasks is problematic with pointing out all the assumptions that I had made about the tasks they had just performed. I am explicit that this failure to consider my own assumptions was likely not limited to this dem- onstration and asked the students to help me realize when I am making incorrect assump- tions. I also highlight that this does not, how- ever, change the key point of the demonstration that learning will be more effective with less divided attention. Despite my potentially incor- rect assumptions about the task being easy for

everyone, the demonstration does reliably yield data in which the task-switching condition has a higher total completion time by a significant margin than the total completion time of the two single tasks.

Being aware of the assumptions we make about the students in our classes is perhaps a regular part of teaching reflection for many pro- fessors. However, I must be honest that I was considering these assumptions for the first time. When I revise my courses, I take many factors into consideration—student feedback, test per- formance, difficulty of material, and insights from teaching conferences and journal articles. However, I was not trained to contemplate in- dividual differences may increase or decrease the suitability of blanket statements I make about how a demonstration works. This does not mean these helpful demonstrations should be discarded but rather that I need to be more thoughtful about how I frame them. This spring, I have continued to include the demonstration in my courses. The students enjoy it and it gives me to opportunity to nudge them toward better classroom choices.

I expect that now that I have found these assumptions inherent in this demonstration, I am only just beginning to see the way that assumptions about my students might influence my teaching. I have also begun to recognize other assumptions that I use in my lectures on increasing academic success. The demonstra- tion of the difficulty in picking out the correct penny from a set of distractors (Nickerson & Adams, 1979) and the Moses Illusion (“How many animals of each type did Moses bring on the ark?”; Erickson & Mattson, 1981) both also come with assumptions. The former assumes experience with American currency and the lat- ter expects some familiarity with characters and stories associated with Abrahamic faiths. These are still acceptable choices to demonstrate key teaching points in class, but now I try to balance their use with some context about how they work only when one has consistent background experience and that for some students in my classes this may not be the case.

As I work to improve the teaching of psy- chology, I think we need to be aware of other places in which assumptions such as these may lurk. A quick review of the ancillary materials for an introductory psychology textbook sug- gests other potentially less inclusive demos, in-

2 LLOYD

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cluding those that relied on visual materials for demonstrations of perceptual illusions or schema memory examples that presumed a level of familiarity with the stimuli. There has been some progress toward acknowledging these concerns with the recent distribution of a manual for including issues of disability in in- troductory psychology courses (Rosa, Bogart, & Dunn, 2018). This resource contains demon- strations such as a tactile version of Gestalt principles, which would be suitable for vision- impaired students in ways the more conven- tional pictorial stimuli would not. A similar resource would be a welcome addition for fac- ulty wanting to consider additional factors re- lated to diversity and inclusion. In the mean- time, I am not going to try to find only those demonstrations that are universally appropriate because this would likely be impossible. In- stead, I will model my willingness to learn by continuing to share many kinds of demonstra- tions while adding in discussions of the assump- tions about the participants that are inherent in each.

References

Erickson, T. D., & Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic illusion. Journal of Verbal Learn- ing and Verbal Behavior, 20, 540–551. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/S0022-5371(81)90165-1

Nickerson, R. S., & Adams, M. J. (1979). Long-term memory for a common object. Cognitive Psychol- ogy, 11, 287–307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010- 0285(79)90013-6

Rosa, N. M., Bogart, K., & Dunn, D. S. (2018). Increasing inclusiveness and awareness: Disability in introductory psychology. Retrieved from http:// teachpsych.org/resources/Documents/otrp/resources/ Disability%20in%20Intro%20Psych%20Revision %20042419%20-%20Google%20Docs.pdf

Weinstein, Y. (2018). The cost of task switching: A simple yet very powerful demonstration. Retrieved fromhttps://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/ 7/28-1.

Received October 10, 2019 Revision received February 19, 2020

Accepted March 14, 2020 �

3SOMETIMES A DEMO

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