[tips] Helping high school student with psychology project

[Jim Clark]

Hi

I've had an inquiry from a high school student interested in doing a science 
project on a psychological topic. I appreciate rules might be different in USA 
and Canada, but does anyone have experience of the ethics involved with HS 
students doing psychological studies?

Thanks
Jim

Jim Clark
Professor & Chair of Psychology
University of Winnipeg
204-786-9757
Room 4L41A (4th Floor Lockhart)
www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark



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Re: [tips] Helping high school student with psychology project

[Gerald Peterson]

I had student seek me out, and she had assignment to replicate soc psych study 
for science fair. Non-controversial topic? As it was part of class learning 
experience and not formal research, we did not go thru IRB.  She ran procedure 
and treatment of participants by me and her highschool teacher. Was more of a 
demonstration than full research study. 

 
G.L. (Gary) Peterson,Ph.D
Psychology@SVSU


> On Jan 30, 2016, at 12:38 PM, Jim Clark  wrote:
> 
>  
> 
> Hi
>  
> I’ve had an inquiry from a high school student interested in doing a science 
> project on a psychological topic. I appreciate rules might be different in 
> USA and Canada, but does anyone have experience of the ethics involved with 
> HS students doing psychological studies?
>  
> Thanks
> Jim
>  
> Jim Clark
> Professor & Chair of Psychology
> University of Winnipeg
> 204-786-9757
> Room 4L41A (4th Floor Lockhart)
> www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
>  
>  
> ---
> 
> You are currently subscribed to tips as: peter...@svsu.edu.
> 
> To unsubscribe click here: 
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> 
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> 
> or send a blank email to 
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Re: [tips] Helping high school student with psychology project

[Kenneth Steele]

I will be interested in other people’s replies to this question.

I have supervised several long-distance HS projects.  Most of these students 
were in small towns and were attending some kind of special school (like a 
private school) that required a project for graduation.

A recent project asked whether chewing gum immediately prior to taking a math 
test would improve math scores. (There is a supportive literature on this 
hypothesis but some conspiracy theorists might note that much of the research 
is sponsored by Wrigley.) 

I approached the situation as if I was teaching a research methods course, 
i.e., an educational experience.  So the student and I would exchange emails 
about the hypothesis.  I located some easy primary literature for her to review 
and taught her how to read an empirical article.  We discussed design issues 
(between vs within comparisons) and we discussed ethical issues (deception 
issues, harm issues).

The student was doing the experiment as part of an official class in her high 
school, and so the teacher was involved at various stages.  Typically, the 
teacher was involved at the beginning and the end of the project.  (Sometimes, 
I have been asked to comment on the quality of work by the student to be used 
in assigning a grade.)

I would work with a student only on a project that is very low-risk because of 
supervision issues. (I think they did run their studies because there are so 
many newbie mistakes, like the experimental group participated in a club 
meeting and the control group participated at the end of a class period.)  

I did not register these projects with our IRB because they were very low-risk 
and I was treating them as an educational experience, like projects we might do 
in class.

My HS students have been enthusiastic but very naive.  The concept of needing a 
control group/condition took some convincing.

Ken

-
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D.  steel...@appstate.edu 

Professor
Department of Psychology  http://www.psych.appstate.edu 

Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
-

> On Jan 30, 2016, at 12:38 PM, Jim Clark  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Hi
>  
> I’ve had an inquiry from a high school student interested in doing a science 
> project on a psychological topic. I appreciate rules might be different in 
> USA and Canada, but does anyone have experience of the ethics involved with 
> HS students doing psychological studies?
>  
> Thanks
> Jim
>  
> Jim Clark
> Professor & Chair of Psychology
> University of Winnipeg
> 204-786-9757
> Room 4L41A (4th Floor Lockhart)
> www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark 
>  
>  
> ---
> 
> You are currently subscribed to tips as: steel...@appstate.edu 
> .
> 
> To unsubscribe click here: 
> http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13524.94845a3ed9806f1cef14973830dd8c39=T=tips=48022
>  
> 
> (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken)
> 
> or send a blank email to 
> leave-48022-13524.94845a3ed9806f1cef14973830dd8...@fsulist.frostburg.edu 
> 

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RE:[tips] signal detection and ROC curves

[Mike Palij]

On Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2016 12:57:50 -0600, Douglas Peterson wrote:


No argument here.  Just me not being clear.


No problem. Just me being argumentative. ;-)


A' and AUC are valid measures comparing two systems
and much more interpretable than other SDT measures
given the parameters as Mike explains but they are not
direct measures of SDT parameters as typically explains.


I'm not sure why being "direct measure of SDT" is more
important thant the usefulness of the measure (e.g., A'
being more useful than d'). Although defining d' as the
difference between Z-hit rate - Z-false alarm is one way
to calculate d', this form seems to depend upon the
assumption that the probability dietributions are normal
in which case the means and standard deviations are
independent which is not the case in some other
distributions.

True story:  I learned about SDT from Sheila Chase with
whom I took experiment psych lab at Hunter College as
an undergraduate.  She did psychophysics work with
pigeons and we used Michael D'Amato's (an NYU Ph.D. ;-)
textbook on experimental psychology which covered
classical psychophysics and SDT.  When I got to grad
school in experimental psych at Stony Brook, I got
additional coverage of SDT in my graduate S class.
However, I had to take a year off from grad school to
deal with some family matters and enrolled part-time
at NYU's graduate experimental psych program so I
could keep up my studies.  One of the courses involved
George Sperling who taught the "sensation" and psychophysics
part of a course called "Basic Processes I" that all first
year NYU students had to take (Lloyd Kaufman taught
the "perception" part of the course).  Speriling took a
heavily mathematical approach and when he started to
cover SDT I thought "Cool, I know this stuff."

Well, unfornately, Sperling started out with an example of
SDT that used two exponential distributions instead of normal
distributions.  Now, I had some idea of what an exponential
distribution was but that was never covered in any class I took
(I read about them in my readings on SDT).  He went into the math
for doing SDT with exponential distributions and I was lost --
a major problem was that Sperling didn't provide a reading list
on the topics, so you either followed what he said in class or
you had to find sources on your own.  I thouught I was a total
idiot until I talked to my classmates who also had no idea
what an exponential distribution was.  This, of course, raised
the question why Sperling assumed we would know about
exponential distributions (later we learned that he just expected
a certain level of math stat knowledge in his students and if
they didn't have it, they could just flunk out).

Unltimately, Sperling had to point out to us idiots that the
signficance of exponential distributions is that the variance
of such distributions is the square of the mean of the distribution
which poses problems for SDT because (a) the mean and SD
are not independent, and (b) as the mean increased, so did the
variance.  This violated traditional SDT based on normal
distributions but early work by Egan and others showed how
other distributions could be used -- one just needed either a
background in electrical engineering (Sperling was working
at Bell Labs at the time) or a masters in math stat.

Needless to say, I bombed this part of the course -- it didn't make
me feel any better that the rest of the class also bombed out.
However, I did ace Kaufman's part of the course. ;-)

Morale:  the form of SDT that relies upon normal distributions is
only one form of SDT analysis and other forms (as we'll see shortly)
may make the analysis more complex and rely upon other aspects
of the analysis (e.g., A' actually is better than d' in certain 
situations).



Pastore, Crawley, Berens and Skelly (2003) present a good
discussion of the issues including the advantages and
disadvantages of A'.


*smacks forehead* How did I forget Pastore et al (2003)?  I looked
at the article after you mentioned it and realized that I had in fact 
read

but a while ago.  However, turns out the situation may be more
complex than they present.  More on this shortly.


Specifically, A' is not independent from bias and is actually a
poorer estimate when performance is nearer to perfect in terns
of hits or false alarms.   For the 3 of us who care about this issue,


I think we will soon reach N <1 of Tipsters who care about this
issue. ;-)


estimates of d' aren't much good in those extremes either.


You mean like how Fechner's law breaks down at very low and very
high intensities because the Weber ratio is not constant for
all stimulus values; e.g., see:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ALsP3Rv3fFgC=PA288=%22fechner%27s+law%22+extremes=en=X=0ahUKEwjtzK7n3dHKAhXLWT4KHTnBBkoQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage=%22fechner%27s%20law%22%20extremes=false


Macmillan and Creelman (1991) suggest adjusting hit rates of
100% to 1-(1/2n) an false alarm rates to 1/2n and I don't have
any reason to doubt that 

Re: [tips] signal detection and ROC curves

[Kenneth Steele]

> On Jan 30, 2016, at 10:13 AM, Mike Palij  wrote:
> 
> 
> I believe that now we have officially reached N< 0 people
> interested in this topic. ;-)
> 
> -Mike Palij
> New York University
> m...@nyu.edu
> 


N = N + 1

I am still enjoying the discussion.  

Ken

-
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D.  steel...@appstate.edu 

Professor
Department of Psychology  http://www.psych.appstate.edu 

Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
-


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