Seismosaurus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2003
- Messages
- 6,092
Next September my school is having a day devoted to the topic of "Viewpoint". I've convinced the science department to do how we view pseudoscience as part of our contribution!
This is for 12 year old kids...
I'm kicking the lesson off with some clips of science fiction and fantasy where people use magic powers - Yoda lifting Luke's X Wing, that kind of thing. That will be used to spark a discussion of what might be possible in the way of mental powers. I might also try to include a clip of somebody like Gellar spoonbending and Randi debunking him if I can find it, copyright allowing.
Then the experiment. We're having kids in groups of three; a sender, receiver and judge. The sender and receiver will be sitting at opposite ends of a table; the receiver will be facing away from the sender. The judge will sit at the side of the table.
The sender will have a set of 20 Zener cards, laminated, and will have thirty seconds to try and send each one to the receiver; the judge will time this with a stopwatch.
After thirty seconds the receiver will mark down what he or she thinks is being sent; the judge will then record the right answer. After all twenty are done, the judge will collect the form from the receiver and mark it using his own to give a score out of twenty.
Afterward the kids will do a bar chart of their scores, and we will do a chart of how many kids got each score so that hopefully we will get a nice bell curve.
At the end we will cap it off with a discussion of how doing tests like this can change our viewpoint on pseudoscientific topics.
Does this sound like a fair test? I've tried to make it fairly cheat-proof without going over the top - bearing in mind that these are 12 year olds, and that they won't have any prior knowledge of what it is they are doing, and so no way to plan cheating in advance.
Also, my probability math is not really up to this... I know you have a one in five chance of being right on any individual go, but what is the probability of getting each score? So what are the odds of getting one of the twenty right, two right, three, etc?
This is for 12 year old kids...
I'm kicking the lesson off with some clips of science fiction and fantasy where people use magic powers - Yoda lifting Luke's X Wing, that kind of thing. That will be used to spark a discussion of what might be possible in the way of mental powers. I might also try to include a clip of somebody like Gellar spoonbending and Randi debunking him if I can find it, copyright allowing.
Then the experiment. We're having kids in groups of three; a sender, receiver and judge. The sender and receiver will be sitting at opposite ends of a table; the receiver will be facing away from the sender. The judge will sit at the side of the table.
The sender will have a set of 20 Zener cards, laminated, and will have thirty seconds to try and send each one to the receiver; the judge will time this with a stopwatch.
After thirty seconds the receiver will mark down what he or she thinks is being sent; the judge will then record the right answer. After all twenty are done, the judge will collect the form from the receiver and mark it using his own to give a score out of twenty.
Afterward the kids will do a bar chart of their scores, and we will do a chart of how many kids got each score so that hopefully we will get a nice bell curve.
At the end we will cap it off with a discussion of how doing tests like this can change our viewpoint on pseudoscientific topics.
Does this sound like a fair test? I've tried to make it fairly cheat-proof without going over the top - bearing in mind that these are 12 year olds, and that they won't have any prior knowledge of what it is they are doing, and so no way to plan cheating in advance.
Also, my probability math is not really up to this... I know you have a one in five chance of being right on any individual go, but what is the probability of getting each score? So what are the odds of getting one of the twenty right, two right, three, etc?
