Don’t quite know where the 12 days go, or how the students and I hang on, but IFS 2019 wrapped up and I had a wonderful time learning about how to measure media effects on attention and emotion with 20 fantastic new IU students.
William gets ready to collect data from Abhi.
Grant and Chapman, holding the poster of brilliance.
Grace describes the work that she and her team members did.
They learned how to measure heart rate as an index of attention, and skin conductance and corrugator muscle activation as an index of intensity and direction of emotion respectively. As an educator, it’s always fun for me to watch students learn by doing. And, of course, some of them aren’t really ‘into it’ as much as the others…but that’s ok too. In the end, I think we all have fun and everyone learns at least a little.
I had taken about 7 years off from teaching in the Intensive Freshman Seminars, and in that time they had introduced a new feature: the IFS Academic Forum. This is a way for students to get accustomed to sharing the knowledge they had obtained with those who had been enrolled in some of the other IFS courses. Plus, hopefully, my students got a chance to leave their own posters and filter around the Frangipani Room on the IMU and see the posters of other classes.
After taking many years off, I am glad to have returned to the Intensive Freshman Seminar program here at IU. This is one of the several ways I’m aware of that IU tries to make a very large student body (we have over 48,000 students on campus during the average year) a bit smaller for undergraduates.
Students and their families arrive for IFS in The Media School
Our first week is in the books. We have talked about experimental design and psychophysiological measurement. We have visited the Wells Library and had an informative lecture from Meggan Press the Undergraduate Assistant Librarian about how to do successful database searches for scientific literature.
And then the students—working in groups—designed and
collected their own ECG data to test hypotheses about what affects attention to
media.
Collaborative Learning
Setting up ECG sensors
Experimenter observes data
Subject listening to stimuli
All Smiles in the ICR
More about what their data suggested will be coming up
later.
