Services

Please note: Upon completing the purchase of your consultation package, you will be directed to a page where we will collect information about you (the client) and your current project (e.g. course to be taught).

Introducing EMAs

Introducing students to explanatory modeling activities.

This includes advice on how to:
1. Make students aware of the need to aquire and refine the cognitive skills necessary to construct, evaluate, and revise explanations of target phenomena.
2. Explain to students what explanatory modeling is and how engaging in these activities can help them develop and refine these skills.

 

Core Concepts

Preparing students for engagement in explanatory modeling activities by presenting them with information about the nature of scientific explanations, the kinds of scientific explanations used in psychology, and the modeling procedures that scientists use to construct, evaluate, and revise explanations.

• Scientific Explanation
  1. General description, with a focus on psychological explanations.
  2. How scientific explanations enhance understanding of the phenomena they explain by situating those phenomena within larger theoretical frameworks that are organized around explanatory, inferential, and evidential relations.
  3. How psychologists use the enabling assumptions of their theoretical framework (perspective) to guide their construction, evaluation, and revision of explanations.

 

• Modeling Procedures
  1. How scientists construct, evaluate, and adapt models to satisfy constraints on potential explanatory mechanisms.
  2. How models make reasoning about phenomena cognitively tractable by making relevant features of target systems manifest and displaying the significance of these features for producing and maintaining those phenomena.
  3. How models are validated by using them to generate empirically testable hypotheses.

Clients are also advised on how to incorporate this material with the subject matter being presented in a way that facilitates students’ understanding.

 

Strategy Development

Presenting students with strategies for constructing, evaluating, and refining explanatory models, instructing students in how to carry out these strategies, and showing students how the use of these strategies can facilitate the process of scientific investigation.

This involves recommending strategies for:

1. Using various forms of abstraction, such as generic modeling and idealization, to select and integrate constraints into a candidate model.
2. Mentally simulating the candidate model in specific ways to examine the interaction of existing constraints and the emergence of new constraints as new states are produced.
3. Adapting their models to satisfy relevant constraints.
4. Validating the model by generating hypotheses and comparing those hypotheses to empirical evidence.
5. Using the evidence collected to confirm or revise the candidate model.

 

EMA Engagement

Engaging students in explanatory modeling activities.
This includes advice on:

1. Effective EMA development.
2. Effective integration of EMAs with other instructional methods.
3. Giving students feedback on their modeling performance.

 

Metacognitive Reflection

Engaging students in metacognitive reflection on and discussion of their modeling activities.
This includes:

1. Advice on giving students instruction regarding how to engage in metacognitive reflection on and disussion of their modeling activities.
2. Recommended techniques for focusing students’ attention on important aspects of their modeling activities during both reflection and discussion.

 

Scientific Arguments

Providing students with information about the nature of scientific arguments and counterarguments, with emphasis on important relations between explanations, arguments, and the interpretation of evidence.

This involves teaching students:

1. The two major kinds of unitary argument (deductive and inductive).
2. Criteria for evaluating arguments.
3. Important relations between psychological arguments, their evaluation, the constraints embedded in the relevant explanations, and relevant evidence.

 

Applying Inferences

Teaching students to use the implications of relevant explanations to make, analyze, and evaluate psychological arguments and counterarguments.

To evaluate an argument, the student would:

1. Verify the truth of the premises by examining relevant evidence.
2. Construct a representation of the argument.
3. Manipulate that representation in accordance with the implications of relevant explanations.

 

Evaluation Techniques

Constructing exams, essay assignments, and other methods of evaluation that accurately assess students’ application of critical analytic and argument skills to the relevant subject matter.

The proper construction of these forms of evaluation are critical because:

1. Students tend to learn what they believe they will be tested on.
2. These forms of evaluation provide valuable feedback to both students and teachers.

 

Evaluation Analysis

Using measures of students performance and student’s reflections on and discussions of their modeling activities to improve teaching technques.

At various intervals (as determined by you, the client) throughout the duration of the course being taught, you provide GLN with information about students’ performance on exams and essays, and other forms of evaluation and students’ reflections and discussions of their explanatory modeling activities. GLN then analyzes this information to identify students’ anchoring conceptions, reasoning skills, and learning processes at that point in instruction. The resulting analysis is then used to recommend adjustments in instructional methods that might enhance students’ acquisition of target levels of understanding and reasoning skills.