001in an Ideal World the reason why we're teaching what we're teaching is so students can transfer that knowledge or those skills to something else but in this case they're actually like being Junior psychologist right so it puts them in the role of a psychological researcher I was a student at sanberg myself and I remember my teacher Jim MAA doing psych fair for him and just absolutely loving it and that kind of spurred my interest in psychology ology I got my degrees in Psychology and then coming back it was one of the first things I'm like we need to make sure we do this it was so much fun I want to do it with my own students py fair is group- based project that students work on where they're really applying all of the research
002skills that they learned they come up with their own hypothesis they develop their study and try to think of all the confounding variables they could try to control and and then they have the opportunity to develop that experiment over the course of a few weeks before actually implementing it a big part of it again is just getting out of the classroom and doing this Hands-On part of it and not just listening to lectur uh we're not just about chalkboards anymore I am more of like a visual slash creative like Hands-On learner so I definitely preferred the project aspect of it cuz it's more like you're creating something of your own to help you understand psychology um it's not something that you learn by you know reading an article in class you learn it by going
003through it a parent night the night before the daytime psychology Fair um and inviting the community to come see what what we do in the classroom parents and family members get to come through and be the participants in the experiments and then the next day we spend the whole day in the pack foury year with all these different students and classes coming down to also run through the experiments you know it's cool to see a finished process you know a lot of what we do as teachers we don't see the endgame necessarily we're we're dealing with small incremental periods of growth and this a you know like a 2 2 and 1 half week time period you're seeing kids who knew nothing about research or statistics going from an idea to a finished concept to
004here's my research and here's what I found it wasn't even just like psychology itself concept that we learned we learned a lot about the experimental process especially during the psych Fair um we learned about confounding variables in class and it was easy to understand the concept of it a confounding variable is something that you can't control affecting the effectiveness of your experiment so I think seeing that and having that happen and like the disappointment of like oh well our experiment doesn't work as well now because this person came through and distracted somebody who is supposed to be focused I think that that is something that we learn that we wouldn't have learned just sitting in a classroom a big part of the learning process is you actually doing it yourself so being able to have
005that Hands-On opportunity to actually learn something and you're controlling the procedure you're making the whole write up you're finding the results you're actually learning how to do these things I think just participation and like being able to be handson and um working with others I think that just taught me collaboration a lot being in an environment when you have like supportive people around you and like being able to collaborate and spread your ideas and then like bring them to life it's it's a cool experience for sure I agree I think the most rewarding part is just feeling accomplished at the end of the day just amazing feeling I plan to pursue a career in Psychology and specifically want to go deeper into Psych patry and this experiment has allowed me to gain some experience with
006research um and that's something you it's really important the psych fair was definitely like really pushed me to do psych cuz I just I love projects and I just thought that was really cool you learn how to like actually think like a psychologist and think like someone running an experiment and create one of your own and find something that is interesting to you for us to be able to actually see it come to light because when we're studying these Concepts in class right we're just hearing about about these hypothetical situations but being able to actually um create the scenario on our own and see really being brought to life is something that it's just like a crazy experience and I think it's something that really solidified our understanding