In one of my psychology courses last week, we were talking about the difference one word can make in the interpreter's perception. The example used in class was if we were presented with a "warm, determined, intense, etc." person or a "cold, determined, intense, etc." person. However, I found a different use for such an idea.
In that same class period, we also covered the idea of schema, generalized mental scripts that we create in order to be able to commit our brainpower to less-redundant things. There are three types of schema: those that define a person (for example, the Hippie schema), those that define a role (the schema defining what a student does), and those that define events (schema that tell you what to do when eating at a restaurant, for a common example). As such, these schema can apply to just about anything.
This ties in with the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which I have talked about before. The example I have in mind is how our teacher told us that the test that is coming up in a week is going to be HARD. I think this is a bad idea, despite our teacher's intentions. The teacher said that the test was going to be hard thinking that it would motivate us to study and generally be prepared for a hard test. However, I think this may have had the opposite effect. For some students, when they hear that the test is going to be HARD, they panic. This is because their prototype (or an exemplar) of a hard test comes up in their mind. Their prototypical hard test may be a test that they studied for but didn't do well on anyway. This leads them to look at their test-preparation schema and decide that regardless of whether they study or not they won't do very well, and so they don't study and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (their thinking they wouldn't do well led them to not study, and so they didn't do well). This is why I think teachers should say tests are CHALLENGING rather than HARD. Saying a test is HARD implies that some or all of the students will have a tough time with it and some of them just won't be able to handle it at all. CHALLENGING implies that while it will be tough, it can be handled with sufficient preparation. In this way, one word can make all the difference.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Aaron, Nice columns. The extension of the misuse of expectations is when the professor says to the students in the first day of class, "Look to your left and right...one of you will fail this course..." There are variations of this theme. It is meant either to motivate or to be a ham-handed way of reinforcing a power difference between faculty and students. Either way, it does just the opposite of what teachers should do - set high expectations and let the students know that we expect them all to do well, and we set the bar high assuming they want to be here.
ReplyDeleteThis is so true! It's amazing how these words affect us subconsciously. Once we know this though, I feel that we can step back and critically examine how they affect us and control it. I look forward to your posts!
ReplyDeleteSuran,
ReplyDeleteI agree. Once we know that such things happen, we can more easily realize when we are doing them. There's actually a theory behind that called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which says that we can't see what we can't describe using our known language. For example, we can't describe a color we don't have a word for. So in that, if we can't describe a mental phenomenon, chances are we won't notice it at all.
Thanks for the comment!