My profile as project supervisor

General background

I used to teach a course on Positive Psychology. I still sometimes think of projects I want to supervise in that area. Recently I've supervised a number of projects on (see further down for more details):

• Mindfulness and mindfulness meditation (MF and MFM). (Other staff who have supervised projects related to MF/MFM in recent years, although not necessarily this year, include Heather Woods, Larry Barsalou, Esther Papies, Lorna Morrow.)
• "Green space" phenomena
• "mHealth"
• I have supervised a number of projects on student procrastination.
  However a better research question currently might be to look at how students decide to do a learning activity at all. It is traditional to think of this as about motivation as if this were high or low; but in fact many things such as how to tell whether they are still on the right track can be more powerful.

However I have quite often supervised projects in areas I knew nothing about, if the student has come with a specific idea and does not require detailed technical knowledge from me, but general support and someone to discuss their ideas with. (An example was theory of mind in ravens in Edinburgh zoo; another was drinking and sociability in sports club members vs. other students; another was perceiving someone's personality traits from a photo of their bag.) In fact these have been some of the best projects I've supervised. But I am NOT usually interested in supervising clinical psychology projects.

Below, any references I mention briefly can often be found in my large list of education-related references.

Specific topics 2022-2023

Specific topics 2021-2022

• Research on student procrastination has left me feeling that perhaps it has asked the wrong questions by looking at whether it is a character trait. A project looking at how students take decisions from moment to moment on how they decide whether to work on an essay (for example) might illuminate different issues. For some, being asked to write a very short piece (one paragraph) makes them feel it is easy and they start at once; whereas a different person might think that if it is short then every word will count so they should think very carefully about it and write slowly.
• I have supervised several projects on "Green Space" phenomena. Student projects have now shown that pictures produce effects (so it doesn't have to be actual physical exposure to nature); and that Very Short Interventions (VSIs) can work. One such is a video less than 4 minutes long which produced a significant improvement in some measures of mood: stress reduction, and increase of positive emotion.
  One project could be to test whether it is green (plants or trees), or still water or flowing water or cliffs, hills, mountains? Is a combination best? which elements are most powerful?

  Another project showed that the benefits could be produced by at least one Urban scene: so it may not even be green nor nature that is the essential cause. It would be interesting to explore further what the essential ingredients are. What kinds of urban scene can produce the effect?
  It might also be interesting to explore this another way: by self-reports of mood improvements after exposure to aspects of "nature" to see what the essential ingredient(s) are.

• A possible study would be to compare mindfulness meditation to green space exposure in their effects. (Using both a variety of measures of mood improvement; and of the lengths of time needed.)
• There are plans for introducing classes in schools on "computational thinking" for all pupils. This is a surprising initiative, to believe that there is something of general intellectual value to someone who has never programmed which could be taught. A project to test some of these ideas and exercises on non-computer scientists would throw some light on this, and interest researchers in the School of Computing Science as well as myself.

Specific topics 2020-2021

• Very Short Interventions (VSI). A student group recently showed that a video less than 4 minutes long could produce a significant improvement in some measures of mood: stress reduction, and increase of positive emotion. Could other short interventions do this?
• Positive effects of "green space" have been shown to work to different degrees in still pictures, videos, CCTV (real pictures of what is happening now), and through windows. How do these compare?
• Is it urban vs. "nature" pictures that matter OR is it how close to the viewer is to the picture i.e. a view of a city from the top of a tower block is quite dfferent from seeing a street at ground level e.g. through a ground floor window. I.e. perhaps it is not "green" that matters at all, but distance?
• If it is countryside that matters, then is it green (plants) or trees, or still water or flowing water or cliffs, hills, mountains? Is a combination best? which elements are most powerful?

Specific topics 2016-2020

• Student discussion which benefits (deep) learning
  There is a literature that shows that peer discussion (amongst students) under specific conditions significantly improves their conceptual understanding. I have a page under construction which outlines this area.

  Ways discussion occurs:

  • One possibility is to have artificially prompted student discussion in facebook groups. I.e. only slightly artificial.
  • Another is opportunistic, unplanned student discussion, especially between students living together.

  Types of study might be:

  • Finding out more about how discussion currently occurs and how much there is.
  • In best conditions (friends living together?), how many CI discussions per day? And what promotes them?
  • How best to launch them when you have the people and time i.e. the opportunity?
  • Finding out how to reliably create discussion.
• Digital delusions.
  There are various very widespread misconceptions about how new technical facilities e.g. facebook have completely changed behaviour in various ways (as opposed to just being new means for old human activities). The project would define a particular delusion, and then look for evidence for and against there being a real, as opposed to perceived, difference.

• Team Based Learning (TBL).
  Within the university several classes will be using this particular way of teaching at university for the first time. There may be a chance to collect data on how well this succeeds.

• Assessment by pairwise comparison.
  Most marking by teachers is done as if any answer (e.g. an essay) can be marked by an expert independent of any other. An old psychological theory from Thurstone, however, sees such judgements as essentially comparative. You can look at a page with some rough notes on this. Students too can mark such work (and learn from the process of doing so). The project might look at how markers experience using the new method.
• Mindfulness.
  • I feel that there are three different potential values to mindfulness (MF), and that future work should try hard to distinguish them:
    1. Resolving and improving old, long-term mental attitudes and approaches.
    2. Whether MF is protective against new stresses (as in the "protective factors" found against clinical depression by Brown & Harris (1978) "Social origins of depression : a study of psychiatric disorder in women" Link to library record).
    3. Its widespread use by a majority of users, particularly students, as ad hoc self-medication to ward off stresses after they start to be felt; like aspirin for fevers and aches.
  • That should probably be compared to another good project topic: Most people, perhaps all, spend a considerable amount of time (and often money) each day repairing the day's mental damage e.g. by a drink before dinner, eating after you get home and can relax enough to enjoy it, moaning to friends or family, etc. Little is known about such self-protective "maintainence" behaviour, either for mental knocks, or from physical ones (small cuts and bruises, small strains and sprains of joints and ligaments).
  • A project might, for instance, do a survey of ad hoc mindfulness use (whilst the literature seems to only report on 8 week courses as a minimum, and so has lost touch with real (non-clinical) practice).
  • Comparing MF, the green-space effect (see below), and "Flow".
  • Many people, particularly students, use MF to relieve stress immediately. But experts claim it trains skills that are then usable in future, and protective. Few if any studies have actually measured both claims.
• Altruism. Looking into the complexity of motivation; and still more, of decision-making, when people decide whether to donate money or time (i.e. volunteering) for charitable ends.
• mHealth: this refers to a fuzzy but important area, involving the interaction of three things: increasing people's health and well-being; whether action is done by or to the "patient"; exploiting modern gadgets and ICT (information and communications technology). I have a page, which is basically only a heap of pointers. In 2014-5, I supervised two great MSc projects in this area, by students who already had some experience in the area. In 2015-6 I supervised a maxi on using mindfulness to combat test anxiety. Mindfulness when delivered by a phone app. is part of mHealth; but is an increasingly interesting topic in its own right (see the point above).
• Follow up, somehow, Luke Timmons' project, which showed that critical thinking skill in undergraduates depended upon whom they lived with. Here is a summary of a talk on it; which has a link to his full project report. This suggests that opportunity for unplanned intellectual discussions may be a crucial educational factor currently.
• A project on James Flynn's ideas on critical thinking or my interpretation of them as to do with thought schemas skimmed from various disciplines, but which manage to apply much more widely than just to that discipline. It would require effort to convert his ideas into a psychology project.

Specific topics 2015-16

• Can pictures and/or emojis be successfully used instead of text for computer passwords?
• Artificially prompted student discussion in facebook groups. Look at this page which gives an ancient argument for how discussion is essential for learning; and skim over Draper (2009), which gives some references on the literature on learner discussion. The Miyake and the Howe references are particularly relevant for seeing how discussion has been shown to stimulate learning.
• Following up the Opezzo paper showing how walking and Green space independently promote "divergent thinking", a common test of creativity.
  Opezzo, M. & Schwartz,F.L. (2014) "Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking" Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Vol.40 no.4 Jul 2014 pp.1142-1152 doi:10.1037/a0036577
• Shopping addiction, current mood, and ability to inhibit behaviour appropriately.
• Exam anxiety, and ad hoc mindfulness exercises.

Specific topics 2014-15

• Student discussion. There are 4 kinds of study, any of which I'd like to pursue.
  1. Naturalistic study of student discussion in the wild. I now believe that we can't just ask students when they discussed some topic: their recall is much too poor. So to find out how much discussion goes on, we need better methods. Catch for instance, cases where a student tends to phone her mum and bend her ear about the essay she's struggling with just now...
  2. Controlled experiment that establishes whether or not discussion is so valuable, that it is worth reducing the revision time spent in re-reading, reading, writing in order to get it.
  3. Compare the effects / effectiveness of learning designs that prompt student discussion; and particularly how proactive students can be in organising discussion instead of only responding to someone else.
  4. Generate rival learning activities and measure comparative effectiveness. E.g. self-testing has a strong literature (Roediger; Karpicke) on how much more effective it is compared to simple re-reading as a learning and/or revision strategy. Is it better or worse than discussion?
• Look at this page which gives an ancient argument for how discussion is essential for learning; and skim over Draper (2009), which gives some references on the literature on learner discussion. The Miyake and the Howe references are particularly relevant for seeing how discussion has been shown to stimulate learning.
• Mindfulness training and education.
• Green exposure: does simply being outdoors, e.g. in a park, measurably increase well-being, reduce restlessness, increase ability to concentrate? (I have a student for this.)
• Develop student exercises: learning through experiential exercises.
• Research a grand developmental hypothesis: The argument is that all education and especially HE, is a process of getting better and better at interacting with people who disagree with you. Instead of only collaborating with people who share your views, you learn to tolerate and indeed interact productively with, those who differ more and more from you. This would explain how peer discussion isn't just helpful instantly in improving your ideas, but also changes you more profoundly.
• neo-Vygotskian ideas: on how we learn through apprenticeships to new kinds of conversation.

Specific topics 2013-14

• A study of student use of "podcasts": audio recordings of lectures. Issues include: how many value them? Is this as insurance or anyway? Are they used instead of lectures, as well as and during the course, only at revision? Where are they listened to (e.g. while jogging, commuting, with full attention at a desk?). Are they just listened to straight through, or with frequent use of pause, fast forward, etc.?
• A survey of how much discussion students actually do anyway. For instance, anecdotes suggest that students who don't have friends who discuss academic things, may phone up their mums to blether about their current essay's content.
• With a student, I ran a workshop to give students practice in oral responses to questions about psychology to improve their fluency. We failed to record a significant effect, yet all the participants we spoke to felt strongly that it was beneficial, both for fluency and for improving their understanding and confidence about the academic content. I'd like to get to the bottom of this.
• There is some literature on teaching students how to discuss productively. We could try and test something like this.

Specific topics 2012-13

• Producing a test for students of qualitative understanding of psychology. Another way of putting this is: can we invent a simple method that students should apply to every bit of psychology they read, that summarises the importance of a study in 1 or 2 sentences? Most only remember the "effect": i.e. the mean effect: they remember nothing of the variation. Even better, what kind of critical points should you routinely look for and remember?

• Reflection e.g. keeping a learning diary. Several studies have shown that students required to do this get sig. higher exam marks. Can we replicate this? What kind of thinking is prompted, and why don't students do this automatically?

• Expectation effects on learning in education. A number of studies have shown how a tiny intervention, sometimes only a few words, change a learner's performance instantly and enough to change their grades. They use a number of different theories for this. Can all these be explained as expectation effects, and how might we apply this?

Specific topics 2011-12

• Producing a test of qualitative understanding for psychology. Hestenes developed a test (the "FCI" = force concept inventory) for physics at A-level / level1 HE that eventually showed that most HE students could pass complicated looking physics questions with calculations, but couldn't answer very simple questions that required qualitative understanding. This so shocked some academics (when they used it on their own classes) that it eventually led to the biggest, most powerful changes in teaching yet reported in the literature. Could we do something similar for psychology? It seems negligent not to try ...

  This ref. gives a brief account of the method (many later papers discuss results and developments):
  Halloun,I.A. & Hestenes,D. (1985) American Journal of Physics vol.53 no.11 pp.1043-1048
  The question for the project is: can we invent an analogue for psychology? What are the things that psychologists take for granted, but students may not pick up at all quickly, even if they pass exams? Not anecdote but the spread of human performance? ....

• Do a convincing test on whether and how the AAW website improves student writing.

• Investigate experimentally what reduces student anxiety: e.g. discussing problems, discussing solutions, being made aware of support services, ....

Specific topics 2010-11

• There's a very promising project in progress offering students online self-help for basic writing skills (since staff mostly refuse to help, yet students know they want to get better). The feedback seems great, but a direct controlled test would be good. So at least three kinds of project: a) controlled experiment, using the materials, seeing whether students' writing actually gets better if they study these materials (vs. just practising); b) collecting data from students in departments that have this installed: what are their attitudes, do they think they are getting better at writing, ....; c) What do students in general feel about such self-help facilities for skills such as writing/
• Summer projects: I may also have some summer studentships on education topics.
• Ditto for a spin-off offering self-help on basic maths (actually numeracy) especially for psychology students doing stats.
• I now have a contact in the university counselling service . who expressed some interest in co-supervising projects. These are unlikely to involve contact with clients, but to study things such as how useful the service seems to be to third parties such as academics; or running experiments designed to cast light on the peculiar properties of dialogue in counselling (e.g. that it is all about one person, and not about reciprocity as in normal conversations).

Specific topics 2009-10

• Dweck's "mindsets", and related studies.
• Peer assisted learning; study groups (what makes them really valuable, or not).
• What aspects of group work matter for learning?
• I'm interested in a project (following up on one this year) on: when will students who don't know each other nevertheless spontaneously collaborate on a task, and when is their judgement right or wrong as to whether this will improve their task performance? What role does shyness play (if any) in this?
• I have collaborated with Jaye Richards, a teacher in a secondary school on the south side, who has demonstrated major learning gains using a VLE in her classes. There will be more research to do on what exactly the important features of her new method are, perhaps following up a classroom observational project. See here and here.
• How does feedback to students actually work? Is it really as important as the literature believes? is it always important, or just in some circumstances? When it helps, what are the conditions e.g. having a 2-way conversation not just a set of written comments?
• Creating (developing, piloting, testing) workshops for students that increase their study skills, exam skills, justified self-confidence in their knowledge and ability as students. I have done a few of these: many more would be good.

Still wider general areas

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [this page]
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