A growing body of research suggests that students achieve learning outcomes at higher rates when instructors use active-learning methods rather than standard modes of instruction. To investigate how one such method might be used to teach philosophy, we observed two classes that employed Reacting to the Past (hereafter, Reacting), an educational role-immersion game. We chose to investigate Reacting because role-immersion games are considered a particularly effective active-learning strategy. Professors who have used Reacting to teach history, interdisciplinary humanities, and political theory agree that it engages students and teaches general skills like collaboration and communication. We investigated whether it can be effective for teaching philosophical content and skills like analyzing, evaluating, crafting, and communicating arguments in addition to bringing the more general benefits of active learning to philosophy classrooms. Overall, we find Reacting to be a useful tool for achieving these ends. While we do not argue that Reacting is uniquely useful for teaching philosophy, we conclude that it is worthy of consideration by philosophers interested in creative active-learning strategies, especially given that it offers a prepackaged set of flexible, user-friendly tools for motivating and engaging students.
Previous experiments testing whether an individual's race can be identified from speech sounds have produced inconsistent results. Current work examined this question using spontaneous laughter sounds to help isolate voice quality from dialect effects. In Experiment 1, six laughs from each of six black and six white vocalizers were edited to create 72 bouts of three to four contiguous bursts. These bouts were then further edited to create 72 single bursts. Fourteen undergraduate participants heard both sets of laughs in separate blocks. Sounds were presented twice on each trial and categorized as “Black” or “White.” Mean percentage-correct was 61.1 (SD = 10.1) with multi-burst versions, and 55.8 (SD = 12.7) with single bursts. Both outcomes were statistically higher than chance performance in t-test comparisons. Experiment 2 tested 12 new listeners in a balanced, same-different design with paired, bout-length stimuli from same- or different-race vocalizers. There were 120 stimuli in all, combining 5 laughs from each of 5 laughers of each race. Mean d' was 0.92 (SD = 0.44), which was statistically different from chance. Taken together, these experiments suggest modest, but reliable sensitivity to vocalizer race from voice-quality alone.
Laughter is a ubiquitous human phenomenon that has been little investigated scientifically. To examine the relationship between laugher arousal level and acoustic output, bouts of laughter were recorded from undergraduates viewing humorous video clips. These participants provided continuous subjective ratings of funniness while watching the clips, and heart rate (HR) was collected concurrently to provide an objective measure of physiological arousal. As a first approach, comparisons focused on voiced laughter from nine males and eight females. For each individual, one high-amplitude and one low-amplitude laugh bout was identified for which HR could be extracted. Beats per minute increased significantly more with high-amplitude than low-amplitude bouts, an effect that was not likely due to physical exertion or movement artifact. No sex difference was found in the magnitude of HR change for either amplitude condition. Both subjective ratings of funniness and fundamental-frequency measures were significantly higher for higher-amplitude bouts, while harmonic-to-noise ratios trended lower for these sounds. Overall, results are consistent with the intuition that higher physiological arousal in vocalizers is reflected in higher vocal amplitude and faster, potentially less stable vocal-fold vibration in voiced laughter.
We created Justice: The Game, an educational, role-immersion game designed to be used in philosophy courses. We seek to describe Justice in sufficent detail so that it is understandable to readers not already familiar with role-immersion pedagogy. We hope some instructors will be sufficiently interested in using the game. In addition to describing the game we also evaluate it, thereby highlighting the pedagogical potential of role-immersion games designed to teach political philosophy. We analyze the game by drawing on our observations as designers and playtesters of Justice, along with feedback from students obtained in focus-groups conducted shortly after playtesting ended. We present evidence that Justice, compared to conventional instructional methods alone, plausibly enhances student learning of philosophical skills and content by requiring them to practice those skills and put their content-area knowledge to use in a highly-motivating and engaging context.
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