Observe: A multimedia course on the observational analysis of behavior

Abstract

OBSERVE is a preliminary release of a multimedia course for teaching undergraduate and graduate students how and why to study behavior by direct observation. The instructional text and commentary and the self-test and examination materials are built around a series of exercises in which the student observes and categorizes film clips of the behavior of several different species in several different ways. Incorporation of elements from The Observer software for computer recording and video analysis implements fully computerized continuous recording. At present, the text, together with check sheets that the program generates, enables a comparison between one-zero, instantaneous, and continuous sampling of the same behavioral excerpts. Matrices are printed out for an exercise in calculating interobserver reliability. Another section supports carrying out and writing up a small observational project on human behavior in the field. Plans for the future development of OBSERVE are briefly described.

Train-to-Code: An adaptive expert system for training systematic observation and coding skills

“…What TTC was designed for is highly efficient and effective training of users with respect to their ability to code any desired corpus of behavioral examples at a maximal standard of accuracy and stability. As such, TTC is a flexible tool specifically designed for use in the applied setting, as well as in the classroom and laboratory-unlike other currently available systems, such as COR (Blasko et al, 1998) and OBSERVE (Dickins et al, 2000), which tend to target academic settings in their pedagogy (but certainly not in their data collection capabilities).…”

Mapping, Modeling, and Mentoring: Charting a Course for Professionalism in Graduate Medical Education

“…Videos, movies, panel discussions, drama presentations, role-play exercises, and interactive computers have resulted in superior attention, interaction, test scores, and retention of information in teaching clinical skills, procedural skills, and interpersonal skills, distance learning, quality assurance and peer review of patient encounters, and public education. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]…”

Teaching of Research Methods in Undergraduate Psychology Courses: A Survey of Provision in HE Institutions and Colleges in the UK

“…A consequence of all this has been the development of at least three multimedia packages to provide students with the opportunity to develop observational research skills within the classroom, enabling groups of students to be taught in parallel. These packages have involved the incorporation of video assets into interactive computer programmes designed to teach students observational research methods (Blasko et al, 2004;Dickens et al, 2000;Gove, Oates and Littleton, 1998;Oates, 2004). In addition to such multimedia packages enabling students to learn about observational research methods and to develop and practise the associated skills, there is also evidence that such approaches can be beneficial, in terms of assessment outcomes, when contrasted with more conventional ways of teaching psychology such as the lecture (Erwin and Rieppi, 1999).…”