Ever want your own Zener cards?

I didn't think so. I never did, either. But now at least you can get them for free: the JREF has a teaching module on ESP that you can download.

It's pretty good. The module strongly emphasizes good record keeping and rigor, which are important skills for young investigators. I was a little disappointed in the bit about statistics—it basically tells the students to use a table to look up values, don't worry about the math behind it, and trust us, getting 8 hits in 25 trials does not mean you have ESP. I would think the very best first module to throw at students would be an introduction to statistics; have the kids throw dice or flip coins and tally results, and learn what randomness really looks like and how we test for it.

Particularly if you're going to critically examine parapsychology, an understanding of how subtle biases can lead to statistically significant results is a good idea, because I suspect that the casual fudging of a few numbers is the foundation of the whole field. Just look at Daryl Bem's work to see what I mean.

Tags

More like this

The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in…
Greetings! After emerging from the Cave of Open Lab (have you seen all the awesome posts that were chosen?), I'm back with the best in psychology and neuroscience research blogging from the past week. Over at Games With Words, we learn that "If Microsoft Word had its way, passive verbs would be…
The first key concept in probability is called a random variable. Random variables are a key concept - but since they're a key concept of the frequentist school, they are alas, one of the things that bring out more of the Bayesian wars. But the idea of the random variable, and its key position in…
One social science finding which I've wondered about over the past few years is the result that women care much more about the race of a potential mate than men do. The fact that individuals tend to want to mate assortatively with those who share their characteristics is no surprise. Rather,…