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My course material, textbooks and other pedagogical material reflect my commitment to teaching and my goal to arouse curiosity in beginning students, to encourage high standards, and to stimulate advanced students to creative work. My pedagogical chapter, Speech Perception (in Press in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences), introduces the student to this fascinating topic. My chapter, Models for reading letters and words, in S. Sternberg & D. Scarborough (Eds.), Invitation to Cognitive Science, is a pedagogical introduction to the use of mathematical models in psychological inquiry. The book is aimed at advanced undergraduate students in the general field of cognitive science. My teaching has been informed by my research, which has convinced me that persons benefit greatly from having multiple sources of information from several sensory modalities. In face to face conversation, for example, perception and understanding are better given the face and voice relative to either one presented alone. I use this principle in my teaching by providing a rich array of media for presentation of the course material. Powerpoint demonstrations, animation, video clips, graphs, and narrative are used to embellish the learning experience of the students.
I am a co-PI on a National Science Foundation Education Initiative aimed at the development of new courses in Linguistics and Computer Sciences. This program provides support for graduate teaching assistants, and provides a unique educational opportunity as well as financial support. Grant No. S 0000012678 I also obtained from the Center for Teaching Excellence a Teaching Award to develop new course in Decision Making and Problem Solving. The major goal is to support the development of reflective thought to provide students with a more complete set of skills, which I call psychological literacy. Various problem solving and decision-making scenarios are presented and analyzed within the context of cognitive psychology. Participating in this course will help students acquire skills in general problem solving and rational decision making and judgment. Most university courses as most courses in high school might be called content courses as opposed to what might be called process courses. Content courses ask students to learn a body of knowledge, such as 18th century literature. Process courses, on the other hand, the focus on learning of how rather than the learning or what. Following in the tradition of John Dewey, my teaching is aimed at learning how to think rationally, make optimal decisions, and solv Recent Ph.D. Students
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