Directions

This assignment will involve working as a group to explore developmental psychology concepts and how they can be important in real life situations.

1. Reread Chapter 9 in your textbook particularly page 339-347.
2. Read Terry Morris’ Working in Teams for ideas about how to work together.
3. Click Group Forums in the course menu. Find the group with your name, then click on Group Discussion Board.
4. Elect one person as moderator to take responsibility for organizing the activity and posting the final group project.
5. In the group forum, you will be designing with your group a brochure, power-point presentation, website or using some other format to give information to a group of people about cognitive errors that might impact real life situations.  Specifically, pretend that based on your  knowledge of cognitive psychology you have been asked to give a presentation on cognitive errors and their impact. As a group, you can pick a group to which you would like to target your presentation. Some suggestions include: teachers, managers of a company, nursing students- or you may pick something else. Make sure your target audience is clear in the presentation.

   Your brochure/presentation/website should first explain the three approaches to problem solving: algorithm, heuristic, and insight. You should not use word for word definitions from the book but instead explain things in your own words. For each problem solving strategy, you should also include an example of how it might be used that is relevant to the audience you chose.

   Then discuss include at least four cognitive errors. When discussing each concept, provide an explanation of the concept by defining it in your own words and provide a specific example of how it can play an important role for the group you chose to address. Possibilities of cognitive errors to discuss include: conformation bias, mental set, overconfidence, availability heuristic, belief perseverance, or framing.

   Use the group forum to discuss your ideas and to develop the group’s brochure/presentation/website. I would recommend that you begin by asking each group member to post five or six potential ideas from the chapter in the discussion forum by mid-week (Wednesday) and then spend the rest of the week working together to create a final project. 

The completed project should be posted in the class discussion  forum labeled 
Cognitive Error Group Project. Make sure it is clearly labeled as the final product.

Purpose

This assignment will help you more thoroughly understand cognitive psychology concepts by having to try to explain it to others and apply it to real life settings.  This assignment will also help you to develop and practice some teamwork skills.