Well, I'm back after my holiday hiatus. Many of my colleagues across the country are back in the classroom already. I return there early next week. As I was preparing for my spring semester classes the last few days, I began to think about some of the non-professional jargon but eminently fun jargon we use to describe or classify classroom behaviors.
During graduate school, one of my peers, David L. DiLalla of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, coined a teaching term I still love and use: the furrowed-brow index (FBI). The FBI refers to the facial feedback teachers routinely receive when their students fail to understand course material. To wit, the facial confusion that results when lecture content, the direction of a discussion, or even the use of an uncommon word (say, a great one, like "moribund") results in puzzled looks and wrinkled foreheads (i.e., the proverbial furrowed brows). When teaching psychology, the FBI tends to be quite high in certain classes (statistics, research methods, tests and measures) where the conceptual material is especially challenging and, admittedly, often dry.
I remembered the FBI during a terrific talk given by my colleague, Dr. Beth Morling, last week at the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NIToP). Dr. Morling teaches research methods for psychology at the University of Delaware. The reason the FBI came to mind is that Dr. Morling identified a behavior that falls at the other end of the student spectrum where misplaced certainty can reign: validity blurt (or if you prefer Morling's alternative term, validity spew). When prompted to review an experiment's design, for example, students often blurt out critiques or complaints ("That's not a valid design!", "The sample is biased!", and the like). As Morling explains, the problem is that students are merely critical but not systematically critical in their evaluations of psychological research.
I love two things about validity blurt. First, I love the term, as it is both descriptive and apt. Second, any psychology teacher who covers research findings and invites student comments has experienced validity blurt. Morling has ingeniously named a phenomenon we've all experienced-it was there, waiting to be dubbed-and she has done so cleverly and memorably (thanks, Beth).
When psychologists teach about validity, they are essentially referring to whether and how much a knowledge claim about some behavior is truthful and accurate. To wit, are we studying what we believe we are studying? If a cognitive psychologist documents slower memory retrieval times in a group of 80 year olds as compared to 50 year olds, can she (and we) be certain that the differences in processing speed is attributable to (for instance) age and not some other factor (especially one not controlled or accounted for in the research design)? Adequately understanding validity issues is important whether one is a consumer or a producer (or both) of psychological research.
Validity comes in several guises, any one of which can be relevant to the successful (or not so successful) execution of an experiment or other type of empirical investigation. I'll only mention three here. Construct validity, for example, refers to whether a variable within a hypothesized relationship exists and has been measured accurately (e.g., does a given IQ test actually measure "intelligence"? How do we know?). Internal validity, the sine qua non of experimentation, concerns the causal relations between variables or constructs (Has an investigator clearly demonstrated that a change in one variable causes a demonstrable change in another?). And then we come to external validity, which address the representativeness of some research finding (Can an investigator convincingly argue that behaviors observed in one sample of people or primates can be reasonably expected to occur in a similar sample at another time and in another place?). To counteract validity blurt, teachers need to help students develop critical thinking skills in order to rigorously deconstruct the validity of arguments, theories, research designs, and, of course, research findings, beyond superficial levels. As Morling demonstrated at the NIToP conference, this can be done and validity blurt can be reduced.
Appropriate sources for learning about validity is are quality research methods texts in psychology. For learning how to teach about validity issues, I recommend a fine book by Bryan Saville of James Madison University. Ramping up on validity will help you deal with the validity blurters in your life while helping you to maintain your own critical acumen-and, we hope, a corresponding (causally-linked?) reduction in observed levels of the FBI.
