In this short (4-5 page) paper, you'll choose a part of cognitive science that we've covered in class, and you'll discuss
one of three topics:
Option 1 Why/HOW COGNITIVE SCIENCE CAN INFLUENCE INDIVIDUALS OR DRIVE POLICY
Option 2 Why/HOW COGNITIVE SCIENCE CAN LEAD TO BETTER Ais
Option 3 WHAT QUESTION WOULD TURING POSE TODAY? (Turing Test 2020 EDITION!)
Option 4 You Decide! Come up with another topic that relates to the 4 class themes.
This is a Reflection PAPER! The most important feature of this requirement of our class, per the fuller description in the syllabus, is that you should write a paper whose content consists primarily of your own thoughts about these issues. This is to be distinguished from a *research* paper (or a 'book report') where you would read and report about others' ideas and results.
We're interested here in what *you* think about this topic, so you should try to maximize that, and minimize your discussion of background and additional research. As such, you needn't cite or discuss any papers or research beyond what we have covered in class (though you could do so). We are looking for evidence that you've thought carefully about the question under consideration.
EVALUATION
Your TFs will grade your papers based largely on a single overarching question: To what degree does the paper exhibit interesting careful thought that involves themes related to our course?
100 POINTS TOTAL
Clarity & novelty of the thesis (10 points)
How carefully and interestingly is that idea or thesis conveyed and executed? (50 points)
Contains relevant TEXT BOOK OR OTHER LECTURE material (15 points)
To what degree do your thoughts make contact with themes from LECTURE? Are the themes accurately represented; Do they support your thesis?
Contains relevant MEDIA presented in class (15 points)
To what degree do your thoughts make contact with themes from TED talks, online videos, podcasts, etc? Are the themes accurately represented; Do they support your thesis?
Readability/Clarity/Form (10 points)
How well is the paper written (grammar, clarity, etc) aside from its particular content?
Also, please use normal font sizes (typically 11-point or 12-point for most fonts), margins (typically 1 inch on each side), and spacing (typically double-spaced); doing otherwise doesn't fool anyone.
NOTE: Students will be asked to submit papers via Turnitin. If a student gets a warning indicating that there is more than a 10% overlap with other material (even their own, self-plagerism) then the student will lose half the points associated with the material that is found to overlap.
the student can choose to cite their own paper however, this does not excuse verbatim copying of their own material (self-plagerism).
You can learn more about how turn it in can improve your writing: http://www.canvas.gatech.edu/blog/uncategorized/guest-post-from-i-caught-you-to-i-taught-you-utilizing-turnitin-to-improve-student-writing/
TIPS FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT
Develop your thesis and support it! Implicit in the material you will see in the advice below is the idea that your paper should have *some* thesis (as should nearly every bit of nonfiction that you write in college, and beyond!). Moreover, your paper should be organized around explicating, exploring, and defending this thesis -- including things such as paragraphs with topic sentences and transitions, etc. In other words, the assigned paper topic was designed not to let you speculate haphazardly, but to allow you to speculate with a goal -- supporting a thesis -- and on a focused topic. So, even if you explore multiple perspectives in your paper (e.g. arguing one way, and then playing the "devil's advocate"), you should eventually reach some clear conclusion.
Make sure your paper is about research in Cognitive Science.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE VS. COGNITIVE PROCESSES One past pitfall we've seen is when students focus on the real-world importance of a cognitive *process* rather than of research in cognitive *science*. In other words, the assigned topic is to write about how some aspect of *research* in cognitive science is important (e.g. research on language acquisition), not why some part of the mind itself is important (e.g. language acquisition itself). (It is undoubtedly true that language acquisition possesses tremendous real-world importance: without it, for example, we would be unable to communicate efficiently, and many aspects of society would break down. But that may all be beside the point for this paper, since language can subserve these functions just fine even without any cognitive science research elucidating how it works.)
Maintain SCOPE AND FOCUS The specific topic of your paper, of course, is entirely up to you. You could write a focused paper on the real-world importance of a single technique or idea (e.g. of recent research using fMRI), or of an entire subfield of investigation (e.g. language acquisition), or of a more abstract idea (e.g. of research on innateness or modularity). And you could similarly focus on only a relatively small slice of real-world connections (e.g. photography, driving safety, childhood education) or you could range more widely (e.g. relating work on visual perception to several different real-world activities and contexts).
In all cases, though, you should be sure that your paper discusses some of the material that we explored in the lectures and/or readings for the course. And in all cases, we will be on the lookout for the degree of careful thought present in your paper, whatever its scope. So, be sure that your paper is something more than a laundry-list of possible applications; we are not impressed with the sheer volume of applications you can list, but rather with how thoughtfully you've discussed them. (If you list too many possible real-world connections, then you won't have room to discuss any of them with sufficient care!) You should similarly try to come up with clever or nuanced connections, rather than obvious ones that anyone would come up with -- e.g. "in the future we might be able to build a robot to do X" (which you could easily say for just about any X that we've covered in the course!).
DETAILS are important! Part of writing a thoughtful paper, of course, is going into some detail about how your ideas might actually work. For example, you wouldn't want to just say that infant cognition work on arithmetic has implications for how we should educate kids, and then go on to talk about the importance of learning and education. Instead, you would want to consider the kinds of things in particular that this research suggests we should do in education. (For example, you could begin by noting that the work on math in infants suggests that we start with an approximate/intuitive sense of number. Then, from this, you could argue that we should first encourage kids to develop their approximate understandings of quantity -- i.e. "estimation" -- rather than focusing on making them memorize specific mathematical facts. BEING THOUGHTFUL VS. BEING RIGHT In a similar vein, note that there is no constraint here that your paper's thesis has to be correct! In past years, it has been common for us to note when grading certain papers that we completely disagree with a paper's conclusion (perhaps because some additional work clearly shows it to be false) -- but to nevertheless give the paper an enthusiastic top score because it was so interesting and thoughtful.
EXERCISE FOR DEFINING PAPER TOPIC
In many cases students begin searching for a paper topic along these sorts of lines: "I found the material on X to be especially intriguing and stimulating, so I chose that as my paper topic. Does that seem promising?" It depends: this is a *thought* paper, and so the promising-ness of that topic will depend on the degree of interesting careful thought that you're able to marshal for that topic. Thus, choosing a topic based on your general level of interest is one great way to start, but then you can't stop there.
Review your Journal Submissions—these submissions were meant to get you to think about the topics we covered in class. Have you changed your minds on any of your submissions?
Brainstorm: you could spend a few minutes brainstorming thoughts for this kind of paper for *every* topic that we've discussed at any length in the course so far -- and then you could choose your paper topic based not on your level of initial interest but instead based on the topic for which you have the most/best collection of initially brainstormed thoughts. And note that in some cases these two routes to developing paper topics might diverge: for example, you might be more interested in topic A but be able to generate relatively few interesting thoughts about it, while you might be significantly less interested in topic B but find that you nevertheless are bursting at the seams with interesting thoughts about it. In that case, B might be a better choice for this paper (a situation that wouldn't necessarily arise if this was a research paper instead of a thought paper!).
Other Considerations…
NO SAMPLE PAPERS
There are many different ways to write top-scoring papers, and you could do so in ways that are very different than any of the ways explored in past papers! HAVE FUN! Too many class papers and requirements force you to jump through so many hoops that you don't really have time to sit down and really *think* freely about the material. This paper, in contrast, is all about such thinking, since you can't find the 'answer' in any of the readings or lectures. So, have fun while you're doing this! Thanks, and please feel free to bring up any questions about this requirement at the beginning of today's class...
Some notes about Option 1* Why/HOW COGNITIVE SCIENCE CAN INFLUENCE INDIVIDUALS OR DRIVE POLICY
How the research in a given area should (or should not!) impact the real world, and everyday life. In essence, you'll be asking: *Who cares?* Why should (or shouldn't) the 'person on the street' care about this research? This can also be considered a 'thought paper' in part because our readings and lectures will not always discuss these themes explicitly, but I hope that you'll be thinking about them throughout our course." To see why, it's helpful to keep in mind the heuristic goal in this option of trying to explain the importance of cognitive science to the canonical "person in the street" who is skeptical of all that ivory-tower mumbo-jumbo. In the first place, he is not impressed by generic appeals to "understanding ourselves better" (which of course doesn't involve real-world importance in the first place), so talking about applications is definitely helpful. ("Wow. You know, I've never thought it was that dangerous to talk on my cellphone while driving.)
*Special thanks to Brian Scholl (Yale University) who allowed me to adapt this assignment and relevant resources!