The Mystery of the Vanished Citations

James McConnell’s Forgotten 1960s Quest for Planarian Learning,
a Biochemical Engram, & Celebrity
by Mark Rilling

Evaluating McConnell’s public relations blitz for planarian learning and memory from the vantage point of 30 years is difficult. To market his ideas to a mass audience, McConnell connected planarian learning to the American myth of the quick, easy, simple technological fix for complex problems. McConnell knew when he was kidding, but his less sophisticated mass audience could easily have been misled. By appealing directly to a mass audience, McConnell escaped the peer review that would have tempered his hype. He outmatched the few dissenters with charisma.
The profession does not have a mechanism for providing peer review for the attempts of psychologists to popularize the discipline. Because psychologists have a First Amendment
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
 
 
 
  right to express their views on psychological topics to the public as they see fit, the problem of how to popularize psychology does not have a simple solution. Fidelity to the peer-reviewed literature is proposed as an ethical standard for evaluating coverage of psychological topics by the media. When a topic is controversial, the media could present alternative viewpoints, dissenting opinions, and heavy doses of old-fashioned scientific skepticism. The coverage of planarian learning by the media provides lessons of contemporary relevance. Although the coverage of contemporary neuroscience by the media is well beyond the scope of this article, basic research on neural mechanisms of memory is still sometimes accompanied by speculation about a memory pill (Service, 1994).
Our graduate institutions do not provide psychologists with training in the art and ethics of public relations. This represents a failure to build public support for science. Many responsible psychologists shun the media and are even reluctant to cooperate with professional science writers because of a desire to avoid the sensational. By their silence, such scientists bear some esponsibility for the distorted messages about psychology that reach the public through the media.

The Worm Runner’s Digest: Peer Review Versus the 1960s Counterculture

McConnel’s name is inevitably linked with the infamous The Worm Runner’s Digest, McConnell’s house organ.

Today McConnell would have set up a Web site on the World Wide Web, but there was no Web site in McConnell’s day, so he founded his own journal. The journal is hard to pigeonhole. It is funny and strange: an improbable, flawed, and ultimately unworkable combination of a humor magazine and a scientific journal. It is one of the great cultural relics of psychology from the 1960s, a scientific incarnation of the counterculture.

Cmiel (1994)

A social historian
Kenneth J. Cmiel was an American academic and historian specializing in the history of human rights at the University of Iowa.
 
 
 
  of the counterculture of the 1960s, analyzed the rhetoric of the counterculture and observed that it represented an attack on the prevailing norms of discourse. For McConnell, the rhetoric of the scientific establishment was serious, so as an antiestablishment scientist he countered with humor.
The Digest was a counterculture version of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology and was born in the burst of public enthusiasm for planarian learning that followed the story that appeared in Newsweek in September 1959 (Animal Life). Below the masthead, the digest was identified as An Informal Journal of Comparative Psychology. The idea was to provide a clearinghouse for research with planarians, that is, to publish pilot studies before final versions were published in traditional scientific journals. At first, a clear consequence of McConnell’s (1959) editorial policy was that articles would escape the rigorous peer review of the establishment journals. After the Digest was founded, McConnell never again published an article in the Journal ofComparative and Physiological Psychology. The Digest soon became a home for memory transfer research. At first, the ideas about memory transfer that McConnell placed in the Digest were taken very seriously by other scientists until failure to replicate letters and articles in Science consigned memory transfer to the scientific fringe.

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Why Mathematics Is a Language
by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.

Окончание Назад

Language as a Teaching Tool

Understanding how mathematical sentences work is helpful when teaching or learning math. Students often find numbers and symbols intimidating, so putting an equation into a familiar language makes the subject more approachable. Basically, it’s like translating a foreign language into a known one.
While students typically dislike word problems, extracting the nouns, verbs, and modifiers from a spoken/written language and translating them into a mathematical equation is a valuable skill to have. Word problems improve comprehension and increase problem-solving skills.
Because mathematics is the same all over the world, math can act as a universal language. A phrase or formula has the same meaning, regardless of another language that accompanies it. In this way, math helps people learn and communicate, even if other communication barriers exist.

Language as a Teaching Tool

∇ × D = ρ
∇ × D = 0
∇ × E = —^∂B/_∂t
∇ × H = J + ^∂D/_∂t

Not everyone agrees that mathematics is a language. Some definitions of language describe it as a spoken form of communication. Mathematics is a written form of communication. While it may be easy to read a simple addition statement aloud (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2), it’s much harder to read other equations aloud (e.g., Maxwell’s equations). Also, the spoken statements would be rendered in the speaker’s native language, not a universal tongue.
However, sign language would also be disqualified based on this criterion. Most linguists accept sign language as a true language. There are a handful of dead languages that no one alive knows how to pronounce or even read anymore.
A strong case for mathematics as a language is that modern elementary-high school curricula uses techniques from language education for teaching mathematics. Educational psychologist Paul Riccomini and colleagues wrote that students learning mathematics require

a robust vocabulary knowledge base; flexibility; fluency and proficiency with numbers, symbols, words, and diagrams; and comprehension skills.

Sources

1. Ford, Alan, and F. David Peat. The Role of Language in Science. Foundations of Physics 18.12 (1988): 1233–42.
2. Galilei, Galileo. The Assayer‘a (Il Saggiatore in Italian) (Rome, 1623). The Controversy on the Comets of 1618. Eds. Drake, Stillman and C. D. O’Malley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.
3. Klima, Edward S., and Ursula Bellugi. The Signs of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
4. Riccomini, Paul J., et al. The Language of Mathematics: The Importance of Teaching and Learning Mathematical Vocabulary. Reading & Writing Quarterly 31.3 (2015): 235-52. Print.

Текст публикуется по ThoughtCo

5 Behavior Management Resources for Teachers
by Janelle Cox

Help increase your chances of a successful school year by implementing an effective behavior management program. Use these behavior management resources to help you establish and maintain effective classroom discipline in your classroom.

Behavior Management Tips

As teachers, we often find ourselves in situations where our students are being uncooperative or disrespectful to others. To eliminate this behavior, it’s important to address it before it becomes a problem. A great way to do this is by using a few simple behavior management strategies that will help promote appropriate behavior.
Here you will learn six classroom ideas to help motivate good behavior: start your day with a morning message, pick a stick to avoid hurt feelings, sway negative behavior with a traffic light, motivate students to keep quiet, and learn how to reward good behavior.