HOHENFELS, Germany -- Students in Hohenfels Middle/High School psychology class sought a better understanding of human behavior as they conducted experiments among fellow classmates and parents at a Psychology Fair here, Jan. 8.
Unlike a science fair where completed projects are presented, the psychological fair served as a platform for the students to conduct their research, with visitors serving as the test subjects. Students will study and correlate the data collected and then present their findings to the class next week.
"Education is leaning more toward project-based learning," said Mini DeLamarter, HMHS psychology teacher. "I came up with this event, but it has all been self-driven by the students. They are the ones coming up with the ideas, doing the research, creating their booths and deciding how they're going to collect data."
Each student created a hypothesis or research question that they then tested through interactions with visitors to the fair. Experiments ranged from testing memory to perceptions of beauty and even determining if paper color can affect test scores.
Alex McCready put a twist on the popular Rorschach, or inkblot, test, first developed in the 1920s by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach, to create profiles for schizophrenic patients. Rather than use generic inkblots which are open to interpretation and used mostly to determine a person's emotional stability and personality type, McCready used blots with a definitive answer as to what they represent.
"This way, I can compare with all of my trials whether or not there is a correlation between age and gender and what people are able to see," said McCready.
Tanja Vass conducted a survey to determine what factors affect musical preference, such as age, gender and sexual orientation.
"Many people think that people kind of organize their music based on their personality, like hard rockers are all rebel, for example," she said. "But that has kind of changed since the genres have become more mixed together, so I would like to see what factors affect people's preferences."
Logan Webb chose his project after seeing how seriously a friend took astrology .
"He'd say, 'I'm such a Leo,' or 'my boss is such a Cancer,' and I'm like -- I don't believe that to be true. So I thought it would be interesting to test it myself," said Webb.
Webb asked volunteers to fill out a personality profile and over the week he will compare their answers and see if they correlate to their astrological sign.
"Previous research suggests astrology is not true," Webb said.
While Webb's project will take some time to analyze, some hypotheses could be proven instantaneously.
To determine if color affects taste, Kelsy Hetzler presented subjects with three different colored drinks and asked them to identify the tastes. The results were fascinating.
"Actually, they're all Sprite," said Hetzler, "but most people think the red one is some kind of cherry soda."
Participants, presenters, and onlookers all enjoyed the fair and went away with some new understandings of human behavior.
"The kids really knew their stuff and I was really impressed by the wide variety of topics," said parent participant Kristin Jacobs-Schmid.
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