The teacher was told that the object of the experiment was to study the effects of punishment on learning. They are also told that their role in the experiment was to read word lists to the learner and the learner must remember the second word from a list of word pairs they had read earlier. If the learner got the answer wrong, then the teacher was told to administer shocks, for each answer that the learner got wrong, and the shocks had to increase in intensity. The teacher is unaware of the fact that the learner is actually an actor, and receives no shock. The experiments, involving the Undergrad students from Yale, resulted in 60
Instead of learning some actual useful information, teachers fret over the test rather than about how much that student is actually absorbing into their head. It has become a practice to ‘teach the test’ in today’s teaching world. Tests like SAT, ACT and AP have you pay quite a bit and don’t even show you what you did wrong, blocking out the possibility of even trying to learn from your mistakes. It is believed to be a clever tactic used to gain more profit, students keep coming back to prove they are worth more with those silly numbers. They stress day and night over these overrated tests, like previously stated channeling out the imagination, curiosity and good will.
He asks the question of teachers, if they don’t know what ground rules they want how will the students? The person responsible for learners must therefore consider one of a number of methods. One such method, the Small Group Method was developed by Dr Heather McCarty . This method suggests breaking your students into groups of 3 or 4. Each group is then asked to devise a small number of ground rules and then each group puts forward their suggestions to the whole class.
Lots were apparently drawn, but it was arranged that in each case the volunteer would be the teacher. Teacher and learner were then taken to a room where the learner was strapped into a chair and electrodes fixed to his wrists. The volunteer/teacher was told that the punishment to be applied was electric shock, and that these shocks could be extremely painful, although they would cause no permanent damage. Next the volunteer/teacher was taken to his own room where he was given his instructions; every time the learner made a mistake, he was to give an increasingly high electric shock by way of punishment. The intensity of these shocks - as displayed on a 'shock generator' - ranged from 15V to 450V.
24 of these were allocated to the experimental group and 15 were put in a control group. This experiment took part in a modern university building and the experiment lasted about 30 minutes. The participants were given the role of an interviewer and ordered to harass a ‘job applicant’, who was actually a confederate, to make him nervous during a test to determine if he would be capable of the job. The participants thought the experiments were researching the relationship between psychological stress and test achievement, they were also told that the applicant did not know the real purpose of the study they heard the applicant being told that poor performance on the test would not affect their job prospects and that the job being applied for was real. The applicant, listening via a speaker in a different room, had to answer 32 multiple-choice questions read out in four sets by the interviewer.
The other actors that are responding to the Milgram Experiment are : The learner, the teacher, and the person who is conducting the experiment. The learner’s interests are to obey the teacher’s orders and to receive punishment from wrong doing. The teacher’s interests are to give the learner punishment for not answering the questions correctly. This shows how when someone is given orders they will do them, even if they were wrong or not. This is exactly what the Nazi troops or the Germans had to do to obey their higher power.
When Joel took his leadership position, the first thing he did was come into the organization and meet with current Rabbi’s and leaders to gain an understanding of how the Hillel organization was ran. He did not talk about his ideas until he took the time to understand those who were already in charge running Hillel. Then once he took the time to understand the current leaders, Joel explained his ideas and vision for the new Hillel. Joel at that time formed a coalition with the current leadership of the organization by getting them on board with his thinking and vision. John P. Kotter (2007) states “In successful
Psychologists throughout the years have influenced our world by motivating people to explore themselves beyond their means and consciences. One, extremely influential figure in the history of psychology is named Lawrence Kohlberg. He was born in Bronxville, New York on October 15, 1927 to a family of wealth. As a child, he portrayed “concern for the welfare of others by volunteering as a sailor in World War II and later working to smuggle Jews through the British Blockade into Palestine.” (Long, n.d., p. 2) “It was upon his graduation from Phillips, however, that Kohlberg first began to recognize his passion for the Zionist cause, and, following his graduation, he enlisted as an engineer on a carrier ship.” (Long, n.d., p. 2) His new interest in morality surely helped strengthen his personal views in regard to his impending findings as a psychologist. His captivation towards the elements of psychology continued further as he “grew increasingly fascinated by the cognitive development work proposed by Swiss theorist Jean Piaget, and focused his efforts on the moral development of children for his dissertation.
Frederic Milton Thrasher (1892–1962) was a sociologist at the University of Chicago. He was born in Shelbyville, Indiana in 1892. he graduated B.A. from DePauw University in 1916 in social psychology; he then did an MA in 1918, at Chicago with a thesis on "The Boy Scout Movement as A Socializing Agency." He then took a PhD in Chicago in 1926, on Gangs. In the 1930s he then moved to New York where he taught at the Steinhardt School of Education of New York University, becoming Professor of educational sociology and retiring in 1959.
Whenever the pupil answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to throw one of the switches, starting at the lowest voltage and progressing to the higher voltages. The pupil, of course, was not actually receiving shocks, but he would act out preplanned mistakes and feign pain upon receiving the "shocks." About midway through the series of switches, the "pupil" would complain loudly that he wanted to stop, kick the wall, and scream. At the highest levels of shock the pupil would remain silent. All the while, the experimenter, wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clipboard, would instruct the teacher to continue with the "learning experiment."