The goal of a service-learning project is to enhance learning by sharing with others and actively reflecting on the process afterward. The community, or "others" involved should also benefit from this interaction. This semester we will have two different sets of interections with the community. In late March we will interact with seventh-graders from a local middle school. In April, we will collect data to help the city design a brochure for new residents.
Service-learning projects are one way to apply what we know from research about perception to needs outside the classroom. There are many other areas where applied research is benefitting individuals in society at large. This course will also emphasize such applied areas, and as their first paper, the students will each summarize the current status of an area of applied perception research.
All of the above will be documented on this webpage. Thus, this page will be updated as the semester progresses. If you are interested, the webpages from previous classes are also available: 1997, 1998.
Return to Perception 440 information page.
The Class:
Back Row: Lora Muxworthy, Heather
McCown, Allison Reynolds, Rachel Waits, Rebecca Woods
Middle Row: Chris Ramos, Nathan Hay, Luke Cantu, Laurie Moses,
David Koepnick, Tim Ballew
Front Row: Laurie Gallaway, Shawn Davis (TA), Christina
Willis, Dr. Lauren Scharff
On March 29th and 31st, the class visited TJR Middle School, gave presentations and interacted with seventh-graders in Mrs. Leah Kahn's science class. The interactions involved many demonstrations which helped the students understand some basic principles about perceptual processing and some of the effects of perceptual aging. For a summary of these visits and some pictures, click here.
The City of Nacogdoches wanted to design a brochure for new residents. They enlisted our help in designing a brochure that would be perceptually appealing, and readable. The class designed a two-part approach to gather data before making their recommendations to the city. The influences of the factors of text color, background color, and font type were investigated by collecting reaction times for computer-presented text. Subjective preferences for the same combinations of these variables were collected for both the computer stimuli and for sample brochures created using content provided by the city. Click here for one of the student research papers summarizing this project.
For some general information on Service Learning and the projects at Stephen F. Austin State University: The Center for Service-Learning and Eldercare