Saturday, 8 March 2014

What is a schema

Study Guide Due on March 4 (10 points)

This Study Guide covers readingsfor March 11 and March 13. They are:

Readings
·         “Considerations of Media Effects,” by Bradley W. Gorham (no date). On Canvas.
·         “Everybody Knows That Mass Media …,” by Michael P. Levine and Sarah K. Murnen (2009). On Canvas.
·         “Crime News and Racialized Beliefs,” by Travis L. Dixon (2008). On Canvas.
               
Instructions: Open a Word document on your computer and save it. Type your name and student number at the top of the document. Type your answers to the required questions, numbering them to match the questions in the Study Guide.

Answer the six questions. The Study Guide is intended to help you prepare for the March 14 quiz.  Your Study Guide answers should be brief and direct. Many of the questions can be answered in a few words.
Upload your completed study guide to the appropriate Canvas location by 1 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11. (Canvas accepts files only in Word’s .doc or .docx format.) Then bring a printed or electronic copy of your completed study guide to class on Tuesday, March 11, and Thursday, March 13. This Study Guidemay be used for in-class work those days. 

We will not accept your Study Guide during class nor will we accept it by email. No exceptions. The only way to get credit for this assignment is to upload it to Canvas by the date and time it’s due.

Your Study Guide is worth up to 10 points. In grading the Study Guide, we will select one "3-point question" at random and evaluate its answer for correctness and completeness. You will earn three points for answering it correctly and completely. For the other questions, we will look for complete and thoughtful answers – not necessarily correct answers.  A thoughtfully answered question is one that responds directly to the question posed, following the instructions within that question. Please see the grading rubric in Canvas for more information.

Required questions for your Study Guide

“Considerations of Media Effects”

1.       What is a schema? How do humans use schema? Each question can be answered in a sentence or two.
2.       What’s the connection between a stereotype and a schema?  Limit your answer to about two sentences.

“Everybody Knows That Mass Media …”

3.       This is a recent article that seeks to summarize the social-scientific research about mass media images and their relationship with negative body images and disordered eating among females.  It includes terms that will be unfamiliar to many of you, some of which I explain below.  Don’t get distracted by those terms.  Read the article for general meaning. After you’ve read the article, write a 50- to 75-word summary of what social scientists know about this relationship between media images and negative body image or disordered eating among females.  Think of your task this way: If you had to convey the main “takeaways” of this article to me, what would you say?  Be sure to write this in your own words.
Here are brief definitions of three terms that may be unfamiliar:

·         Cross-sectional surveys or studies: These are surveys or studies done at a single point in time. If I were to survey our class on March 11 about the number of magazines each student reads in a typical month, that would be a cross-sectional survey of magazine readership.
·         Longitudinal studies or surveys: Longitudinal refers to research that takes place over a long period of time and typically involves several phases of data-gathering, often from the same people. A longitudinal survey might involve asking the same group of people about their media-use habits multiple times over several years.
·         Meta-analyses: These are research projects that analyze the findings from many similar research studies of the same subject.  A meta-analysis of research studies about the relationship between exposure to media images of fashion models and negative body self-image among women would seek to make sense of the findings of dozens of studies about that issue.  The meta-analysis would seek to discover what these studies, as a group, have found about that relationship.

4.       This article talks about causation in a way that’s slightly different from the reading you did three weeks ago in “Effects of Mass Communication”.  It’s focused, of course, on whether certain kinds of media images affect (cause changes in) perceptions about body image among females and in eating disorders.  In your own words, try to describe what you see as the main difference between the two readings’ approaches to causation (at least as I’ve presented it in class).  I know the difference may not be entirely clear, but I’d like you to try to grasp the distinction between the articles and to tell me what it is.

“Crime News and Racialized Beliefs”

5.       Find the list of hypotheses. List the three dependent variables in this study.
6.       I’m interested in you telling me the “big-picture conclusion” from this study. As in the “Everybody Knows That Mass Media …,” many of you will encounter terms that are unfamiliar or tables that are hard to understand.  Don’t get distracted by them.  Read for general meaning.  Then, in your own words, write a 50- to 75-word summary of the main findings or conclusions from this article. 


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