Awkward Encounters

While exploring the various blogs located on Sakai, I stumbled across an article that really grabbed my attention. What grabbed my attention was an article titled, "Unstructured Play" by Jonah Lehrer, which was prompted by an article by Melinda Wenner titled, "The Serious Need for Play. Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed." Basically, these articles explored the necessity of free, unstructured play in the lives of developing children. What exactly is free, unstructured play? Daydreaming, role playing, or allowing children to make up inventive uses for normal household items would all fall under that category.

This free play has several benefits, such as it allows children to explore more creative solutions to problems, helps them work out anxiety in their lives, and also helps the children develop more advanced social skills. Growing up, I was never bought expensive toys, and I remember playing with empty dish soap containers. Not having six thousand Barbies, or the trendiest toys never interfered with my development, and according to these findings, maybe it helped me out in the end! Another interesting aspect popped up in these articles, the introduction of technology into children's lives. Wenner discusses the impact that television has on developing children. Using the TV as a virtual babysitter doesn't encourage children to be imaginative or engage in unstructured play - it creates all the scenarios for them, no thinking required. Maybe it is time to control the volume - at least when children are concerned.

And what exactly does this have to do with my comp? In the past and for previous classes have looked at the ways that school districts have educated children, what works and what doesn't - and how can we change this for the better. It could possibly be interesting to look at whether free play actually facilitates more creative problem solutions and social development. This could be done with real children or with rats in the lab - facilitating a free unstructured play period and then after a specified amount of time looking at whether this actually develops better social skills and creative problem solving, with a series of follow-up tasks. The more information collected on in what kind of environments children develop in the better - not to mention parents could save a bundle on these technological toys that "make their children smarter." Maybe reverting back to the old ways (encouraging children to play with what was around the house and have lots of free unstructured play time) isn't such a bad idea - we all turned out o.k. right?

Like many with their senior comps, I began without a clue. I did not have one clue what I would want to spend a year of my life working on. I remember our initial discussion in class, where Professor Knupsky stressed the importance of choosing a topic we are passionate or at least interested in exploring. Sitting around with my house mates, a debate broke out about what was important after we all graduate. One was arguing for graduate school, to get a good, high paying job and then life will take its course. Another disagreed, yelling that money was not everything and you did not have to go to graduate school to be successful. Tired of the yelling, I chimed in with "you realize you both are actually agreeing," this brought the room to a halt.

Over the summer, I went with my parents to visit QVC (an initialism standing for Quality, Value and Convience). While on this trip, I had the opportunity to tour the vat QVC studio. We went into a control room that contained hundreds of monitors, flashing lights and information. In this room, QVC is able to monitor how many calls are coming in, how many iteams are being bought in a minute and what part of the country the calls are coming from. One of the things that struck me was that QVC can monitor if a certain word said by the announcer triggers more buys of a product than another word. How is this possible? Is it really the word that cause people to buy the product, or is it something else?

I have decided to see if there is a relationship between the use of figurative language in advertisements and a consumer’s likelihood to buy the product. I am not sure if I want to focus on a specific figure of speech, such as simile, personification, etc, or if I want to look at more than one. I am also contemplating the idea of maybe incorporating an image in the advertisement or playing around with the medium the advertisement is presented in (computer pop-ups, magazine ads, etc).

The article by Jerome Singer I read has a lot of important and interesting information about the benefits of imaginative play in early childhood. Singer looks at various aspects such as language acquisition, imagery, and the emotional benefits of imaginative play in developing children as well as those in middle childhood. In terms of language development the article states, "children who were more inclined to make-believe play also excelled in comprehension, clarity, and organization of words used in describing a picture" (Singer, 1998). The article also states that, "Children's play is one major way in which the young child can deal with complexity and novelty of its environment" (Singer, 1998). The really interesting party of this article is that it not only looks at developing children, but follows the positive aspects of imaginative play into middle childhood, a field with virtually no research on at the time. Singer writes, "while imaginative play in its overt form continues in middle childhood, it is increasingly less obvious and takes on somewhat different forms. Yet children yearn for it and teachers in the schools who use make-believe formats for teaching often find tremendous responsiveness from children" (1998).

So how does this relate to my comp? I am very interested in the way that children learn in the classroom. This article cites several past articles and also gave me several ideas on how I could potentially build upon these findings. If people are so worried about the way children's language is developing, perhaps we need to look at the underlying causes instead of just using media as a scapegoat - something we have been continuously bombarded with in readings. Perhaps allowing children to have more time to engage in imaginative play will help them develop more elaborate verbal fluency, and the language problem will get smaller. Also, in using play in the classroom, children will be more connected/interested in what they are learning leading to more enjoyment in the classroom. More enjoyment could lead to more drive to succeed instead of just doing what is necessary to pass from one grade to the next.

As you can see this research has limitless boundaries. Introducing new techniques into the classroom can only add to the quality of the education that children are receiving. The more data the better- because the only way education will change is if there is substantial proof that children will be receiving the same quality education with the new method as the old method, and that they will still be scoring as well if not better on tests measuring their academic aptitude. Hopefully my comp will help pave the way for positive changes in the field of education.

I am surprised to be able to say that my first idea for senior thesis has panned out, at least to this point. I began with the idea of exploring happiness, because I believe it is one of the strongest motivators in the world. After conducting further research I'm "happy" to say that I believe my topic can be well explored here at Allegheny

In thinking further about my comp, I decided to explore the use of figurative language in advertisements. Rhetorical figures can be arranged and divided based on properties and characteristics. At the highest level, a rhetorical figure is an artful deviation. The next level divides rhetorical figures into tropes and schemes. Tropes deviate from a consumers' expectations through the non-literal use of words, while schemes use literal words to deviate from expectations. Finally, tropes and schemes are divided into categories by their rhetorical operations, which is either simple or complex. Schemes are divided into repetition (simple) and reversal (complex). Examples of schemes include: Rhyme, alliteration, both simple and antimetabole and antithesis, both complex. Tropes are divided into the categories of substitution (simple) and destabilization (complex). Some examples include: Hyperbole and ellipsis, both simple and metaphor and pun, both complex. For my comp, I have decided to explore the use of tropes in advertising (metaphor and hyperbole). Also, if I am ambitious, I might explore the use of a scheme (rhyme) because no research has been done in this area.

For my exploring the field entry, I would like to discuss the TED talk by Stuart Brown: Why Play is vital - no matter your age. To briefly give an overview of the video, Stuart Brown talks about the history of play, and its different types such as narrative, bodily, imaginative, etc. These different types of play all help the brain in numerous ways, especially in the learning process. Brown also discusses something called your personal play history. People with a history of play during their childhood have an increased ability to problem solve in creative ways later in their life.

A major part of my methods section of my comp is the creation and presentation of the sales pitches for the products. I will need to create a general script describing the products and the beginning then make sure the script only contains the desired tropes within them. I am debating with the idea of using an actor to deliver the sales pitches. It is still up in the air whether he/she will be delivering them in person or through a prerecorded video. After reading this article, delivery and dialogue are very important in verbal advertisements and I will have to think long and hard about who will be delivering the pitch and what he/she should say.

It is odd to look back at the beginning of this semester when we were presented with the daunting task of selecting a topic for our senior thesis. We all hated the idea of finally having to realize that eventually we would have to complete a senior "comp". Now, the problem is no where close to worrying about a topic, but on how to perfect it. I arrived at the concept of happiness in college students awhile ago , but I am only just starting to realize how my senior thesis may turn out.

In the article, "Assessing children's oral storytelling in their first year of school" Riley and Burrell look at the important role that storytelling plays in the classroom. Some of the benefits of oral narration in the classroom were improved reading ability, better developed writing skills, wider vocabulary, and a greater ability to use descriptive words. Also, frequently exposing children to hearing and telling stories in class can lead to higher reading comprehension when they start to read actual books.

In their study, Riley and Burrell enroll a group of 5-6 year old children in a program called "StoryTalk" which is developed to enhance the children's language skills as well as narration ability. The participants were told a story and asked to retell the same story that they just heard multiple times. Their re-telling of the story was rated in terms of overall sentence structure, vocabulary, word structure, basic concepts, and formulating labels. Researchers used two different measures to score these categories: Tell Me - New Zealand SEA Story Retelling task, and CELF.

Researchers found that children's scores in all categories went up with the second retelling of the story, although they had a few drawbacks as well. Teachers who were giving this assessment test found that it was difficult to assess the categories accurately. There would definitely have to be a training session or multiple raters to make this test more accurate. Regardless of the drawbacks, teachers found that many students who had not been excelling with normal schoolwork thrived with this assignment. Riley and Burrell (2007) wrote, "The assessment gave the children an opportunity to say more than they would normally be able to say in a group or whole-class situation" (p. 192-193).

This all goes back to the original idea that allowing children to participate in storytelling tasks in the classroom is an alternative to normal teaching techniques. Not all children learn in the same way and allowing them options will give more children a chance to excel especially in terms of language skills, written and narrative. Gaining more insight into the benefits of storytelling on things such as sentence structure and label formation could provide an alternative teaching style that ensures that no child is left behind on the road to learning.

Riley, J., & Burrell, A. (2007). Assessing children’s oral storytelling in their first year of
school. International Journal of Early Years Education, 15, 181-196.

For my final exploring the field entry I decided to go back to my research question dealing specifically with motivators (intrinsic vs. extrinsic). There are a number of studies have concluded that participants with higher levels of intrinsic motivation have higher levels of happiness and overall well-being. On the flip side, there are still some researchers who are not convinced of that these results can be generalized to all people. While these researchers may fewer in numbers, they do have a notable face, Daniel Gilbert.