Distance teaching of observational techniques of infant behavior

M. Cacioppo and T. Taeschner

Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy

This paper tries to verify the possibility of teaching observational techniques of behavior via the Internet. In the framework of the project "Funzione Gamma", a CD-ROM was handed to 10 students of the Psychology Faculty of the University "La Sapienza" of Rome. It contained software for behavioral observation and two digital video files of five minutes each. The software was a specially adapted edition of The Observer (Noldus Information Technology), named "Student Edition for Funzione Gamma". The two video files refer to a classroom situation. The students were able to communicate with experts in observational techniques via a Web site of the Psychology Faculty and ask them for advice about the working procedures of the software. The task given to the students was: make six observations in a fixed sequence and send, for each of them, the observational data (ODF file) to the Web site. Through the comparison of this coded data it was possible to measure inter-observer reliability. The comparison was made between the students' observations and the experts' observations.

From the first results we can see that the students keep getting better results in their observations as for the observers' matching (measured by Cohen's Kappa index). It follows that one can propose such a teaching method for distance learning of observational techniques.


Poster presented at Measuring Behavior 2000, 3rd International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 15-18 August 2000, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

© 2000 Noldus Information Technology b.v.