Dear all, 

My colleague Dr Elena Hoicka is looking for someone working in a museum (or similar) who organises programming for children to review or write a short letter of support for a knowledge exchange grant application in developmental psychology. Further details are below. If you can help with this please contact Elena directly at [log in to unmask] 

Many thanks, 

Dr Christine Knight BA(Hons) PhD
Policy Research Fellow
ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum
College of Humanities and Social Science
University of Edinburgh
St John's Land, Holyrood Road 
Edinburgh EH8 8AQ 
Tel: 0131 651 4743
Mob: 07956 896943
Fax: 0131 651 4748
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/forum



Begin forwarded message:



	From: Elena Hoicka <[log in to unmask]>
	Date: 10 June 2011 08:38:32 GMT+01:00
	To: Christine Knight <[log in to unmask]>
	Subject: Reviewer/ letter of support for ESRC project
	
	

	Hi Christine,
	 
	Here's the info about the grant application. I need 2 people to review the grant proposal for the ESRC, and a separate person to write a short letter of support for including the running of experiments (and hence collecting new data) during the event. The events/website hinges on the idea of using parents as experimenters/data coders in the experiments to teach them about psychology research, and studies in waves 2 and 3 will be designed with the feedback of parents at the event, and visitors to the website. So I think running the experiments, and hence collecting new data, adds value to the project. The people should be from outside of academia, and include people who work with/represent parents/children. For example, someone who works a museum and organises programming for children; someone who runs a nursery or a playgroup, etc. I'm submitting Monday, June 13, so would need to have contact details by then. If anyone is interested, they can contact me at <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
	 
	I recently completed an ESRC-funded project on how parents differentiatially cue joking, pretending, and being literal. So far, we've found that when parents joke (e.g., saying that a toy chicken is a spoon), they use a lot of actions and utterances which indicate that they do not believe it's true. When they are being literal (spoon is a spoon) they use a a lot of actions and utterances which indicate that they believe it's true. Finally, when pretending (e.g., a block is a spoon), they fall in between, acting as though it's part true, part not true. I'm also in the process of analysing acoustic cues, which suggest that parents use features of Infant-Directed speech when joking and pretending, suggesting this could be to make the jokes/pretending easier to understand. 

	I'm now applying for follow-on funding in order to report the findings back to the public, specifically parents, but also early years educators. The idea is to set up a series of events at the Edinburgh Zoo, the Glasgow Science Centre, and the MacRobert (a children's arts centre in Stirling), where we provide:
	 
	-short 15-20 minute talks throughout the day aimed at parents and educators about joking and pretending. This could include what kids understand about joking and pretending at different ages, what the benefits of joking and pretending are, the results of my studies, and what research we're doing next.
	 
	-activity areas where parents/children can joke and pretend by themselves, in a way which engages with the research. There would be toys, costumes, etc., and parents would be encouraged to think about how they are conveying their jokes/pretending to their children and vice versa. They could try out different cues (laughing, not laughing; making sound effects or not) to see if it changes how their children respond to their pretending and joking. They could try out different toys to see if children best pretend with objects that look like the actual objects (e.g., toy horse for horse) versus non-descript objects (e.g., block for horse) and see how their children react. Each of these suggestions will be explained on posters which convey information about the ESRC-based studies and other research on joking and pretending.
	 
	-activity areas where researchers run follow-up pilot studies on joking and pretending, initially based on the ESRC study, but later also based on feedback from parents and the public. These would include eye-tracking, imitation studies, etc., with a different study for each year of age under 5 so everyone can participate in an age-appropriate study. Parents would be invited to predict what their child would do before the study, either act as an experimenter or coder during the study, and give feedback after the study. We ran studies at the Edinburgh zoo last summer and parents actually cued up to participate, so they seem quite keen!
	 
	-We would also host a website with information about the studies, videos, and short articles using the pilot studies to explain research methodology. 
	 
	-Crucially, we would also be asking for feedback from parents at each activity point: their thoughts on the activity, how they think it could be improved (e.g., parents often tell me joke studies would work better if the parents were the ones joking instead of the experimenter), and what kind of research they'd like to see in the future.  We would also ask for comments/questions from visitors to the website, and linked facebook and twitter pages. We would use these comments and questions to feedback into pilots at the next two events, so that parents and other members of the public become active in the design of the research, and we would end up with some pilot data from parent- and public-led research.
	 
	Thanks,
	Elena
	 
________________________________

	The Sunday Times Scottish University of the Year 2009/2010
	The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159.
	


-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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