directed discussion method

dialogue between two or more people about a specific topic in which one person’s role is to keep the dialogue focused on a certain path or moving in a certain direction. That person may be a teacher, group leader, or mediator. In an educational setting, for example, a professor would provide curriculum-directed focus based on experience, while the students would contribute varied perspectives and broad-ranging information from their research.

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Psychology term of the day

January 31st 2025

group effect

a research finding specific to the group of individuals to which a participant belongs. A group effect could appear in an assigned subset, such as a treatment or intervention, or in a naturally occurring subset, such as age level or classroom. For example, a researcher might be interested in a group effect of a specific reading intervention, or in a group effect of book reading for students in the current decade who may be reading less than previous sets of students owing to more common use of the computer and television.