Film-work Part 2: Complex Details Unfold

 

                                                            

Research and Development years: 1979-1999

 Initial 1979 research was conducted at the University of Kansas Watson Library, applying my class textbooks noted prominent researchers. It began with B.F. Skinner’s stimulus-response research followed with D. O. Hebb, Canadian Neuroscientist, who wrote on the organization of behavior.

 Those meant hours searching “the dark stacks” using Dewey decimal; cards, and printing textbook findings.

 Popular college instructional topics in the 1980s, expanded into Cognitive Behavioral Modification (CBM) with Donald Meichenbaum, who combined Skinner’s and Albert Bandura’s behavioral analysis work.

 It was an exciting, informative, time for me. I couldn’t read enough about it. The early 1980s created a fresh flavor for neuroscience, at a time when few lay people understood the meaning of the word “cognitive”, or cared about it.

 Scientific writing tutorials were recommended by a Journalism faculty member, who directed me to the well-known Topeka Menninger psychiatric clinic’s prominent editor.

 I soon found myself writing scientific papers, and publishing them in an accelerated learning journal, eager for fresh perspectives. Their editor soon became my mentor, and the research effort sprang from that point.

 Seeking Scientific Advancement

 

I kept going, setting up 12 research sites in the process, training and conducting trial classes with puppetry voices.

Today we have large, well-attended neuroscience conferences; many students major in cognition.

The topic now also floods the internet’s Social Media feeds, nearly half a century later.

The first memory and cognition lessons 1-30, were created on audio tape formats, recorded in detail several times.

Hefty personal-directive, workbook additions, complete with researched and cited, lessons, were added to interface with the listening tapes; 45 minutes of additional written/spoken homework was required.

Unfortunately, the cassette tapes consisted of the warm-up drills only; with few game lessons (which are the centerpiece of the instruction). The complete game lessons were administered by an instructor applying transparencies on an overhead projector in group settings, according to age ranges and abilities.

School implementations were activated on this crude model.

Data streams were compiled as such by 5 different university professors and grad students. Then, the data was submitted to the University of Iowa’s statistical analysis department with the Woodcock Johnson’s (Cognitive Skills Battery) Vice President, who evaluated the entire ongoing process.

The final data process then progressed to the New Jersey automated testing service for the schools’ achievement tests correlations.

This rehearsal model was rapidly becoming non-feasible, outdated, with technological advancement.

Subsequently, initial filming of the Warm-up lessons and a few simple “Games” followed. But the bulk of the program was in limbo, requiring high-definition video and sound.

The recent, arduous, film update was strapped with earlier detailed compilations to formulate, yet in the mirrored procedure as the earlier audio tape formats.

A long incubation followed, until recently, when the seemingly unattainable process was realized this spring in solid teamwork with talented sound engineer, Scott Adam Walker.