Teaching Experience of David I. Shore

Student Supervision:

The supervision of independent projects is and has been a very rewarding experience. I have recently begun to collaborate with Dr. Jake Burack (McGill University) through the co-supervision of several of his students. The first (Kim Harris) explored the development of gaze-contingent orienting for her Undergraduate Honours Thesis. This manuscript is being submitted to the Journal of Development and Cognition (Harris, Shore, Burack & Klein, in prep). Additionally, I am currently assisting with his Doctoral student (Grace Irrocci) who is exploring the relation of global and local processing in both normally developing and high-functioning autistic children. Grace will be taking up a faculty position at Simon Fraser University in September 2000. His other students (Mafalda Porporino and Danny Miller) are examining the normal development of global-local interference using a flanker task and change-blindness using a flicker paradigm, respectively. These projects are in various stages of completion.

While a graduate student, I was responsible for a directed studies course for a a third year student (Tracy Fraser). The project focused on the processing of and memory for human faces (see Face Processing Project). In addition to the typical aspects of experimental design, this project involved photographing, developing and digitally manipulating the stimulus set which was done together with the student. This project formed the basis of Enns and Shore (1997).

During my tenure as a Killam Post-Doctoral fellow, I co-supervised an undergraduate honours thesis with Dr. Patricia A. McMullen who was on Sabbatical and away from the university. This project extended the work discussed above (see Face Processing Project) by including a manipulation of image contrast. We are presently in the process of preparing this manuscript for submission.

As a requirement of the two lab courses discussed below, each student had to complete a unique project. This afforded me the opportunity to supervise almost a dozen students. Two student projects from the most recent course (Psychology 3130) are also presently being developed into manuscripts for submission. The first project (The effect of expertise on processing of upright and inverted photographs) integrates well with the manuscripts discussed above, while the second project (The effect of attention on the detection of onsets and offsets) is very related to the work completed in my Doctoral thesis.

I look forward to the rewards and challenges of being a mentor to both undergraduate, and graduate students. I would feel confident supervising students of my own or collaborating with others to co-supervise students.

Lecturing Experience:

During my tenure at Dalhousie University I team taught a third year cognitive lab course (Psychology 3130) with Dr. Raymond Klein. The main focus of this course was on the history of cognition and how this history has affected present-day psychology. I was responsible for teaching lectures every week and developing laboratory demonstrations. In addition, I maintained an active web site containing course notes, assignments and pages for data collection. This course took a unique perspective on cognition by spending the first term focusing on historical issues and the second term updating these issues with modern paradigms.

As a graduate student, my teaching focused mainly on a fourth year perception laboratory course (P463) which I taught with Dr. James Enns. I was responsible for the hands-on component of this course which involved developing weekly experiments for the students. They would collect data on themselves, analyse this data, and submit a weekly assignment summarising the data and methods. We have plans to submit the material from this course for publication as a laboratory course manual.

Also during my graduate student career I taught two sections of a third year research methods course which was a part of the students required statistics experience. I was responsible for presenting lecture material and setting exams and weekly assignments.

As an undergraduate I supervised a first year psychology course which was taught from video lectures. I was responsible for summarising and reviewing the material for the course. The very small class sizes encouraged me to interact closely with individual students.

I am prepared to teach courses, both lecture and laboratory, on Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology (Including the development of perception and language acquisition), Research Methodology, History of Psychology, and Psychophysiology. With additional preparation I would feel comfortable teaching courses on Statistics.

Extracurricular Teaching:

As an aquatics instructor I interacted with people ranging in age from 2 to 68 years old. Among these students there were many with both physical and mental disabilities including patients suffering from Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis, Spina Bifida, Spasticity, and Down's Syndrome. By the end of my aquatic career I was responsible for directing a facility which included three pools, a staff of over 30 members and served a regular membership of 1200 and a summer camp membership of 300. In addition, I was qualified to train life guards with national recognition.

I have also served as a community volunteer teaching both CPR and First Aid to members of both the general public and the medical community (Doctors, Nurses, and Interns). This experience exposed me to a broad range of learning styles and allowed me to acquire a number of different teaching styles which has been a strong asset in my university teaching.