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TOK Human Sciences

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What are the human sciences? History Sociology Anthropology Psychology Economics And the social sciences of Humanities, Arts and political sciences

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Studying human beings, ways of knowing On your own, write spaced apart: psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science Use your pen to join them and show interconnections In groups: What does each one study? Do some of them overlap in what they study? Are any of them subcategories of others? What associations come to your mind for each of the human sciences? Are there stereotypes that you can identify? Do you consider there to be any significant omissions to the subjects in this list? If you are studying human geography or business, for example where would you place your subject? Is it a human science? In what ways can all the sciences, both natural and human, tell us something about human beings? What can they tell us, for example, about our ways of know: sense perception, emotion, language, and reasoning? Is it biology or psychology that can tell us more about our emotions?

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CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING CLAIM To what extent do you accept it? Effective investigation depends on the relationship between the methods and the subject of the research. So interdependent are they for the successful creation of knowledge that they cannot be separated: tell me your methods, and I will tell you your subject matter, tell me your subject matter, and I will tell you your methods.

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Biologist or Anthropologist You will be a Biologist or Anthropologist. You will choose a specific behavior to observe (biologist- natural science). The others will act as anthropologists (human science) but will seek to observe and report on a more ample range of behaviors Pay attention to how sense perception, language, emotion and reasoning influence your experiences and your findings

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Paleoart Are human beings really all that different? South Africa DrakensbergLascaux France http://www.youtube.com/w atch?v=-LZMaNNIDNM http://www.youtube.com/w atch?v=-LZMaNNIDNM Caverns at lascaux

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Paleoart USA and Brazil Head of Sinbad- Utah USA Rock Shelter Furada Piaui region- Brazil

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How do all these civilizations have such similar art, even though they were separated by space and time ? Climbing man Dampier Australia Petroglyphs Yinshan Mountains Inner Mongolia

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IB questionnaire I.D. at least 10 flaws that make this questionnaire and its following interpretation unlikely to gather accurate info Imagine you graduated 10 years ago with your IB diploma. A researcher, trying to find out about the impact of international education, has decided to survey IB students of your grad year, contacting those for whom their schools have up to date contact info. You receive in the mail the following questionnaire and, although you pick up your pen to fill it in, you quickly find difficulties in answering. What problems do you face?

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International Education Survey What percentage of your IB education was international? Under the heading the influence of CAS on your life you are asked 2 questions: How many hours a week have you contributed to doing service within the past year? How much money have you donated to international charities within the past year? Rate, on the IB scale 1-7, how much more international your outlook is, having take the IB, than it would have been if you had not done so?

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Interpretation of results/ problems Male graduates are more generous than female graduates. They have donated 15% more to charities in the past year than the women have. IB graduates contribute on average 15 hours a week in doing service IB graduates are 17.69% more international in their outlook than are graduates of any other form of international education. (what advice would an experienced human scientist give to the researcher who designed this study, on each point? Problems with study The method for gaining a sample of graduates The assumptions seemingly made The choice of the particular questions to ask The language, such as definitions The scales for eval The use of control group (your alternative self) The likeliness of accuracy of memory in reporting The likeliness of accurate answers as people report about themselves The precision of the stats The consideration or not of alt. explanations

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ACTIVITY What do the following terms mean and what do they illustrate about human sciences? Go through list together. If there are terms no none knows, have individuals or pairs look them up and explain them to the class: Validity, operational definition, construct validity, triangulation Reliability Milgram experiment/ethics codes Dependent/independent variable, control/experimental group Hawthorne effect Subject-expectancy/observer-expectancy effect Double-blind/triple blind trials Placebo, nocebo Observation, verbal protocol, self-report Participant observation, cross-cultural comparison Cultural relativism Random/representative sampling Survey, census, questionnaire, interview Qualitative/quantitative research Experimental research, correlational study, case study, longitudinal study

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What are the implications of how we measure for the kinds of conclusions we draw? How does our method of measuring poverty affect the knowledge we gain? Quality and Quantity: How do we try to quantify poverty? What do Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the human development Index (HDI) measure and how do they measure it? What are the implications of accepting each of the methods of measurement, for world attitudes and potentially world decision making?

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METAPHORS AND DIPLOMA SUBJECTS From what subject does each term come? What is the source of the metaphor? What is the target? Can you suggest other examples from your studies? Does geography play a role in providing raw material for the construction of metaphor? Innate drive/ mRNA translation/ electric current Monetary inflation/ Big Bang/ computer virus Concentration gradient/ punctuated equilibrium Computer hardware/ work done/ regime purge System firewall/ natural selection/ cognitive dissonance Netiquette/ price elasticity/ radioactive decay/ buffer solution Great leap forward/ electrical resistance/ liberation front Computer software/ greenhouse effect/ selfish gene Group pressure/ eukaryotic cell/ Trojan horse/ nitrogen fixation Lock and key model/ network topology