Mark Scase
Allied Health Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Science

Video transcript

I teach a second year module on biological psychology. This module is about how biological processes influence behaviour.

Students can sometimes find this module difficult, because it includes lots of anatomical terms and it’s quite different in nature from other modules that they take.

One way in which I’ve tried to make it more enhanced is to give practical classes so that students can measure biological processes on themselves.

The product that we use is called Lab Tutor. The software runs on a web server her at DMU.

The software is available for free but in order t run it requires AD Instruments hardware.

The types of things that we are using this hardware for is to record things like lie detection – how biological processes are influenced by stress.

Here we have a student with various probes attached to her. Probes on her skin to measure Galvanic skin response, to measure her pulse, and to measure her skin temperature and one round her waist to measure breathing.

The way in which the software is arranged is that students log in to the web server in groups and are then taken through, on a stage by stage basis, how to run the practical. Students record their data, which is then saved automatically.

At the end of each practical students can then come back and log in individually, and look at their data, can do further analysis and can help them to understand more about biological processes.