PSYCHOINFORMATICS: A NEW PARADIGM OF RESEARCH IN SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY

Workshop:
School Psychology is a field that applies principles of educational psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, Organizational psychology, community psychology, and applied behavior analysis for crisis intervention. Crisis intervention is an integral part of school psychology. School administrators view school psychologists as the school’s crisis intervention “experts”. Crisis events can significantly affect a student’s ability to learn and function effectively. As noted by the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP, 2007) and the American Psychological Association (APA, 2007), school psychologists adhere to the scientist-practitioner framework and make decisions based on empirical research. Their researches are not necessarily directed toward development of theory rather to systematic inquiry to find effective solutions to real life crisis. Any crisis occurs in random fashion. Psychoinformatics is new paradigm of research where in researcher deals with randomly occured behaviour. It follows data driven rather hypothesis driven model. Hypothesis driven model fails to gauge random behaviour and controls researcher's thinking. It is more suitable for theory development.
     Psychoinformatics  is  a technique through which we can mine data in any form and can develop pattern based on  relations among data. The pattern finally reflects specific psychological phenomena.  Sometimes, researcher finds unique phenomenon of psychology as this approach follows here and now rather earlier notions. It uses computer databases to store, retrieve and assist in understanding psychological phenomenon. Psychoinformatics  entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of  psychological  data. Data warehouse, data retrieving, data mining, pattern recognition  and discovery of knowledge are five basic principles of psychoinformatics. This tutorial session will focus on following topics:

1. Research paradigms of school psychology
2. Paradigm shift from hypothesis to data driven model
3. Five principles of Psychoinformatics and its application in school psychology.

Time: 2 hours
Pedagogy: Lecture and Case study.
Ref:
1. Dutta Roy,D.(2010). Psychoinformatics: Innovation in mining randomized data. PSYBER NEWS: International Psychology Research Publication,1,1,23-31.
2. Dutta Roy,D.(2006). Development of picture drawing test to assess consciousness layers of tribal children of Tripura, Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology,32, 1, 20-25
3. Dutta Roy, D. and Paul, M. (2002). Reading motivation of children in grades III and IV,Indian Educational Review, 38,1,43-51.
4. Tutorial: Psycho-informatics: model for measuring randomized behaviour : Measuring behaviour, 2012, Utrecht, Netherlands. http://www.measuringbehavior.org/mb2012/tutorial-psycho-informatics-model-measuring-randomized-behaviour






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School Psychology is a field that applies principles of educational psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, community psychology, and applied behavior analysis for crisis intervention. Crisis intervention is an integral part of school psychology. School administrators view school psychologists as the school’s crisis intervention “experts”. Crisis events can significantly affect a student’s ability to learn and function effectively. As noted by the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP, 2007) and the American Psychological Association (APA, 2007), school psychologists adhere to the scientist-practitioner framework and make decisions based on empirical research. Their researches are not necessarily directed toward development of theory rather to systematic inquiry to find effective solutions to real life crisis. Psychoinformatics is new paradigm of research where in researcher deals with randomly occured behaviour.





 Usually, inquiry follows hypothesis driven model. Hypothesis driven model fails to gauge random behaviour. It is more suitable for theory development. But School psychology aims at crisis intervention. It is problem focused. Psychoinformatics is paradigm shift in Psychological research.

With rapid, randomized-digitalized and non-digitalized information explosion, problems of psychology are moving from bounded psychology arena to unbounded psychology. Bounded psychology refers to knowing psychology through responses controlled by the experimenter or test constructor. Knowing psychology through randomized responses or data is called unbounded psychology. Knowing psychology through predetermined hypotheses limits our knowledge to pre-assumed psychological traits. This causes serious problem to gauge all determinants of individual differences in behaviour. Psychoinformatics  is  a technique through which we can mine data in any form and can develop pattern based on  relations among data. The pattern finally reflects specific psychological traits. It uses computer databases to store, retrieve and assist in understanding psychological information. Psychoinformatics  entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of  psychological  data. Data warehouse, data retrieving, data mining, pattern recognition  and discovery of knowledge are five basic principles of psychoinformatics. This tutorial session will focus on following topics:


Paradigm shift in psychological research;

Importance of psychoinformatics;

Basic assumptions, techniques and measurement tools in data mining and pattern recognition;

Case studies on digitalized (internet based training data) and non-digitalized data (poem of Rabindranath Tagore, pictures drawn by ethnic minority children and psychiatric case history).