Section 2: Teaching to recognize Uncertainty - Page
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So far, we've talked about how to teach students to recognize Situations of Uncertainty.
All that's left is to talk about where to teach it!
SITE SELECTION:
The best places to teach students to recognize Situations of Uncertainty are situations where:
- there is frequent but intermittent traffic
For each of your students, you will be measuring the detection-to-arrival times of vehicles that approach after everything has become quiet / (they see no vehicles).
That means if vehicles rarely or never approach, or if traffic rarely or never gets quiet, you'll be there for a long time, waiting for those opportunities!
So you look for situations that have some approaching vehicles and then some quiet, then vehicles approaching, then quiet, etc.
Often crossings that are "downstream" from traffic signals are perfect -- there is a long gap in traffic, and then vehicles approach, then it gets quiet again, etc.
- the auditory / visual conditions are steady
Your students will assess a situation, and if the situation changes before the assessment is completed, you'll need to start over again and assess the new situation.
This can happen, for example:
- if a lawnmower starts up after a student who uses hearing has started assessing the situation, or
- if a student who uses vision started assessing a situation in cloudy conditions and then the sun comes out.
Therefore you need a site where the conditions that affect their ability to hear/(see) the traffic will remain steady long enough to test their judgment of that situation.
I don't mean that there are no temporary changes in conditions -- for students who use hearing, there could be temporary masking sounds from receding traffic, airplanes, etc., and for students who use vision, receding vehicles could temporarily block their view of approaching vehicles.
You simply wait until those temporary conditions dissipate and resume your assessment, as long as the residual conditions are consistent.