Foreign Perspectives

ED209 is a really big course to revise from and to pass so any help in condensing that revision is always useful as there’s an awful lot of pages in the course books. To that end, I’ve collected together all the various posts and resources relating to it right here.

Before you start there’s the matter of choosing the seen question topic. If you want a head start on this, it’s basically the same question every year and is something along the lines of “how does the theory support your chosen area”. It’s best to treat this as TMA7. In case you were wondering, yes, the question on the exam is exactly the same as the one that they give you in April/May.

Since it is such a large course, it’s best sitting back and deciding on what to revise before starting the revision. Although it’s based around the 2009 exam, that article goes over how to select what you should revise.

In 2009, those revision topics were Early cognitive development, Temperament and development, and First relationships from book 1, Gender identity, National identity, and Young consumers from book 2, Early category representation, First words, Development of children’s understanding of grammar, Executive functions, and Theory of mind from book 3.  All of these are collected in the PDF file. If that’s not enough for you, Tim has an excellent series of notes covering every chapter in book 1 to book 3; not quite so organised but with some useful gems is the information here. For book 4 you’ll need to get the notes from Erica Cox as Tim and myself thought that it would be asking for trouble to publish notes on our own topic.

Once you’ve all that done, there’s some exam preparation to be done right down to the final 24 hours when you should definitely look over your TMAs as they can come up in the exam (and did in 2009). There is a LOT of writing to be done during the exam so get yourself a decent pen.

There are two different revision weekends run for the course. These are by Erica Cox and the OU Psychological Society. I gather that Erica’s are more inspirational, the OUPS ones are more hard work. I didn’t go to either on the basis that the time would be better spent actually doing the revision rather than going to a course about doing it but if I were choosing I think I’d get Erica’s notes and go to the OUPS weekend on the basis that this would get the best of both.

Finally, for your perusal there’s the post-mortem. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the analysis of the 2009 results is that seven people didn’t answer the seen question. Worth noting too is that the large number of people leaving in the first hour or so almost certainly represent the 10% who fail the exam ie if you’re still sitting there at the end of the three hours, chances are that you’ve passed.

I was going to say “good luck” at this point but you shouldn’t need it if you use all the resources above. If you come across anything else that’s useful, let me know and I’ll mention it here.

Incoming search terms:

• ed209 ou ericka
• Erika Cox Ed 209