Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

One of the common comments that I hear about all of the level 2 psychology courses is that there’s way too much content for the level and number of points of the courses.

They’re not wrong either if my experience so far is anything to go by. The level 2 60 point Child Development course feels much more like a 90 point course at times and some of the work required from assignments seems to fall into the definition of requirements for level 3 rather than those for level 2.

Usually the Open University are pretty good at setting the level and amount of content in their courses so how come they appear to have this one so wrong?

One big difference that this sequence of course has is that it’s very much targeted at creating professional psychologists rather than having a more general aim of producing degree level education as other courses usually do. Thus, even though level is the lowest level of psychology course that they offer, the content and requirements of us seems to be almost a postgraduate level eg the “big” assignment that’s coming up soon seems to require original research.

The snag is that if they did make it a 90 point course they’d put a lot of people off what’s a very popular course and if they make it level 3 then they’d have to go and produce a new level 2 introductory course to fill in a gap (it takes a very crazy person to start a new subject at level 3!).

One of the principal aims of the Northern Ireland education minister is to end the 11+ selection system and thus kill off the grammar school system.

However, her thinking is extremely flawed. Yes, socialism is all about equality of opportunity but it seems to me that it’s more than that: it’s about giving the opportunities to those who are able to benefit from them. Her banning of selection tests removes the ability of the education system to allocate places on the basis of ability rather than on the basis of how much money one’s parents have.

Whilst clearly it makes some sense to allocate places on the basis of distance from the school what that does is raise property prices in areas near good schools as it already has done in England. Thus the ability of a working class family to send their child to one of these “good schools” is severely diminished as they are priced out of the housing market near these schools very quickly.

Making the primary selection criteria that the child is entitled to free school meals just seems like a joke. What that really means is that those in relatively deprived areas get priority over those in areas a little better off however it also discriminates against the many families who could claim but won’t claim free school meals on principle. Taking that particular criteria what seems sure to happen is that, by and large, those who would have gone to a grammar school will go to the secondary school instead and vice versa. That’s a system that’s sure to fail everyone. How long will it take the less able pupils to do the typical one or two hours a night grammar school homeworks? Three? Four? In reality it’s not going to take long before they fall behind. Similarly in the secondary school system there just aren’t the mechanisms in place to stretch the pupils. Thus we will have a school system that will be suitable for nobody.

However, the main problem with removing selection is that those that can afford it will simply move into the private school system which seems set for a major expansion on the back of her “no academic selection” policy. Without a grammar school system many children from working class families who would have benefited from a grammar school (which is, after all, effectively a private schooling but without the cost) will lose out as will we all.

Of course, banning selection at 11 doesn’t remove selection. In France, everyone is guaranteed a place in university which seems a grand socialist ideal and so it is. The problem is that it results in a dropout rate of 50% in the first year (and is up to 70%) compared to only 8% in the UK.  Surely it can’t make sense to raise expectations unrealistically as they do in France?

The working class need grammar schools. Yes, the selection process isn’t perfect but let’s not kill off the biggest educational advantage that they’ve ever had by wiping out grammar schools.

One of the essential things to do early on in starting an Open University course is to get yourself into a study group.

Although there are regular tutorials associated with the course there tend to be quite a lot of things that don’t come up during the tutorials for one reason or another but which are often vital to your success on the course. Not all of these will be obvious at the off either. For example, one of the most useful things that I picked up early on in the French course was from just how extensive another student made his notes and what he was making notes on. Seeing just how extensive the notes of another student are has a great deal more impact than hearing at a tutorial that you should make notes.

Less tangible reasons at the start are the encouragement to keep going that you can get from other study group members. As an indication of how important that is, the only people who finished the French diploma were those who were in the study group three years earlier: everyone else dropped out along the way.

Then, there’s the magnification of sources that arises from having a number of people working on the problem. On Saturday for instance our group turned up four separate sets of notes on different aspects of the course.

Finally, there’s the reason that you joined the study group for in the first place… talking about the assignments!

One of the biggest surprises that I had when I started the psychology course this year was the sheer number of separate tutorial groups that it has in the area. Previously with the language courses it was one group to cover the whole of Ireland whereas there are six or seven separate ones for this psychology course and it’s not even the most popular course (Exploring Psychology in case you were wondering).

That larger number of students is also reflected in the blogging world with myself prattling on here, Lynn doing something vaguely similar and Tim being very dedicated. And that’s just from the crop of students studying the course right now with Tanya and presumably others being around in previous years.

Where does all this interest come from though. Well, for me this is notionally the first course in a psychology degree being followed out of interest at the moment although I tend to use my qualifications eventually. The others in my tutor group pretty much all seem to be working with children in some connection so the current course is of more immediate benefit to them. That doesn’t explain why Exploring Psychology (which is considered the first OU psychology course) is running with around 8000 students but I guess that understanding how peoples’ minds work is an interesting topic for an awful lot of people.

I’m something of an addict to browsing university prospectuses though sometimes it’s quite a while between getting the thing and getting around to signing up for a course. Last time it was all the way from picking up a prospectus around 1985 to starting a course in 2002!

At the moment I’m plugging away with a child development course which means that my next logical one is notionally the exploring psychology course which I’d have started last October were it not for the overlap with the final course for the modern languages degree. However, there’s an even worse overlap this year so I’m going to create a gap for myself by not starting the psychology course ’til October 2010 (with probably a little course popped into the first half of that year).

However, for a change, I’ve been looking much further ahead than I usually do and browsing the postgraduate prospectus which has a rather interesting little MSc in psychology that in turn leads on to a PhD.

Crazy, eh? Still, ’twas crazy talk like that which got me from “speaking a little French” to finishing off an honours degree in modern languages.