Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

After getting over the mountain that was the S204 exam, I feel that I’ve been really getting into the chemistry course over the past month or so.

I’ve the third assignment away this morning and it’s the first one that I feel reasonably confident about (though ’til the results come back it could easily be false optimism). Interestingly the biology course is proving increasingly useful as the course moves more into proper chemistry or rather moves away from the largely theoretical side of things and into dealing with how various chemicals react together.

One problem continues to dog progress and that’s that chemistry doesn’t fit easily into the computer age. Actually doing the assignments doesn’t take overly long for the most part but getting the various symbols and diagrams onto the computer eats up the time. To begin with you need to pick up an entirely different font from the normal ones to even be able to type the symbols required and, of course, those symbols aren’t on the keyboard so every one needs to be inserted as a special symbol. The diagrams themselves are equally easy on paper but need a range of software to prepare them for the computer. Even what would appear to be a simple graph can’t be done with normal spreadsheet software because you need to put sub and superscripts on the titles and axes labels.

Still, the plus point of that is that the course team need to make the assignments a little easier to do than they might do otherwise although with the large potential for a few errors to creep in between paper and computer screen, the marks haven’t (yet) reflected that slightly easier aspect.

Also this morning was the third iCMA for the autism course. As usual, it was four questions that could be answered by finding and reading a few paragraphs of the book for each one. Another 100% mark for me which means that I have passed the continuous assessment part of the course already with two more iCMAs left which, for me, are now effectively optional.

In comparison to the chemistry, the autism course is very much a stop-start affair. It’s around one iCMA per month covering one or two chapters of the book and with each chapter only taking a couple of hours to read it’s working out at two or three hours per month to do the course (compared to the official 8 hours a week). The net effect of that is that I generally do an iCMA then read the chapter(s) for the next one and then there’s nothing to do for three weeks. The problems with that approach are that by the time the next iCMA comes around, I’ve to revise the relevant chapter(s) before doing the questions and that overall it’s a very annoying way to progress through the course.

This is the first course where I’ve had an iCMA to do. In principle they’re the same as CMAs but, if the first one is anything to go by, they’re much shorter (only four questions), you have to do them whilst you’re online and you can’t print them out to mull over.

Shorter is certainly good. There are five iCMAs and an EMA for this course which looked like quite a lot of work. In practice it took about 10 minutes to do this one so hopefully the remaining four will be of a similar length and be equally easy to fit in.

Doing them online is a bit of a pain as is the inability to print them off (or at least to do so easily). That ties you to the computer while you’re doing the questions although you don’t have to do them all at once. Not being able to print them off is probably the biggest nuisance though as you’ve no record of what you’ve put in unless you  type them all out separately (which I’ve done).

The format is not fantastic this time around as all four are multi-part questions of various types. For instance, this time around two were “select one or more of”, one was “complete the following sentences” and the final one was “select two options”. One answer seemed decidedly iffy (definitely wrong in fact) but there’s no “unsound question” option on the iCMA.

Anyway, that leaves the road clear for the chemistry TMA which I will be starting on during the week.

I’m doing this one basically to ease myself back into the psychology and a brief leaf through the DVD last week showed up a whole bunch of relatively familiar terminology.

This is one of the new-style online tutoring courses which in principle should be excellent but, so far, they don’t seem to have hit on a totally successful formula for them. The problem is basically that as the tutoring is done in a course-wide group, they need everyone to be moving along at roughly the same speed which for SK124 means that the various assignments are only released three weeks ahead of the due date. Unlike the TT courses, where the course materials were released three weeks in advance, you could actually finish working through all of the course material but that would mean that you’d be doing the assignments weeks or possibly months after you’d covered the relevant material which would make them a little harder.

As it’s a 15 pointer spread over 20 weeks it looks like the course will proceed at a relatively sedate pace. There’s quite a lot of DVD based material but as a rough guide it looks like a chapter a fortnight rather than the usual chapter a week rate for OU courses. The first chapter is largely introductory but as I completed it in a couple of hours it looks like the course won’t eat up a lot of time.

So what is autism anyway? Well, it’s a range of conditions that exhibit in the form of difficulties in communication, varying degrees of inflexibility eg needing things to remain the same and/or repetitive actions, and social isolation. Although there seems to be a big genetic component, there also seems to be an aspect of environmental factors which may trigger it (though nobody knows what they are yet).

The summer turned out to be surprisingly busy, albeit mostly not with the holiday things that we were expecting to fill it with.

At the off was my summer school in the first week of July. The write-up for that took an awful lot longer than expected which in turn knocked a number of things back. I finally managed to get that off last week which means that right now I’m in the midst of doing .the assignment for the main biology course, a week late, and then it’ll be straight on to the final assignment for that course.

The little guys decided against the football camp in the end, although more by default than anything else in that we couldn’t track down the contact details of the one that they liked last year and they weren’t that fired up about the alternative that we had available.

We’d expected that once we got Mum in to the residential home that the work involved with that would reduce. Well, the direct running around looking for a place has gone down alright but the amount of admin associated with it has gone up somewhat. The social services people seem to be of the view that we are working on that full-time and expect responses to their demands no later than the end of the week which, in almost all cases, has proved to be an impossibility. Quite how they expect some things to be done when the people I need to contact are on holiday is beyond me.

The headmaster, Mr Hutchinson, of the school died after an accident in his home over the summer which has made the start to the school year somewhat subdued as he was always racing around the playground. Racing around everywhere in fact as he never seemed to sit down. You’re probably thinking that it meant that he had no time for anyone but actually he always found a few minutes to chat with any child, parent or teacher who came up to him; I’ll miss our little chats. The school kicked off with two half-days so this is the first full-day that the kids are in with both of them coming out at the same time rather than having John finishing an hour earlier than James this year which is much handier.

Wendy was busy with assignments during the summer and is getting going on the final assignment for the current course which is just as well as the materials for the next one arrived yesterday. It’s a medical history course and there looks to be an awful lot of reading to be done over the year.

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.