Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

As those who’ve done this course will know, there is a LOT of course needing to be revised. So much in fact that, unless you’ve nothing else to do, there’s no way to do it all to the required level.

However, there is the advantage that the usual rule for courses is that a given topic is only examined once (update: unless the course is ED209). Therefore anything covered on assignments can be dropped which takes out a surprising amount for this course since all the essay questions had two options.

Moreover, each question on the exam paper is confined to a single chapter.

Take those together and what remains are the following chapters:

Book 1: Psychological development and early childhood

1. ch3: Sensation to perception
2. ch4: Early cognitive development
3. ch5: Temperament and development
4. ch7:First relationships

Book 2: Children’s personal and social development

1. ch3: Children’s interactions:siblings and peers
2. ch5: Gender identity and the development of gender roles
3. ch6: National identities in children and young people
4. ch7: Young consumers

Book 3: Cognitive and language development in children

1. ch1: Early category representation and concepts
2. ch2: First words
3. ch4: The development of children’s understanding of grammar
4. ch5: Executive functions in childhood development and disorder
5. ch6: Understanding minds

Thanks to Martin, our tutor, for doing the hard work on the above. The ones in bold are those also selected by Tim who has a brilliant set of notes should you want to reduce the revision time even more. Personally, I’m using the Erica Cox notes which equate to something like a half dozen pages per chapter so around 70 pages to do all the above chapters.

To reduce revision time even more don’t forget that you only need to answer TWO questions from the above (plus the seen question!). Thus you only need to revise two of the books ie around 50 pages of the Erica Cox notes. Is it worth cutting it down that much? If it’s a choice of revising two books well or three not so well then I’d go for two; the third book is basically there as insurance against two questions that you really don’t like from one of the books.

Anyway, ’tis back to make a start on actually writing TMA7 (ie the seen question) tomorrow for me and, hopefully, the first run through of one revision chapter. Incidently, on that question, don’t forget that you’ve only got around 50 minutes to write out the answer so don’t be drafting more than around 7001000 words unless you write really fast.

It turns out that the very first piece of research is working out if there’s enough ink in the printer cartridge as there’s getting on for 70 pages of text between the three articles included in the references within the course text.

Those of an ecological mind will be thinking that I’d be better reading these online rather than printing them out and ordinarily I would do that if only because I usually can’t be bothered lugging around actual paper when I have them all on my baby computer. However, two of the articles are two up and it’s rather difficult to read such things with all the scrolling up and down business. Sadly, one of those is the longest article so it’s gonna need to be printed.

I suspect that I’ll be needing a new printer cartridge after if not during printing this lot.

I’ve just been to the final tutorial for the course so there aren’t any more excuses for putting off the work for the seen question for the course.

First off, was to choose the topic from amongst the five on offer. For me the choice was relatively simple. The legal one starts by saying that it’s a bit gruesome in parts which put me off that right away. The education one seems almost exclusively for teachers so that’s out. Health psychology just doesn’t appeal. The autism one seems to require that you’ve some experience of it outside the course. Which leaves the one on specific learning difficulties which I’d have chosen anyway as it seems interesting.

That done, I’ve read the chapter on it in the course book and gone through the study guide. Which means that it’s time for the real work…

What I’ll be doing tomorrow is reading over the three journal articles that are referred to on the course website (it’s in course resources, part 4). All being well, that’ll give me an idea of what approach to take when I’m starting on the literature search which I’ll be starting later in the week.

The aim for all of this work is to produce what’s essentially a TMA of around 1000 words. I say around 1000 words but I suspect that it’ll be somewhat shorter than that as I’ll need to write it out in a little under an hour. It’s very important to keep that time limit in mind as it would be all to easy to write far more in advance than could realistically be reproduced inside that one hour time limit. Going by my tutor, the majority of resits that he has are there because they didn’t allocate their time properly so don’t under-estimate the importance of this aspect!

Now that I’m starting to look at the course forum for SK277 it turns out that there are yet more problems in attempting to cross the ELQ minefield.

The problem is that, thanks to ELQ, several of the courses that make up the Diploma in Health Sciences may simply stop at their final presentations in 2011 and 2012 rather than being replaced by further courses. That will be a truly sad endictment on ELQ if that happens because some of those courses have been attracting comments such as “I just loved this module” (Human Biology), “one of the best OU courses I’ve taken” (Infectious Disease) and “an outstanding course!” (Signals and Perception).

At the moment, it appears to be just about possible for me to complete the entire sequence of courses before they reach their respective end dates. It does twist around my original plan somewhat but it would be a shame to miss out on courses with feedback like that. One problem for me is that it means that I have to do Biological Psychology next February and I’d not really decided about doing that then as it means I’ve to overlap that course with Human Biology which starts in October.

Our own little ED209 group was quite active up until the start of the Summer but is still all but completely silent. Likewise for the ED209 forum on the OU site.

Naturally, the reason over the last couple of months has been the summer holidays. It’s surprisingly easy to drop below the number of people required to keep threads going even for a course with a large enrollment such as ED209.

Restarting things after such a break isn’t quite so easy either. People get used to not having a lot of feedback via the forum and so don’t go to it quite so often even after most people have returned from holiday. I suspect though that one other reason for the relative silence on the forum is that ED209 seems to be a course with a high drop out rate ie there just ain’t as many people around. Due to the nature of many forum conversations (ie “please help me with X”) that’s emphasised even more.

What I’ve done in past courses has been to ask the tutor just how many people are submitting TMAs at several tutorials to get a feel for the drop out rate as we went along. I didn’t do that for this course but if the number of people saying “this is a tough course” or words to that effect is anything to go by then the drop out rate must be pretty substantial.

One thing that appears to be different with this course is that the drop outs don’t seem to occur mainly at the start of the course but rather throughout the course. That’s probably down to the TMAs being consistently difficult rather than seeming to get easier as you go along as happens in other courses in my experience. It’s not that the TMAs were really getting easier, just that as one gets into a course it becomes more familiar and so they seem to get easier. With ED209 that doesn’t happen because you’re moving onto topics that are substantially different from what went before as you go along thus each TMA is based on a body of knowledge that’s often substantially different from the knowledge that you used for the previous one. Moreover, the ED209 TMAs come in three flavours (essay, methodology and practical) so you don’t even get the chance to settle into a style of TMA.

As Tim says, this is one course that’s in need of splitting into two. To have it as a level 2 60 point course is a nonsense: it’s much more like a level 3 90 point course. Level 3 because of the consistently high level of difficulty on the TMAs (and, no, I’m not saying that because my marks have been low because they haven’t been) and 90 points because it takes a whole lot more time than any 60 point courses I’ve done whether they be at level 2 or level 3.