Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

Well, it’s almost out of the way. I’m currently sitting on 1850 words and 2000 is the target so I might run up that final 150 tomorrow. Or then again, I might just put it in as-is seeing as the mark I get on it won’t really affect the overall grade for this course that much.

Anyway, with the assignments out of the way the road is clear to start work on getting ready for the exam on October 21st. That work has two aspects for this course. First, there’s the seen question to consider. That’s the question that they’ve already given us but which we’ve to research two papers to support our argument on the day of the exam and, of course, there’s the small matter of drafting the answer in advance so that it’s “just” a matter of writing it out on the day.

Then there’s the revision for the other two questions on the paper. Frankly, that’s a nightmare for this course as there’s just so much of it. I managed to have a first run through of about half of it over the summer and it was a frightening experience. On the one hand, it was reassuring to find that there was a reasonable amount of it that I remembered but what wasn’t so good was just how long it took to go through it all (and I was “only” going through the Erica Cox notes!).

Finally, there’s the problem that I have at the moment which is that I haven’t a clue how to even make a start on answering a worryingly large proportion of the questions on the past papers. Hopefully, that will change over the next six weeks or so! At this point I’m wondering if it would have been a good idea to go to one of the revision weekends for the course… bit late now though there’s one this weekend.

I thought that I’d be well ahead yesterday with the TMA but it turned out that the coding phase of the assignment took a whole lot longer than expected so I’m only getting around to writing up the results section this evening.

You’d think that going through about an hour of video and assigning codes to the various responses that the participants made wouldn’t take a whole lot longer than an hour but it does. The snag is, of course, that you need to start and stop the video almost constantly throughout just to keep up with typing up the coding of it. Thus, instead of taking an hour to watch it you’re looking at something closer to twice that which is a) longer and b) a whole lot more boring. I don’t think I’m cut out for coding psychology experiments.

Anyway, now it’s on to analyse the results and write up something reasonably sensible about them. Hopefully, that won’t take nearly so long as the coding did ‘cos I need to get onto writing up the discussion pretty soon and it’s looking like quite a busy week.

I actually made a small start on this towards the end of July but August just pulls away from me every year so I’m only getting back to it now.

As always the TMAs on this course seem harder than you’d expect for a level 2 course so there’s quite a lot of work to be done between now and Friday. Typically too, the suggested timings for the various parts of this practical are way out: it took ages just to get the coding sheet sorted out yesterday and it’ll probably take getting on for a couple of hours to do the coding of the two videos today.

Having said that, once that phase is done the actual writing of the text doesn’t look like it will take overly long. Of course, I thought that with the last TMA too and sometimes it took a couple of hours just to write a few hundred words on it by the time I’d thought about what to write and looked up all the references. Lots of work for just 72% 🙁

Worryingly the course website for SK277 (my next course) opened up on Friday. That let me do the first part of work on that, namely downloading all the textbooks and whatnot that course teams upload these days. As that course starts in the first week of October and ED209 doesn’t finish ’til October 21st I’m planning on reading over the course text for it starting now thus spreading the October workload over two months.Usually, I’d have started at full speed with it now but I don’t think that’s really a runner with the overlap and I’ll be aiming to build up my preferred one month lead time after the ED209 exam is out of the way.

Anyway, must head off to get going on that coding now…

After much debate I have finally gotten around to signing up for the Human Biology course and the related residential.

The Human Biology course is something of a tangent to everything that I’ve done before. That seems likely to make it fall into the category of “challenging” for me (that’s what everyone seems to call the courses with lots of work these days). To make it that little bit less “challenging” I’ve been reading through the first of the course books for it which seems to be around 25% really hard, 25% really easy and the rest fairly doable. That’s probably about typical for a course that’s aimed at a very wide range of people: everything from nurses through to social science people with everything in between.

For me the really hard parts are the medical bits, the doable are broadly organic chemistry and the really easy are the social science sections. Since it’s aimed at a wide spectrum of people there tends to be quite a lot of hand-holding throughout the book which, hopefully, will make it fall into the category of “doable” as assignments and the exam come up.

At the moment I’m not really sure what to make of the associated residential course. There’s a massive textbook that I’ve to buy for it which implies a lot of pre-course reading that I’ll need to get going on over the coming months.

It’s too early to register for the final couple of courses in the upcoming sequence which definitely includes Exploring Psychology and its residential. I’ll be waiting to see how the Human Biology course goes before signing up for Biological Psychology which would overlap it by about five months. Ordinarily, I’d not have worried about that particular overlap but both courses, although only 30 points each, have a reputation of being “challenging” so I’m putting off the signup up decision until the last moment (early December).

In my short term plans for OU courses the next one up is Human Biology which starts at the start of October and which overlaps my Child Development course by about three weeks. To reduce the work overlap what I’ve done is to buy the first book of the biology course and I’ve been working through that over the last month or two.

However, a bunch of the people doing the Child Development course are going straight on to Biological Psychology which starts in February. As it happens my aim in doing the Human Biology course was to simplify the Biological Psychology and they complement each other quite well. Thus, I’m in the process of getting talked into yet another overlap (February to June in this case).

Interestingly, since the bio psych course doesn’t have an exam it means that it may well not overlap with the next psychology course that starts in October as, usually, I end up running quite a bit ahead of the official course timetable so in principle I might be able to complete it some time in September if not before. That in turn should let me slip in the graduation ceremony for my modern languages degree which would have been this September but I couldn’t manage to fit it in.

What’s even more interesting is that doing the bio psych overlap would knock another year off my psych graduation and still be sticking to my 60 points a year maximum for the degree.