Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

I raised this question during one of the recent tutorials and was instantly shot down!

However, whilst it’s not a “girly” course in terms of difficulty (I’m finding it harder going than even level 3 French!), it is a “girly” course in the sense that it seems to attract more than the usual number of females for a course. Even though I’ve been doing language courses, a more typically female type of course, I found it very noticeable that the percentage of females was much higher than normal in the Child Development course that I’m doing at the moment. If tutorial attenders are any kind of guideline it seems to be around 80% female.

Of course, the reason for that is quite clear when you look at the range of degree and diplomas that this course counts towards even before you consider that anything with “child” in the title is still, even today, considered to be more in the female domain than in the male one. Those qualifications feeding into it are variations on the theme of what’s known as Early Years ie essentially considering the care and education of young children. Those occupations attract more than their fair share of females so thus it’s only natural that qualifications in that line would do the same.

The thing is though that it’s one of the more interesting courses around for guys. After all, whilst arguably girls are, for one reason or another, generally brought up with the expectation that they’ll be looking after the kids (yeah, I know, sexist but still largely true despite that), the guys tend, on the whole, to miss out on that kind of thing. Sure they’ll play with toy soldiers but you don’t see many little boys playing with dolls generally yet that’s one of the ways that you can get used to considering the needs of a baby. Whilst this course isn’t a childcare course as such I found that it filled in a lot of the gaps in childcare lore that guys tend to miss out on as they grow up.

Don’t underestimate the level of difficulty in it though! This course comes with one serious workload and is definitely not a course to be taken lightly.

The Child Development course has what’s called a “seen question” on the exam paper which is sort-of a misnomer. Yes, they’ve given us the actual question that’ll be asked but it really more of a project than a simple question to answer in that we’ve to research the topic and provide a coherent answer citing research evidence to backup that answer.

That wouldn’t be too bad (says he, not having done it yet!) but the first hurdle is that there are five very different topic areas which we need to choose between first. Going by the study guide that choice should only take a day but that only works if you’ve a strong preference for one of the topics or a dislike for four of them and otherwise you could easily find yourself reading through quite a chunk of stuff just to make that choice.

In practical terms, I found it relatively easy to eliminate three of the topics. The legal one sounds interesting in principle but highlights right at the off that it contains quite upsetting material on child sexual abuse so doesn’t sound like something that would be pleasant to work on to me. The education one is very much a “for teachers” topic and doesn’t grab me. The health psychology one just sounded like a lot of marketing drivel. Which leaves the ones on autism and specific learning difficulties.

I’d thought initially that it would be very much a toss-up between these two but the presentation of them made it quite an easy choice. In practical terms I think that, although the autism one would be very interesting, you’d really need to have some experience of the condition to be able to do it as it’s presented in what seems, to me, to be a very confusing way. To be fair, it’s trying to show what autism is like to those with that affliction but it just served to confuse me as to where it was going with the topic.

Which leaves me with specific learning difficulties and that’s the option that I’ll be running with.

As usual I ended up putting my previous assignment in at the last minute. That’s not because I didn’t start on it reasonably early this time around but because I always find that there’s some last minute thing that I can do to improve it in some way and I’m always scared of putting it in too early in case I come up with some much better way of answering it at the last minute.

However, despite the pretty much last minute submission all of the previous ones were marked by the next day (top marks to Ken, my tutor!). Staggeringly fast marking but not rushed as you might expect as the comments were both plentiful and helpful too. But, this time as we’re getting ready to head off to France of course the mark isn’t in yet.

This one was a different type of assignment so I’ve really no way of judging where the final mark will fall. Up to now we’ve had two essay assignments (one more to go) for which the mark was more or less as expected and assignment looking at methodology which ended up with a higher mark as it was so much more structured. This particular one is what they bill as a practical for which we had to write what’s essentially a scientific report looking at how two children of different ages think about their identity. Since it is a report style answer there’s a whole lot of structure already fixed which, in principle, might lead to a higher mark than you’d normally get on an essay style question. However, there’s also a couple of semi-essay segments within it and it’s a new style answer format for me so overall it’s anyone’s guess as to where the mark might fall.

Actually, that varying of the answer formats is one of the things that goes to make this course much harder to do than other ones that I’ve done. Usually the assignments require a similar sort of answer so you get used to producing something along those lines. That’s not to say that they’re easier overall but rather that you get to know what’s expected of you which doesn’t really happen in this particular course.

Although I don’t read the blog stats religiously by any means it’s interesting to keep an eye on them now and again to see what’s popular and what’s not.

For instance, at the moment I’m doing fairly well from people searching for a little assistance with the latest ED209 assignment. Not surprising really as this is one of a mere handful of blogs that have been writing about their experiences with the Child Development course as they’ve been working their way through it this year.

Is it actually useful to try to find some pointers for the assignment this way though? So far, I suspect the answer is “not really”. For instance, Tim has been relatively quiet about it of late and my own contribution certainly doesn’t hand it out on a plate although I do say something about identity and there will be more about the TMA over the coming week. What’s more surprising is that there haven’t been any blogs writing about the course before this year. Tanya has been brave enough to upload all of her assignments for the course but it’s for an earlier year and the assignment questions were quite different so you’ll not get a whole lot of help there.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of just how reliable the information that one would find on a blog about a TMA. After all, even if I were to upload the entire TMA answer this evening you wouldn’t know what mark I was going to get for it. Having said that, I imagine that you could probably have a reasonable guess as to where the mark might fall which in turn would indicate how much work you might need to do to achieve such a mark yourself. Would that really be helpful though? Take, for example, Exploring English (U211) where in the very first assignment you’re required to upload the first half of your TMA, the second half being a critique on someone else’s uploaded TMA. With that you can easily get a feel for the overall quality of work that people are doing in your tutor group. That in itself was quite reassuring for me but then I picked up 90% on that TMA and I can understand that others might find that it was quite intimidating. So, grand if you’re at the top end of the marking range, potentially quite demoralising if you’re sitting in the large middle ground (which is why most OU forums ban discussion about marks).

If anything, the child development course and indeed psychology courses in general with the OU seem much worse than knowing how other people were doing was with the English course. Quite why that is I don’t fully understand but it seems to be related to the fact that a large number of the psychology students are treating the courses as vocational training so it’s more important to them to do well than it might be in another area that’s more of a hobby subject. Thus, whilst I’m more than happy tootling along in the 70s, others in my group are very much aiming to be in the 80s. Having said that, although I’m very content with the marks to date I have already more or less decided to up the pace at which I’m pottering along with the psychology degree thanks to some gentle prodding on the part of fellow students.

So, as always, be careful what you wish for. If you’re a consistent 60% person, would you really be over the moon to see a 90% type assignment? For that matter, there’s the not so insignificant issue that all tutors don’t mark in a 100% identical manner.

This is a somewhat peculiar piece of work that we’ve to do. Since it’s a practical you would obviously assume from that that we have to find a few children and do some practical experiment on them. These days that wouldn’t be quite such a simple thing to organise of course as youve first of all to find some children, then get the parents permission and, of course, there’d be the sex offenders register check that would need done on you as well.

So, what the Open University have done is to conduct a whole series of interviews and record them in advance. Thus we don’t need to find children, get permission and get ourselves checked out thus most of the administration hassles are removed. I suspect that these days the time taken for the pre-experiment administration would mean that some of it would need to be done pretty much as soon as we signed up for the course if it was a real practical exercise that we were going to be doing for the assignment.

What we have to do is to take these interviews and analyse them to see if they conform to Rosenberg’s theory. That’s essentially a theory of identity and basically says that younger children will tend to consider the various aspects of their identity as being defined externally whilst older children will tend to rely on themselves to define their identity. So, for example, a young child will tend to describe themselves in terms of physical characteristics and aspects that can be seen by others, whereas an older child will tend to talk about internal feelings and values.

Next up is writing up the research report which is a full-blown report in terms of format. So there’ll be a title, abstract, introduction, methods section, results, discussion and conclusion along with references and appendices. Sounds easy but I suspect that it’ll be extremely time-consuming so I’m making a proper start on it today with the writing of the methodology section which seems to be by far the easiest bit to do and, according to their suggested plan, should see me with the first 400 words written from the 2000 target.