Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

When you start out on the path of a particular qualification there’s usually one or two sequences of courses that you have to do if you want to pick up that qualification at some point but it’s not always clear just what overall sequence you should follow.

Certainly, if you are doing a tightly defined qualification you may well find that almost all of your courses are compulsory but in a lot of cases the sequence itself isn’t compulsory and that’s where it can be very worthwhile examining what each course entails before deciding on the appropriate sequence for you. If you have previous experience or qualifications (even in a seemingly unrelated area) then you may find that you can make life a whole lot easier for yourself if you work out an appropriate sequence because in this case the ideal sequence for you may be entirely different from that for those who are coming to the qualification with no prior experience.

For example, in my own case to get the modern languages degree I needed to do a sequence of courses in French, another sequence in Spanish and a single course in English language. Most people doing that degree tend to start with the English course since that’s perceived as the easiest one and they tend to do the French sequence next and finish with Spanish because the majority of people here will have done French at school therefore it should be easier for them than Spanish. However, that’s not necessarily the easiest sequence to do. For a start, Spanish is usually seen as easier to learn than French so logically it would be a better to start with than French. Then there’s the business of learning a language which is obviously covered in the French and Spanish sequences and which thereby makes the English course (which is supposedly one of the hardest in the university) seem fairly simple. So, in theory the ideal sequence for me would have been Spanish, French and finally English.

Since I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment, I’ve recently embarked on a psychology degree. There too there’s a sequence to follow that’s recommended which does not seem to be the ideal one for me. Although I should have started on the introductory psychology course first I actually started on the child development one. That seems to be working out to be a better sequence for me in that “learning English” was obviously covered in the English course and it’s also covered in the child development one. Right now I’m in the midst of that section which is proving to be relatively easy going for me thanks to the previous English course. In theory, the introductory course next year should also appear easier in that I’ll have already done a year of psychology. As to the subsequence years, well I’ve not gotten as far as considering a sequence for them yet.

Now, if anyone could work out the ideal (read: easiest) path to the Open University psychology degree it would be really helpful….

The latest assignment on the child psychology course is a bit of an odd one for me in that we’ve to do what is essentially a small research study and write up a scientific report on our findings.

Although in previous times this type of assignment was carried as a real practical involving children, changes in the laws have made that too difficult to do so instead we’ve been given recordings of interviews with various children to work with. Thus we don’t need to contact any children ourselves to carry out the research although I’ve been trying out some of it on my own kids.

It’s based on research that Rosenberg did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is one of those psychological experiments that look like they would make little or no sense to the participants at the time but which turn up some quite interesting results. As you’ll probably gather from my title it’s all about identity and in particular how one’s identity changes over time. Conceptually the experiment is really simple. Children (it works on adults too) are given a sheet of paper with ten lines beginning “I…” and asked to complete them in whatever way they see fit. So, for example, someone might put “I am a boy”, “I like reading”, and so on. Once they’ve completed that, they’re questioned on each statement basically to clarify just what they mean by them and the results are analysed.

Clearly one would expect the younger children to have simpler concepts of self and that’s generally the case in that they will refer, largely, to physical descriptions or activities rather than anything deeply philosophical. Likewise, older children will have a more developed sense of self and wlll usually have more sophisticated answers. However, what’s less obvious is that the younger children are, on the whole, talking about themselves by way of things that others could observe whereas the older ones tend to talk more about things that only they could know ie they have developed a sense of who they are that isn’t dependent on what others can see them do.

Naturally, as we get older that sense of self gets increasingly complex. So, whereas a child will have, for the most part, a single “self”, adults gradually acquire different layers of self over the years. Thus there’ll be the self that’s portrayed at work, the self that paints landscapes, the self that one’s family sees and so on. Clearly too one’s hopes and dreams will generally change over time too: that wishing to be a fireman or whatever mutates somewhat over the years.

As always, Ken’s tutorial on this was fascinating at all kinds of levels. Perhaps the most inspiring example that he gave was of a student who had been doing my current course a few years back. He was 92 at the time and was one of the many people that you meet at the OU who were finally getting around to doing that degree that wasn’t an option when they’d been younger. Now, you might think that this guy had left it rather late to be doing a degree but as he said he just wanted to get it completed before he died so that he could put BA on his headstone. However, as with many such people he got a little carried away with it and finished up with THREE doctorates. I don’t know about you but that certainly set me thinking along the lines of… if that old geezer can do a doctorate, what’s stopping me? In many ways, it’s not the high-flier types that provide inspiration to do something but the people like him who, let’s face it, many people would have consigned to the waste bin of life who provide the real inspiration.

So, who are you right now and who do you want to be?

Aside from the very first French course that I did with them, I have always went down to the Open University before signing up for a new course and had a look through some of the course books.

I’m sure that lots of people have probably done that at one time or another and there are all kinds of approaches that you can take to looking at the books for a possible course. What I did was to have a look at a book about half-way into the course and see if I could understand the words. You might think that this approach would only apply to language courses but in fact it’s equally applicable to all subjects. Certainly I was happy enough that I could understand the words and concepts at about the half-way mark in my current course.

Why half-way though? Well, the OU books seems to be written in a slightly odd way sometimes either by accident or design. Often I’ve found that the first chapter of a book is particularly difficult to follow and one suspects that’s because they want to knock people out of the course early on or rather they want to knock out people who would probably not be up to doing that particular course. Thus the first chapter or two of a book aren’t worth looking at. By the end of the course presumably you’ll have learned quite a lot so you might not initially understand the concepts being spoken about at that point. Therefore, to my mind, the middle is the best spot to aim for.

Why didn’t I just do the “is this course for me” self-assessment test instead? Well, in the case of the languages I didn’t go on the results on said tests for the simple reason that they don’t work too well for me. I don’t do cross-words in English and wouldn’t expect to be able to do them in French yet the tests had things quite similar to cross-words in them (which I couldn’t do). Therefore, glancing at the course books before the course worked better for me than the tests that are available.

However, aside from the books, you can find an increasing number of blogs being written about various courses by students and tutors. These are extremely variable in quality of course as are blogs everywhere. However, you can find truly excellent ones such as Anne’s on various themes from the A207 history course and you can find tutorial notes, revision notes, even complete assignment answers on various courses if you care to look.

But should you look very hard online? For instance, whilst Anne’s site has a fantastic amount of information it’s so much that it has me thinking that perhaps A207 isn’t the course for me (it’s on my rather long short-list). Similarly, I’ve said that the workload on ED209 is pretty substantial on this blog, so would that put someone off doing it? Is too much information about a course beyond the course materials themselves a good thing when you’re choosing a course to do?

The problem is that there’s no easy answer to that. For instance, if I want to do the psychology degree then I have to do a course on biological psychology which has the reputation of being pretty much impossible to do. Should I go on that reputation and therefore not bother with that course? Probably yes, but then I’m just too stubborn to do that so instead I’m looking into doing a course on the biology side first which apparently makes the other course a lot more doable.

The third book is largely about childrens’ learning of which a large chunk is about learning to speak in the early years.

Net effect of that is that I should be on more familiar territory courtesy of the English course I did last year where the third book was all about learning English and most of that about children learning English. In theory that should mean that I’ll be able to work through this part of the course somewhat faster than I’ve been going up to now which is just as well since each week seems to have been taking more time to do recently.

However, now that I’m this far through the course there’s the “seen question” to start to think about. This is quite a peculiar type of thing in many ways and something that the vast majority of people haven’t come up against before. What it is, is quite literally a “seen question” ie they give you the exact question that will be on the exam paper. At first thought that might seem to make this an incredibly easy question to answer but, of course, it isn’t like that because the question is so general to be, on first sight, impossible to answer.

The actual question for this year is “Using evidence from your chosen topic area, critically evaluate the contribution that psychological theory and research have made to improving practice in this field.” which is pretty much the same as it has been ever since they started doing that type of question for this course. The chosen areas are taken from the topics of the final book and are “understanding specific learning difficulties” (dyslexia and dyspraxia), “children and the legal system”, “health psychology: children and development”, “autism and developmental psychology” and “psychology and education: understanding teaching and learning”.

What you have to do is research your chosen topic and find a couple of journal references that you can refer to in your answer. Obviously you can do a lot of work on that answer and in practical terms the question is basically a small research project. What is a problem is that you can’t refer to any notes you’ve made during the exam so you basically need to remember your answer and write it out which seems a little silly to me. One other little problem is that you’ve only about an hour to write the thing out which limits the text to no more than about 1000 words ie a little longer than this post. At the moment, I have sort-of eliminated the “legal system” and “health psychology” as I don’t really like the look of either. My front runner amongst the remaining ones is currently “specific learning difficulties” although I could be talked into the autism or education themes.

However, the biggest problem with this question is an ethical one. Clearly the tutor could provide major league assistance with this one but obviously that’s not the thing that they should be doing since, as always, it should be one’s own work. This is presumably why the OU have sent out one of their missives on the matter. It does leave open the question of study groups and that’s one that I’m not entirely clear on right now so I guess it’ll have to be brought up soonish. Assuming (unlikely I suspect) that our group were all to select the same topic and work on at least the research aspect together, how does that square with the “no collaboration on writing” guidance from the OU? In the past once or twice I’ve been in a group where we needed to rail back on, for example, seeking comments on draft assignments but this seen question seems to have a whole lot more scope for ethical dilemmas like that.

The internet presents us with yet another problem. There are several bloggers talking about the course and that’s created what is, in effect, a sort-of loose study group with, for example, notes very kindly provided by Tim. I gather that a growing number of ED209 students are relying on his notes which will present the first problem for them as presumably he’ll only be doing notes on his chosen topic in the final book. However, what if he were to provide references that he’d researched for that question too? For that matter, others have already put on the full text of their TMAs online and they or others could, in principle, put the full text of their seen question online too. One might think that the university policy on plagiarism would have something to say about that and it does but in general terms their rules are aimed at stopping people selling TMAs (a policy that seems less than effective going by the frequent sales of them on ebay) and don’t really address the issue of people simply publishing them on blogs and whatnot.

I’ve managed to drop another week courtesy of the last assignment but should pick it up again as there’s a week allocated in the schedule for catching up with things so, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be back with my 4 week lead time in about a months time or perhaps a bit less as it didn’t take me nearly so long as I’d expected to get through the material on Sunday as quite a lot of it was covered in the English course last year.

One of the things that you notice when you’ve done a few courses with the Open University is that over the years successive courses tend to get better and the rough edges disappear.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the workload for the Child Development course is far from even week to week. Within the current book some chapters have taken nearly twice as long to do as others which is a really major change week on week. Now, you’d expect that there could be, say, 10% or so of a difference between weeks or that there could well be a somewhat more substantial difference over the course of a month or two. But doubling from one week to the next and then back to the normal level the following week seems very unusual.

Even more puzzling perhaps is that one would have thought that the educational psychologists would have had some input to the course design. Or perhaps, that lumpiness is a required feature for effective learning? I guess I’ll have to wait ’til I do an educational psychology course to find out!