Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

Somehow or other I managed to pick up 78% on the latest assignment which is pretty good going as initially I hadn’t a clue as to how to properly approach the semi-essay part of it.

It was quite a strange kind of assignment as it was largely based on the methodology book rather than the main course text. That dictated quite a different structure than the typical essay response ending up in the question being split between five short definitions and a longer piece on experimental ethics.

As always at degree level, the “definitions” required are quite complete ones with a full definition of each term in the question and examples to show that you actually understand it which, of course, wouldn’t be shown were you just to write out a straight dictionary style definition.

The ethics part was based around an experiment first carried out in the 1960s and replicated for the BBC/Open University series Child of Our Time a few years ago. Basically it involved kids looking at a video of an adult attacking a doll with three different endings to the video: the adult getting told off for his actions, getting rewarded for them and finally nothing happening to him. There are loads of ethical problems in reproducing an experiment like this, most obviously being that you already know that the kids will become more violent after watching the video (yes, folks, watching violent programming does affect them) you know ahead of time that you will be harming in this way.

Psychological experiments on children seem to be quite a minefield in terms of ethics. For instance, it would be really handy to be able to experiment on the effect of removing, say, the father from the family unit but clearly that’s not a runner ethically or morally and many other potential experiments are just as problematical. In these cases you can use what are called “natural experiments” where the conditions you’d liked to have had in your experiment have happened naturally. For example, if the father leaves naturally. However, even there you’ve problems as one assumes that how the family functioned prior to the divorce would be different than if the divorce hadn’t happened ie the “experiment” isn’t running entirely as one would ideally need it to run.

Still, a pleasing mark. Let’s hope that I can keep it up for the next assignment which I gotta get going on soon…

One of the common comments that I hear about all of the level 2 psychology courses is that there’s way too much content for the level and number of points of the courses.

They’re not wrong either if my experience so far is anything to go by. The level 2 60 point Child Development course feels much more like a 90 point course at times and some of the work required from assignments seems to fall into the definition of requirements for level 3 rather than those for level 2.

Usually the Open University are pretty good at setting the level and amount of content in their courses so how come they appear to have this one so wrong?

One big difference that this sequence of course has is that it’s very much targeted at creating professional psychologists rather than having a more general aim of producing degree level education as other courses usually do. Thus, even though level is the lowest level of psychology course that they offer, the content and requirements of us seems to be almost a postgraduate level eg the “big” assignment that’s coming up soon seems to require original research.

The snag is that if they did make it a 90 point course they’d put a lot of people off what’s a very popular course and if they make it level 3 then they’d have to go and produce a new level 2 introductory course to fill in a gap (it takes a very crazy person to start a new subject at level 3!).

One of the essential things to do early on in starting an Open University course is to get yourself into a study group.

Although there are regular tutorials associated with the course there tend to be quite a lot of things that don’t come up during the tutorials for one reason or another but which are often vital to your success on the course. Not all of these will be obvious at the off either. For example, one of the most useful things that I picked up early on in the French course was from just how extensive another student made his notes and what he was making notes on. Seeing just how extensive the notes of another student are has a great deal more impact than hearing at a tutorial that you should make notes.

Less tangible reasons at the start are the encouragement to keep going that you can get from other study group members. As an indication of how important that is, the only people who finished the French diploma were those who were in the study group three years earlier: everyone else dropped out along the way.

Then, there’s the magnification of sources that arises from having a number of people working on the problem. On Saturday for instance our group turned up four separate sets of notes on different aspects of the course.

Finally, there’s the reason that you joined the study group for in the first place… talking about the assignments!

One of the biggest surprises that I had when I started the psychology course this year was the sheer number of separate tutorial groups that it has in the area. Previously with the language courses it was one group to cover the whole of Ireland whereas there are six or seven separate ones for this psychology course and it’s not even the most popular course (Exploring Psychology in case you were wondering).

That larger number of students is also reflected in the blogging world with myself prattling on here, Lynn doing something vaguely similar and Tim being very dedicated. And that’s just from the crop of students studying the course right now with Tanya and presumably others being around in previous years.

Where does all this interest come from though. Well, for me this is notionally the first course in a psychology degree being followed out of interest at the moment although I tend to use my qualifications eventually. The others in my tutor group pretty much all seem to be working with children in some connection so the current course is of more immediate benefit to them. That doesn’t explain why Exploring Psychology (which is considered the first OU psychology course) is running with around 8000 students but I guess that understanding how peoples’ minds work is an interesting topic for an awful lot of people.

I’m something of an addict to browsing university prospectuses though sometimes it’s quite a while between getting the thing and getting around to signing up for a course. Last time it was all the way from picking up a prospectus around 1985 to starting a course in 2002!

At the moment I’m plugging away with a child development course which means that my next logical one is notionally the exploring psychology course which I’d have started last October were it not for the overlap with the final course for the modern languages degree. However, there’s an even worse overlap this year so I’m going to create a gap for myself by not starting the psychology course ’til October 2010 (with probably a little course popped into the first half of that year).

However, for a change, I’ve been looking much further ahead than I usually do and browsing the postgraduate prospectus which has a rather interesting little MSc in psychology that in turn leads on to a PhD.

Crazy, eh? Still, ’twas crazy talk like that which got me from “speaking a little French” to finishing off an honours degree in modern languages.