Psychological perspectives on curriculum review (or at least one psychologist’s).

David CareyDirector of Teaching and LearningSchool of Psychology

I don't want any yes-men around me.I want everybody to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.

Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)

Arguably, critique of curriculum review could be hazardous to one’s professional health.

Henceforth, I shall comment not on curriculum review, but on “climate change”.

A Few Myths about “Climate Change”:

• Climate change is inevitable, so we shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it.

• Climate change is not a consequence of academic activity…

…it can happen without human intervention…(albeit on a geological time scale).

• The resource implications of climate change are clear and easily managible.

• Getting it wrong on climate change means that Aberdeen will sink into the (academic) sea.

Climate change: three perspectives (and maybe more)

1.The Blue Skies view:

In the absence of any constraints, what do we want from our graduates? What should we give them?

Why will they be selected for the great bunker when the planet killing asteroid is coming?

Why will they be selected for the island on 75 metre stilts? (note clever climate change analogy)

How can we be different from the [insert comparison Uni A] and the [comparison Uni B]’s of this world?

The crude consensi falls into two camps, crudely represented by readers of the Telegraph and the Guardian:

Climate change: three perspectives (and maybe more)

1.The Blue Skies view:

The Guardian reader - liberal arts education of yesteryear (I suspect T. Salmon of this sort of vision)

Aberdeen graduate as The Manchester Guardian reading, renaissance sort of character who didn’t have to use his spell checker to know how to spell “renaissance”.

As comfortable with Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” as Delia’s “How to cook for dummies”.

Knows that a past participle is not a constituent of an atom.

Wears bow ties.

Possible New Aberdeen courses:

“Advanced semiotics: a Sports Studies perspective”

“Quantum mechanics for art historians”

“The biochemistry and macro-economics of composting”

Climate change: three perspectives (and maybe more)

1. The Blue Skies view:

The Telegraph reader view: better basics—readin’, writin’ and rithmetic’. The “what does not kill us, makes us stronger” view.

Sees the Aberdeen graduate as Charlton Heston character on Planet of the Apes: the ONLY one who can SPEAK (and read, and add, and think!) compared to all those mute graduates from our competitors.

(Thinks Registry should bring back corporal punishment: C3C6-”The Switch”)

Possible New Aberdeen courses:

“The calculus by hand”

“21st century accounting: how sub-prime mortgages can work for YOU”

“The paragraph: Not just five lines and a carriage return”

Climate change: three perspectives (and maybe more)

2.The Dylan view: The Times They are a Changin’.

This perspective means in its various guises that the 21st century is a different kettle of fish then those heady days of the 1960s.

Our graduates need to know about things like: information technology, global warming, or making money without actually producing anything (read “financial services industry”).

Graduates should have expertise is numerous domains, but adding together a column of numbers is what C:/Windows/Program Files/Accessories/calculator.exe is for!

IPODS, not abacuses!

Tesco ready meals, not sourdough bread by hand!

Possible new Aberdeen courses:

“Multidisciplinary studies for the cell phone user”

“Cookies and dough: Management skills for the internet”.

“Creating writing for your curriculum vitae”.

Climate change: three perspectives (and maybe more)

3. The Downsize expectations view (the slightly darker, sub-clinically depressed cousin of View #2).

The “it’s not their fault, its Higher and A level grade inflation” view.

We need to give them credits for non-traditional activities, such as music, art, self-dressing, and showing up.

Students need to bond with their disciplines, through activities like periodic school “group hugs”.

We need to acknowledge that Weds night half price drinks means Thursday a.m. lectures are a non-starter.

Possible new Aberdeen courses:

“Rocks for Jocks”

“Team building through Paintball”

“Make your own stone tools” (Jointly taught by Engineering and archaeology)

These different sorts of perspectives need to be weighed carefully.

The fact that three academics are all really talking about completely different things (and know it) will never stand in the way of a civil yet high-browed brew-ha-ha.

And excessive compromise has risks…

A parable:

The Canadian government agonised over buying a fighter plane in the 1970s that could patrol the Northern coasts in the arctic (how prophetic was that?) -- as well as for shoot at Soviet tanks rolling into Western Europe (1 out of 2 ain’t bad).

They bought a fighter that couldn’t do either…

…but it did have 10% of the parts made in Canada!

We do not know what we want, and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)

The ideal Psychology student from intake to graduation

Good psychology students are good university students—intellectually curious, independent studiers, a “can do” attitude (what McGeorge calls “gumption”) literary skills, and some numerosity.

At graduation, they are much more of the same! They won’t really remember much content months, let alone years later…

Would we like them to have a broader knowledge base? Of course!

Would we like them to be well read and tutored in sister disciplines? Who wouldn’t?

The ideal Psychology student from intake to graduation

But what’s the limit, when we teach such a broad base anyway? (I blame the Brit Psych Soc who make us teach EVERYTHING)

And what are the constraints?

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Perception: visual information processing, auditory perception and speech recognition. Attention. Visual and spatial imagery. Comprehension. Conceptual knowledge. Learning. Skill acquisition and expertise. Memory: encoding and retrieval processes, working, autobiographical, episodic and semantic memory, implicit and explicit memory, memory improvement. Thinking and reasoning, problem solving, decision-making. Language: structure, comprehension, production, reading. Connectionist models. Emotion and cognition.

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Research methods appropriate to the study of development. Nature of perceptual, motor and cognitive development during infancy. General theories of the nature and nurture of psychological attributes. Development of general representational abilities: especially language, drawing and number. Nature of cognitive change in the school years. Comparative analysis of constructivist, socio-cultural, and information processing theories of development. Development of self and identity. Gender socialisation. Emotional development.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Social perception including: person perception, attitudes, attribution. Inter-group processes including: prejudice, inter-group conflict, social identification. Small group processes including: norms, leadership, decision making, productivity. Social influence including: conformity and obedience, majority and minority influence, the bystander effect. Close relationships including: interpersonal attraction, relationships.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Key assumptions of, and sources of evidence for, the main approaches to emotion, motivation, the self and normal and abnormal personality development, including: psychoanalytic, behavioural, cultural, social learning, social cognitive, radical behaviourist, humanistic-existential-phenomenological, lexical-trait, neo Darwinist, biological and behavioural genetic. Influence of genetic , environmental and cultural factors on individual differences. Temporal and situational consistency of individual differences. Influence of personality on other behaviours including: health; education; culture; ; relationships; occupational choice and competency. History of mental and psychological testing. The nature of intelligence, contemporary approaches to intelligence and their implications for educational and social policy.

PSYCHOBIOLOGY

Basic neurochemistry and neurophysiology of nerve transmission; the structure and organisation of the CNS; behavioral genetics; hormones and behaviour. Psychopharmacology, the brain and reward, drug action and behaviour. Biological aspects of learning, memory, motivation and emotion, sleep and arousal. Evolutionary explanations of behaviour: primatology, sociobiology, animal cognition and comparative psychology. Human neuropsychology, cortical localisation of function, biological basis of psychological abnormalities.

CONCEPTUAL AND HISTORICAL ISSUES

The syllabus is structured around a number of key questions: What is science, and to what extent does psychology (the science of the mind) exemplify scientific characteristics? To what extent is psychology socially and culturally constructed? Can psychology be politically neutral? Can psychology be morally neutral?

Methods of acquiring knowledge: scientific method versus common sense; the relationship between facts and values. Critiques of traditional methods in psychology; the significance of the standpoint from which values are understood.

Paradigms and research programmes: Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. Lessons from the history of psychology: Reductionism, structuralism, functionalism, relativism and the nature of consciousness.

Critical psychology and subjectivity: The critical psychological view of subject and subjectivity. The origins of ethical issues for psychology; moral underpinnings of the theory, research and practice of psychology; psychologists and community members as partners in the construction of ethically responsible practices.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND QUANTITATIVE METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY

RESEARCH ISSUES

Problem definition and hypothesis formulation. Independent and dependent variables: their identification and selection. Experimental manipulation, control and internal validity: the roles of random allocation, matching, and counterbalancing in independent groups, related samples and repeated measure designs. The experimental manipulation of more than one independent variable in factorial designs: the contribution of interaction effects.

The role of random sampling in psychological research: external validity.

Quasi-experimental studies of pre-existing groups: the question of causality. The particular strengths and weaknesses of "single-subject" designs and case studies. Observational approaches. Survey research: sampling and the problem of non-response; descriptive versus explanatory surveys; questionnaire design including closed and open-ended questions; attitude scale construction; different questioning methods, e.g. postal, telephone, face-to-face.

Methods of controlling for participants' expectations and experimenter effects. Inter-rater reliability. Critical evaluation of the methods employed to collect data in psychological research.

The theory of psychological measurement: standardisation; reliability and the standard error of measurement; validity.

The collection of qualitative data: observation, participant observation, techniques for the collection of verbal protocols.

The analysis of qualitative data: content analysis, discourse analysis, grounded theory and protocol analysis.

The ethics of research with humans and animals.

QUANTITATIVE METHODS

Descriptive and summary statistics: measures of central tendency and dispersion; skew and kurtosis; frequency distributions; graphical methods including frequency histograms and cumulative frequency plots; exploratory data analysis including stem and leaf and box and whisker displays.

Probability theory: rules for assigning and combining probabilities; the OR rule with mutually exclusive and non-mutually exclusive events; the AND rule with independent and non-independent events; the binomial distribution (and its normal approximation). The normal distribution: z scores and areas under the curve; the sampling distribution of the sample mean.

Statistical inference: significance testing (including the null and alternative hypothesis, type 1 and type 2 errors, significance level, power and sample size); effect size and confidence intervals.

z-tests and t-tests of means for single sample, independent samples and related samples designs. Confidence intervals: for the population mean; for the difference between two population means. Mean and error bar graphs. Non-parametric alternatives to t-tests: the sign test; Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test; Mann-Whitney test. Tests of proportions: chi-squared tests for goodness of fit and for contingency tables. Cramer's Phi as a measure of association in contingency tables. McNemar's test of change.

Bivariate correlation and linear regression: scatterplots; Pearson's correlation coefficient; partial correlation; the significance of a correlation coefficient; the linear regression equation and its use in prediction; the accuracy of prediction; Spearman's and Kendall's rank order correlation coefficients.

The analysis of variance: one factor independent and repeated measures designs; two factor independent, repeated measures and mixed designs; main effects and interaction effects (including graphical presentation); planned (including trend) comparisons; the Bonferroni correction; post hoc comparisons (including the choice between methods); the analysis of simple effects.

Non-parametric alternatives to one factor analyses of variance: Kruskal-Wallis, Friedman and Cochran's Q tests.

The choice of an appropriate statistical analysis: the issue of level of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales); test assumptions (e.g. normality, homogeneity of variance, linearity); transformations of the dependent variable in an attempt to meet assumptions; robustness; power efficiency.

The ideal Psychology student from intake to graduation

AND.. Those cheeky chaps at The ESRC want more generic skills training for recognised Master of Research training after a 4 year Honours degree in Psych!

Ironic example: Psychology was turned down recognition at the first time of asking for “not having enough qualitative research”

I went back and checked their training course guidelines—they didn’t say how much you shouldn’t have!

Get it? Those guys sure do have a good sense of humour!

The ideal Psychology student from intake to graduation

But what’s the limit, when we teach such a broad base anyway?

And what are the constraints on that broader base?

On Harvard curriculum review:

“There was no explicit market research but prospective student opinion would have been sought and alumni consulted”.

Associated footnote:

“Last year, there were c 23,000 applicants for c1,650 freshman places”.

From: UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN, CURRICULUM REFORM COMMISSION, REPORT FROM HARVARD AND YALE

Constraint No 1. The numeracy of climate change: numbers, numbers, numbers….

Our changes have to be palatable at least, desirable at best, to potential students, although we have to hold fast about excessive pandering to market forces. We are an ANCIENT, VENERABLE UNIVERSITY, and sometimes we have to act like one!

There is some science on student choice and retention but its not clear how much the process has “engaged with it” as of yet….

The numeracy of climate change: numbers, numbers, numbers….

And decision makers need to discriminate between real evidence (the “science bits”) and expert opinion which has “face validity”

The numeracy of climate change: numbers, numbers, numbers….

Learning to read by “phonics” is boring—why can’t we teach kids to read by showing them whole words, over and over, so they can learn just like they did when they learned to speak?

1. Is there evidence that we are attracting students from England because of the greater choice in L1 and L2 that our 4 year degrees offer? Yes? NO? Do we know?

2. Is there evidence that those students who are attracted to a single discipline (geology, French, anthropology) want to study more than three courses outwith their domain? If YES, how many of our typical intake are we referring to? (History and Phil Sic course numbers dropped by 60% when Sci generic skills courses were brought in a few years ago)

3. What effects will extra courses at L1 and L2 have on the number of exit strategies students have if things don’t work out in their core discipline?

24.5 full time academics: ~90 Honours L3, ~90 Honours L4 ROUGHLY 180-200 students admitted by registry to study Psychology on UCAS forms…

4. Direct entrants into 2nd year Psychology have struggled. Why? Course content and demands? Variable school backgrounds in Psychology? The usual distractions of a first year away from home? No team building retreats with the staff?

The numeracy of climate change: numbers, numbers, numbers….

1. A student association rep told me that he thinks 80-90% of our current cohort are working “part time” while registered for full-time degrees.

2. Will 5 year Masters courses draw potential entrants from current and developing taught masters degrees? Or will this be less valued than taught Research Masters? Or more? You enter it as an Undergraduate, long before you have thought about Ph.D training etc.? How will this work with 1+3?

A few more constraints

1. Rationalise and modernise time-tabling. Would it help to block book co-requisite courses? Four Psych lectures to L3 on Tuesday, rather than over four different days…(but don’t we want to encourage them to be here everyday for purposes of independent study)?

2. Ridiculously detailed navel gazing within Schools and Departments: TQA (now ITR), internal teaching committees (x3 in Psych), vertical review committees (now being replaced by a BPS curriculum review group), College Teaching Committee, College Retention, New Products, Enhancing 1st year, Promoting Science, Promoting Science Subgroup, Biannual Teaching Workshops….and several others. Not much across discipline and across Colleges…

3. Stimulus for discussing other potential improvements, beyond curriculum review…student recruitment and support, student study spaces, emphasising generic skills, postgraduate support, enhancing research excellence, academic career development and promotion, etc., ad infinitum

Nevertheless many positives about the process to date and what could happen…

Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.

H. L. Hunt