‘Critical appraisal of the public presentation of psychology’

A 3 tiered approach to facilitated inquiry.

George Thomas (undergraduate Student), Emily Jones (Post-graduate associate tutor) & Dr Myles Jones (Staff)

Department of Psychology

PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning

The Task

• Find BBC internet news articles and newspaper articles (Newsbank)

• Work in groups (Collaborative Inquiry)

• Find corresponding scholarly article using WoK (Web of knowledge)

• Fill in power point assessment to reflect on searching process

The Implementation: 3 Tiers

Staff

Tutors

Students

BBC online Newspaper Articles• Search terms used: Child

Development, Babies development, Psychology, Development, Children, Babies.

George Thomas (undergraduate Student)

BBC online Newspaper Articles: Provide any information you wish about your articles and searches (feel free to insert additional pages!)• Breast fed children handle stress better. Among almost 9,000 children that

were bottle fed, found it harder to deal with stressful events, such as parental divorce. Swedish researchers believe close physical contact and mother-baby bonding during the first few days of life may be important factors to the development of the ability to cope well with stress.

• Research in children as young as 4 months shows a preference for certain colours. Researchers used a special camera which was initially designed to test RAF fighter pilots and their reactions, however in this case it was used to to track the babies eye movements when presented with different colours. However, a criticism of the study already discovered is that the research was only conducted on 30 babies.

• Babies are said to be able to remember music that they heard after 6 months of pregnancy, when still in their mothers womb, more than a year after birth. It was previously thought that babies could only have a memory span of around a month, however the research carried out on 11 babies which showed preference to specific pieces of music and disregard for moderately similar music.

Did you find a journal article relating to your BBC news online article (if so provide any information about article)?• Yes we did. It was called “New Evidence for Infant Colour

Categories” by Anna Franklin and Ian R. L. Davies at the University of Surrey. It was one of the journals which comprised of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology 2004.

• It contained experiments carried out by both adults and infants to investigate colour preferences to “novel” (new) colours which were presented to both sets of participants after habituation had been used with a single colour.

• It was shown that contrary to popular belief, infants do posses the ability to distinguish colour categories at 4 months old and are consistent with “Bornstein's” results of a similar experiment.

• The article was in depth and detailed, presenting graphical representations of the data, as well as the statistical results.

Did you notice any differences between the BBC online news article and the journal article?There were massive differences between the BBC article and the journal. First

of all, the respective titles of both pieces of research were totally different, however similar. The BBC was titled “Babies ‘have favourite colours’” in comparison to the journal title, “New evidence for infant colour categories”. The journal itself was detailed, containing graphs and reliable statistics, none of which were mentioned in the BBC article. The journal also used several different experiments to ensure the validity of the initial experiment, of which none was mentioned in the BBC article. The BBC article also managed to miss out the fact that adults were used in the research experiment as a form of control, to allow the infants results to be compared to an adults, to see if the presence of colour categories existed in 4 month old children.

I feel that the BBC article took all the interesting and easy pieces of information from the journal article and summarised it into a readable, public format, which could describe the results in a round-about way, to keep the public updated with current infant research, without providing too much information which may cause confusion to the reader.

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘what worked well’• Students are already accomplished searchers, just need to transfer skills to new medium

• Unfamiliar with term ‘Information literacy’ but “it makes sense”

• Positive response to open-ended nature of the task - ability to pick topics of personal interest

• Skills students learn through this activity are “vital”

Emily Jones (Post-graduate associate tutor)

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘potential for development’• Some difficulties in getting students to engage

with collaborative work

• “Both the [news] articles they picked had no original article……they got quite upset and thought they were going to get marked down for that”

• More helpful to model the full process of the task

before students start searching for news articles

Postgraduate tutor focus group‘overall’• Positive learning experience for both

undergraduate and post-graduate students.

• Range of teaching methods• Greater interaction and even linking

teaching and research by finding novel research articles of interest.

Kate BartlettRebecca BeekenYael BennLisa-MarieBerryJoanna BlackburnMaria ChuBecky CiesielskiTracy EptonJilly GibsonVictoria HaymanKathryn HoldenClare HuytonChristopher JonesEmily JonesDaphne KaklamanouDavid Kelly

Hwan CuiKohThomas McadamsCharlotte McClellandNils MuhlertKaren NivenElinor PeggAdriano PeixotoClair PondIona ReadLaura RennieYvonne-OliviaStockerDrew TarmeyNaira TaroyanKate ThomasonErin WalkerVictoriaYoung

Tutors

AcknowledgementsPamela McKinney (CILASS)

Sandra Turkington

Dr Jon May (Psychology)

Dr Richard Rowe (Psychology)

Dr Jackie Andrade (Psychology)

We welcome comments

PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning

Student tutorial evaluation

As a result of doing this tutorial task I feel more confident in using Library resources for

psychology

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60% agree or agree strongly

20% undecided

20% disagree or disagree strongly

Student tutorial evaluation

71% agree or agree strongly

19% undecided

10% disagree or disagree strongly

As a result of doing the activities in the tutorial task I can use the web of knowledge database

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Student tutorial evaluation

As a result of doing the activities in the tutorial task I feel I have the skills to evaluate information I

find

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20

30

40

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60

Stronglyagree

Agree Undecided Disagree Stronglydisagree

59% agree or agree strongly

28% undecided

13% disagree or disagree strongly