Project Syllabus: Psychology of Prejudice

You can find our Psychology of Prejudice syllabi cross-listed under Social and Special Topics.

Cyndi Kernahan's Psychology of Prejudice and Racism is our newest addition. She has her students submit two questions the morning of class for each reading that is due. Students also do weekly writings on a specific question.  The goal is to "identify, describe, and apply the concepts..."  Her most interesting assignment, though, is the plan of action paper.

"Plan of Action Paper: Plan of action papers will be due towards the end of the semester. These papers should be 6-8 typed, double-spaced pages (including at least 4 references). Specifically, these papers should outline a 'plan of action, that you feel you can take regarding prejudice and racism in our society. The format of the paper will require you to do some research on one or two problems that you feel you can take some action on. You will describe the problem and then describe what you would like to do, very specifically, about it. You may include in this a variety of ideas, ranging from simply discussing racial issues more in your classes/with your family or friends to more 'activist' ideas such as writing letters to elected officials or starting a discussion group about racial issues. Remember that this should be something you actually intend to do!"

She provides students with more detailed instructions.  Contact Cyndi at cynthia.kernahan@uwrf.edu.

George E. Schreer offers a seminar called Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination.  In addition to a research paper, students write weekly reaction papers.

"Weekly Reaction Papers of Assigned Readings (50% of final grade) Since a seminar relies heavily on discussion, it is imperative that you come to class prepared to contribute your newfound knowledge and insight. To accomplish this, reaction papers (1-2 pages single spaced) will be assigned on a regular basis. For the readings assigned: briefly summarize the major themes and ideas (what the researchers were trying to find out), methods (how they went about their task), and results and discussion (what they found and what it all means). While doing this, be sure to integrate together (make connections between) all the readings. In addition, the reaction papers should also include your own thoughts about the readings. Some important questions to consider are:

* How does the article apply to you or situations you might have experienced?

* What new questions, ideas, or testable hypotheses does the research raise?

* Can any theories be integrated with earlier material or applied to a different context?

* What new insights have you learned?"

Project Syllabus: Intro Psych Projects

Recently a member of the PsychTeach listserv was looking for an assignment for Intro Psych that gave students the opportunity to bring together what they learned in the course. Here are a few syllabi from the Project Syllabus database that have some type of 'capstone' project. Visit the site to view these Intro syllabi: http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php?category=Introductory%20Psychology

 

Rory McElwee's syllabus

"Case Study Paper: To take your understanding of the course material to a higher level and to solidify your learning for the long term, the last part of the semester will be spent in a collaborative, problem-based learning exercise in which teams of students will be given a case study to analyze. This exercise will enable the student to apply and synthesize material from throughout the course as well as build research, writing, and oral communication skills. Students will complete a 5-page paper outlining their work which will be due during finals week. You will receive detailed guidelines later in the term. Attendance during these class periods is mandatory for full credit on the project."

 

If you're interested in learning more about this assignment, contact Rory at mcelwee@rowan.edu

 

 

John Schwoebel's syllabus

"OICS Project: Ask a novel question? Explore an intriguing idea. Find a person, theory, area of study, idea, or finding that interests you. Then develop (with my help) an activity that will allow you to further explore the topic. You might: Imagine how a conversation/argument between two famous psychologists might proceed. Create and explain illusions. Paint depression. Apply psychological findings in order to improve your memory, happiness, or attitudes toward others. Write stories, poems, or songs. Construct study aides. Conduct a psychological study. Etc... Design an activity that fits with your interests and strengths and then discuss it with me. You should meet with me (in my office) by October 18 th at the latest. If you don't discuss the activity with me by then, the activity will be graded as late. After we come to an agreement concerning the goals and requirements of the activity, you may begin working on it.

 

"In general, the final product of each activity will be a Poster Presentation at Cazenovia College's 3 rd Biannual Undergraduate Psychology Conference. The format of the poster will vary depending on the type of activity you choose and we will discuss this when we meet individually and as a class. The poster should not be a standard, run-of-the-mill presentation of other people's ideas. The poster should be an original, independent, creative, and scholarly work that reflects your careful thoughts, analyses, and a semester's worth of hard work. Your OICS Project grade will be worth 20% of your total course grade and will be graded based on the following components (each worth 25%):

 

• Originality: novel/unique questions, comparisons, arguments, etc...
  
• Independence: reading/study/research that goes beyond the text/lectures
  
• Creativity: nonstandard, non-term paperish, fun way of communicating your ideas · Scholarship: reflects a great deal of work and thought and the achievement of a deep understanding of your chosen topic"
  

 

 

E.M. Magidson's syllabus. This assignment comes from 2004, but it could easily be adapted for the more recent Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping by Phillip Garrido. The syllabus provides detailed instructions that I haven't reproduced here.

 

"Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, for nine months in 2002 by a self-proclaimed prophet, Brian Mitchell and his companion, Wanda Barzee.

1. Find on the Internet one or two authoritative articles on this case that discuss these ideas, which you should label as subheadings in your paper:

a. Smart was (was not) Brainwashed. Discuss your choice.

b. Psychological Effects Smart May be Experiencing Now c. Suggested Therapy. Indicate why you would recommend such therapy, as well as the specific procedures used in the therapy."

 

 

Chuck Huff. Chuck uses an "Empirical Investigation" project. Students work together to develop a research question, do the background reading on it, design a study, collect and analyze the data, and then present a poster. Visit this link to go directly to his assignment: http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/classes/Intro/empirical.html.

If you have a capstone-type project for your Intro Psych course, consider submitting your syllabus to Project Syllabus for peer review and possible inclusion in our database!

Project Syllabus: Service Learning

Recently there was a question on STP's PsychTeach listserv about service learning and how it is incorporated into courses.


If you've been thinking about adding a service learning component to a course or are considering revising an existing service learning requirement, here are some syllabi from the Project Syllabus database for courses that contain a service learning component. [If you use service learning, consider submitting your syllabus for peer review and possible inclusion in our database!]


Intro Psych: "Service learning students will contribute 15 hours of service over the semester, typically about 1½ hours per week for 10 weeks. You are welcome to "count" service in any public sector or voluntary organization you now are part of, or which you arrange. As well, about 20 spaces are available to students who would like to volunteer with the on-campus day care programme, Campus Kids." Philip Smith. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/ps07intro.pdf


Multicultural Psychology: "You are to complete 10 hours of service-learning in either a public school or community program. This activity requires a serious commitment to the school/program. You are required to complete a service log and keep a critical reflection journal of your experiences." Lori Simons. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/ls07multiculturalpsychology.pdf


Psych of Culture: "We are working with Journey's End, one of a handful of service providers for refugees in the community." Jill Norvilitis. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/jn08culture.pdf


Abnormal Psych: "All students are required to complete 20 hours of service work at a location that works with individuals with mental illness." Meera Rastoogi. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/mr07abnormal.pdf


Fieldwork in School Settings: "Each of you will be matched up with a school age child. You will be required to spend 20 hours over the semester (2 hours per week for 10 weeks in order to provide the school with consistent and predictable participation)." Tasha Howe. http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/th05fieldworkf.pdf

For more information about service learning in general, visit the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse. (Link will open in a new window.)

Project Syllabus: Woot!

I recently ordered a t-shirt from Woot.com. This is the email I received once my order was placed:

Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site! Sit still a minute because you need to know this stuff:

• You're now a registered member of all four of our sites: woot.com, shirt.woot.com, wine.woot.com and sellout.woot.com. Don't be alarmed. We'll explain more later.


• Typical orders take up to 5 business days to ship from our warehouse (except for overnight t-shirt orders). If you order an item during peak times like a Woot-Off, it can take a little longer. Once we ship it, delivery time to your door depends on FedEx or SmartPost.


• Once the item ships out, you can access your tracking data by going to Your Account and clicking on the order number. If you have a problem receiving your order, or you receive the wrong item, contact service@woot.com.


• If you receive your item and it doesn't work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk. Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact service@woot.com and we'll grudgingly provide some further assistance.


• If you receive your item and decide you don't like it, take it to eBay or pawn it off on one of your so-called friends. We don't want it, either.

That goes for Woot.com and all of the sites in the Woot.com family. There's some specific stuff you might want to know about each of the others. And here it comes now.

Shirt.woot - Check the size chart, check the size chart, check the size chart. It's at the bottom of the product description for each sale. If you order the wrong size, we won't take it back - your only option is to gain or lose weight so it fits, possibly including painful, costly cosmetic surgery. If you want your overnight order the next day, place it by noon Central time. International orders generally take about 3-4 weeks to arrive. If you think your one-year-old can design a better shirt, encourage your one-year-old to enter the Derby, our weekly design competition. That $1,000 prize can buy a lot of Binkies.
http://shirt.woot.com/derby/
http://shirt.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Wine.woot - First, don't get your hopes up: wine orders can only be shipped to certain states, so read the entire list of eligible states before you print up the invitations to your wine party and place your order. Ineligible orders will be cancelled and refunded. If you do complete your order and receive the tracking data, make sure you give it some time to update. It won't be uncommon for it to take a little while for real, actual data to show up. You might call the data "late" - we prefer to think of it as "aged". http://wine.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Sellout.woot - Don't be confused or disoriented by the redirect when you visit the site - we just have to run you through Yahoo! Shopping before you come back to Woot turf. It's perfectly normal. You should know that we actually sell things here at times that could partner nicely with items from the regular Woot website, giving you a chance to have your cake and eat it, and then take a bite of another guy's cake when he's not looking, and mmmm...cake...is this email almost over? We're getting hungry. http://sellout.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Bear with us a moment more and we can all get on with our lives. If you email service@woot.com, make sure you include your order number and/or username. We'd hate to have to track you down through other, less savory means. And this last bit of information is critical: when you look at your order history and panic because you don't see an order you placed, make sure you are logged into the Woot site you purchased it from. Your Wine.Woot orders won't show up in your order history if you're looking at it on Shirt.Woot, and so on. And you'll be upset, and we'll be upset, and we'll each say things we don't mean, and even though we'll eventually work it all out, things will never be the same between us again.

Last but certainly not least, happy Wooting!

Woot Member Services

You read the whole thing, didn't you?

Like a syllabus, this email provides both an introduction and the rules of engagement. They not only got me to read the entire email, I also found myself ready to do business with them again even though they have some un-customer-friendly policies, e.g., no returns. How did they do it?

Enthusiastic. The company's enthusiasm appears in the very first sentence. "Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site!" These are people who clearly enjoy what they're doing. Who wants to deal with a surly company?


Use of humor. By about the third bullet point I was beginning to mentally drift off, and then I got slammed back into consciousness with the fourth bullet: "If you receive your item and it doesn't work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk. Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact service@woot.com and we'll grudgingly provide some further assistance." I'm hooked. I know I'm going to stick around until the end. Are you picturing your new academic dishonesty statement? "Students who cheat are total tools."

Written in the first person. By using "we" I get the sense that there is a real, live human being writing this. If so, that means that there's a real, live human being with whom I can communicate if I need something. I feel like we've been introduced.

Easy to read. This email is broken up nicely. There are bullets when bullets are needed. Later paragraphs begin with "shirt.woot," "wine.woot," and "sellout.woot" making it easy to see what they're talking about when.

Clear expectations. The Project Syllabus reviewers have been putting greater emphasis on syllabus tone. When some hear "warmer tone" they may think that means the instructor needs to have lax policies to accommodate every possible student issue. Not at all. This email has a warm tone, generated by humor, but the policies are not lax at all. They are not lax, but they are crystal clear.

Rationale for rules. We know that people are more likely to go along with the rules when they know the reasons for the rules. Woot provides rationales. Why do you have the attendance policy that you do? What's the reasoning behind your late assignment policy? Why are you asking students to do a particular assignment? The reasons may be obvious to you, but they may not be obvious to students.

A syllabus does not need to be a dry read. While the language and style Woot uses may not fit you, I encourage you to use your own voice to put yourself in your syllabus.

[This blog post was based on a symposium titled "Project Syllabus: Best Practices in Syllabus Tone" presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Toronto, Canada, August 2009.]

Project Syllabus: Child Development, Ruth Ault, Davidson College

When reviewing syllabi, one of the things we look for are innovative assignments or other pedagogical techniques. We all can create a course with a multiple-choice midterm and final, but what instructors are looking for is something new that gives the students a new way to learn, or a new way to show that they've learned, the course content.

In Ruth Ault's Child Development syllabus, the child observation assignments stand out. In introducing the assignments, she writes, "You will observe children in order to learn various techniques of observation and to give more focus to specific aspects of development." As a student, I know that that in this class I will not only learn about child development, but I will see it, and I will be using the same techniques researchers use to do so. How cool is that?

Davidson College has a strong working relationship with their local daycare center and permission is granted to the students to observe the children by both the daycare center and the children's parents or guardians. Ault notes, "The observations are done either from hidden observation booths (e.g., behind a one-way mirror) so that the children are completely unaware of being observed or from the playground, where their behavior is visible to the public." Students also learn about the ethics of conducting observations and get practice observing children on video before 'going live.'

The first observation assignment begins with an ethics reminder about confidentiality followed by why students are doing the assignment. The purposes are "to learn how to use running narrative, individual tally, group tally, and time sampling observation methods and to familiarize you with preschool-age children." This is an easy change instructors can make to their syllabi that will yield a high return in syllabus-usefulness. Tell students why they are doing the assignment.


When I was at New Mexico State University-Alamogordo, located near Holloman Air Force Base, I had a number of active and retired Air Force personnel in my classes. I remember one Chief Master Sergeant (the highest NCO rank one can attain) tell me and his classmates that he used the authoritative approach with his crew. When he got his orders, he would explain to his crew what they needed to do, why they needed to do it, and why they needed to do it that way. He would then listen to his crew's ideas about other ways to do it. He said when he started doing that many years ago, he noticed that the work got done faster and better. He added that sometimes he didn't have the time to explain the reasons why something had to be done a certain way, but because his crew knew that he had a reason and that he would tell them as soon as there was time, they would trust him and do it the way he asked.

Consider our own work-lives. How is assessment of student learning viewed in your department or on your campus? Is it just a report you do because someone's asked you to do it? Or is it viewed as a learning activity that you will get something out of? Like our students, when we're given assignments and we can't find the value in them, they feel like busy work. It may be clear to the instructor what the value is in doing a particular assignment, but we can't assume that students will find the value on their own.

Take a look at Ruth Ault's Child Development syllabus for examples of engaging assignments where students are told the goal of the assignment.

Project Syllabus: Social Psychology, Heather Hussey, University of New Hampshire

In some circles, syllabi have come to be seen as legal contracts and many are written that way. In some cases, the language is so strong that it sounds like the instructor is viewing the students as the enemy and the syllabus presents the terms of surrender. The Project Syllabus reviewers read through syllabi with a students' perspective, and the last question I ask myself at the end of a review is, "Would I like to take this course?" When the answer is no, I most often trace it back to the tone of the syllabus.

This new Social Psychology syllabus from Heather Hussey does a great job of using the tone of the syllabus to convey excitement and enthusiasm around the course. On the first page, the first line of the course description reads, "I would like to start by welcoming you to PSYCH 552!" With that one simple sentence, I get the sense that the instructor likes teaching, likes students, and wants everyone to be a part of the class.

Later while setting out expectations, Hussey writes, "I encourage class members to explore the material presented in this class (and even related topics of personal interest), risk making mistakes in discussing the material, and ask for help in understanding course material (this can include others' points of view as well)." As a student, I'm not expected to be perfect! And Hussey puts an exclamation point on this by adding this quote:

There is no such thing as an unreasonable question, or a silly question, or a frivolous question, or a waste-of-time question. It's your life, and you've got to get these answers" -Marcia Wallace

When discussing the requirements for the course, Hussey writes, "Attendance/Participation: Because you are students who want to learn, I expect you to attend class regularly." She assumes that students want to learn, and because they want to learn, of course they would come to class. In a student-as-enemy syllabus, the instructor might write something like, "You must attend all classes. Missing more than 3 classes, regardless of reason, will result in a substantial lowering of your grade." In the end, both convey the importance of attending class, but Hussey's way is more likely to make me, as a student, feel like it's my choice.

But don't think this means the instructor is a pushover. "Please do not bring cell-phones to class (or be sure that they are turned off). If one goes off in class, I reserve the right to answer it." And then she adds, "To be fair, you can answer mine if it rings." Hussey isn't simply imposing rules on students, instead she's laying out the ground rules for the classroom environment as a whole.

Also notice that this syllabus is written in the first person. When the instructor puts themselves in the syllabus, the implied dialog makes the instructor appear more human and more approachable.

I recently read Groopman's book, How Doctors Think, and he notes research that shows that the doctors that get sued, regardless of their degree of competence, are the doctors that patients don't like. A personable doctor who listens to patients and treats patients as people is unlikely to get sued, almost regardless of the mistake he or she makes. It's reasonable to think the same is true for instructors. Listen to your students and treat them with respect, and they are more likely to forgive you your missteps.