HPS111: Introduction to Psychology A

I have a very mixed feeling about this unit.

First of all, there’s no exam which is great. The unit chair whom is Sharon made the decision of abolishing exams for HPS111 and HPS121. She explained that exam is not an effective means of learning.

Instead of sitting exam, we got to do concept maps like we did in high school. But we have to do this on computer this time. Hence we got to learn new technology skills as well as learning to retain information better. Concept maps are great because they require a deep understanding for a topic before we can make links between concepts.

The 6 topics that we touched on were:
•Biological Bases – Genetics and Brains
•Learning
•Memory
•Intelligence
•Motivation & Emotion

After finishing the concept maps, guess what? You get to mark your own maps!! But you’ve to write up a 500-words justification for the marks you’ve given yourself. Your tutor would have a look at it and decided whether you’ve underestimated or overestimated yourself. They would personally contact you if that happened. If the mark you’ve given yourself is what the tutor seem reasonable, that would be your final result.
These concept maps are valuable resources for yourself later on if you’re going to continue on a psych major. However, there weren’t any sample or one perfect concept map provided by the unit chair. You have to decide for yourself which concepts are important and which are not. Therefore, it’s tricky because you don’t know whether you’ve covered everything. All you were given was a rubric with criteria such as structure, clarity, etc to base your concept maps around.

No exam!! Woohoo!

3/5

Yes

Christian Hyde and Sharon Horwood

Psychology The Science of Mind and Behaviour by Michael W Passer and Ronald E Smith, Australian edn, 2013
This is the prescribed text so it’s better to grab a copy.

This is extremely easy marks but don’t forget to do it right and put it in the right place!

One of the issues I had with this unit was the teaching method. We had seminar instead of traditional lecture. All lectures were pre-recorded and you’re expected to listen to the lectures right before the seminar. This model is followed after the “flipped class” model in the US. Recorded lectures were short, divided in parts and they’re not a substituted for doing the reading! I just couldn’t work with recorded lectures because I found it really hard to concentrate on them. That’s being said, there’re no one checking whether you’ve listened to the lectures and seminar. So you could set your own study pace. None of the lectures and seminars was compulsory, of course.

The main thing to study was to do the reading. There was a little reading guide for each week’s topic. The unit chair did a really great job to stuff up the key objectives with the page numbers in the book. I emailed her and she said the reading guide was not compulsory as well!

As I'm writing this review, I figure that I didn’t even have to travel 1hr and 30 mins to uni at all. All I could have done was staying at home, reading random pages, taking random notes and making random concept maps so I could pass the unit.

In the seminar we’re kind of getting the same info from the recorded lectures but the presenter expand/explain them more. We get to interact with the presenter as well. So if you’ve any question feel free to ask the presenter. That’s being said, first years like me are not that brave to put our hands up and ask questions ><

Seminar and lecture are two completely different things.
In

1 x 2hr seminar, 1 x 1hr tutorial

2013, trimester 1

pending