PSY2031: Developmental and Biological Psychology

Examination (2 hours, multiple-choice): 45%
Biological lab report (1500 words): 20%
8 x Multiple Choice Quizzes throughout the semester (takes your 5 highest grades): 15%
Developmental Report for Virtual Child: 10%
Oral presentation (Group, 12mins): 10%

The quizzes were pretty frequent, but were an easy way to get 15% (or close to it). They were all multiple choice, and taken directly from the prescribed readings. However, occasionally you'd get a question that was well outside of the reading's scope, which was a bit irritating.

The exam was 2 hours long, and all multiple choice. We weren't given much guidance in terms of what to focus on for studying, which many others found frustrating because some of the weekly readings were 90+ pages long in total, so there was obviously a LOT of content covered. I actually zoomed through the exam paper surprisingly quickly (cheers, adrenaline) and didn't think the questions were unfair or overly difficult at all.

The lab report was a very frustrating assignment. We were given only a tiny little bit of guidance from the lab tutor, but were basically left to our won devices to figure out how to complete the assignment. For the small word count, it was extremely difficult to include all the information in good enough to get high marks. I guess it was good practice at being concise?

The oral presentation was fairly standard. We were organised into groups of 3, and were allowed some flexibility in which topic to present on. The topics were all developmental disorders, such as Down Syndrome, Fragile X Syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy. This assessment was pretty disorganised, due to a lot of people not turning up etc., which is probably a normal issue for group assignments.

The virtual child report was a short assessment where we had to assess a child's developmental progress from a child psychologist's perspective. We had to 'raise' our child online (which was just answering mind-numbing multiple choice questions). An easy 10% really.

Prof. Julie Stout, Prof. Shantha Rajaratnam, Prof. Dan Lubman, Prof. Nellie Georgiou-Karistianis, Ms. Claudine Kraan, Assoc. Prof. Jeroen van Boxtel

I gave this unit 3/5 purely because I enjoyed the content for the first 4 weeks, and I thought a few of the lecturers were really good. However, overall this unit is disorganised (like most Monash psych units unfortunately), with vague assessment instructions and absent coordinators. I think I only sighted one of the coordinators once for the entire semester. The other I didn't even see once...

The unit is split into 2 topics:

Nope, but plenty of practice questions are available online

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

Prescribed textbooks are Biopsychology by John Pinel, and Development Across the Lifespan by Robert Feldman. The weekly readings come from these textbooks, so it is best to acquire them.

1 X 2 hour lecture weekly, 2 hour labs fortnightly

2014, Semester 1

N/A, probably a distinction