‘Journals contain facts unlike the daily mail’

1. PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning ‘Journals contain facts unlike the daily mail’ Implementation of an inquiry-based learning task enabling evaluation of information sources. Myles Jones1 & Pam McKinney2 Department of Psychology1, Centre for Inquiry-Based learning in the Arts and Social Sciences2 The University of Sheffield

2. Overview • Background • Information literacy and group work • Tutorial Task and implementation • Examples of Student work • Student and Tutor Feedback • Discussion

3. Didactic lectures ‘factual knowledge’ MCQ exam Post-graduate led MCQ tutorials Psy 101 Discovering Psychology: The Past Dinosaurus Didacticus

4. Issues • Large numbers of students (~300) • Changes in number of students with A-level Psychology • Ill prepared for psychology as a discursive subject

6. Skills Sought by Graduate Recruiters (AGR 2006): • Commitment and Drive • Motivation and Enthusiasm • Team working • Oral Communication • Flexibility and Adaptability • Customer Focus • Commercial Sensitivity

7. Psychology in the popular media

8. 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

9. Staff Tutors Students The Implementation: 3 Tiers

10. The Implementation: Web Tools

11. The Implementation: Web Tools

12. BBC online Newspaper Articles • Search terms used: Child Development, Babies development, Psychology, Development, Children, Babies. Emily Jones (Post-graduate associate tutor) George Thomas (undergraduate Student)

13. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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 respectivetitlesof 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.

18. More Examples of student work:

23. Student tutorial evaluation 60% agree or agree strongly 20% undecided 20% disagree or disagree strongly

24. Student tutorial evaluation 71% agree or agree strongly 19% undecided 10% disagree or disagree strongly

25. Student tutorial evaluation 59% agree or agree strongly 28% undecided 13% disagree or disagree strongly

26. Future: actually measuring information literacy

27. 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”

28. 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

29. 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.

30. Hwan CuiKohThomas McadamsCharlotte McClellandNils MuhlertKaren NivenElinor PeggAdriano PeixotoClair PondIona ReadLaura RennieYvonne-OliviaStockerDrew TarmeyNaira TaroyanKate ThomasonErin WalkerVictoriaYoung Kate BartlettRebecca BeekenYael BennLisa-MarieBerryJoanna BlackburnMaria ChuBecky CiesielskiTracy EptonJilly GibsonVictoria HaymanKathryn HoldenClare HuytonChristopher JonesEmily JonesDaphne KaklamanouDavid Kelly Tutors 06-07

31. Nichlas Stenning Olivia Stocker Drew Tarmey Catherine Taylor Maria Chu Alexander Cope Michael Bruyns-Haylett Thomas Bullock David Cameron Tracey Epton Laura Rennie Alison Bromley Mathew Evans Sheng-Yu Fan Daphne Kaklamanou Hwan Koh Suzannah Laycock Jennifer Lewis Lynette Madeley Tom McAdams Charlotte McClelland Abigail Oldfield Barry Orr Joanna Peterkin Clair Pond Kate Absolom AmnaAbdalla Almazam Kate Bartlett Helen Batey Rebecca Beeken Judith Bek Yael Benn Lisa-Marie Berry Laura Bishop Joanna Blackburn Rufino Bolado-Gomez Tutors 07-08

32. Reflections • Large number of tutors and students • Difficult to manage • Difficult to know if reported problems are general or only affecting a small number of students

33. Acknowledgements Sandra Turkington (Sheffield; Library) Clare Scott (Sheffield; Library) Angela Newton (Leeds; Library) Dr Amanda Harrison (Leeds; Psychology) Dr Jon May (Sheffield; Psychology) Dr Richard Rowe (Sheffield; Psychology) Dr Jackie Andrade (Sheffield; Psychology)

34. PEBBLE: Psychological Enquiry-based Learning We welcome comments, observations and discussion