Peter Reddy School of Life and Health Sciences Aston University Birmingham, UK.

1. Employability and liberal education in undergraduate psychology Peter Reddy School of Life and Health Sciences Aston University Birmingham, UK.

2. Aims • To suggest that undergraduate development and the purpose of the BSc Psychology degree may be poorly understood by UK students and their parents • To argue that the undergraduate liberal education tradition in psychology needs to be defended and reinvigorated and to draw on work by Humboldt, Newman, Lave and Wenger in doing so • To argue that self awareness and reflection supports academic development, scholarship and employability

3. The BSc Career Fallacy – that the UK psychology degree is vocational • The BSc career fallacy is the expectation held by many UK students and parents that BSc psychology will lead to a career as a psychologist. • However it is non-vocational and does not qualify graduates for the psychology professions • Only 20% of UK psychology graduates eventually become professional psychologists after graduate study

4. The non-vocational tradition • BSc Psychology aligns with the non-vocational liberal education tradition advocated by Newman (1852 / 1982) • This tradition may not be well understood by stakeholders (parents, students, politicians, employers) in the context of • The increasing expense of HE for students and families • A dominant discourse about employment and employability • A mass HE system • Vocational routes into other health professions • The regulation of practitioner psychologists by the Health Professions Council

5. If most psychology students don’t become psychologists what is the point of studying it? • Students need to know that generally undergraduate education is non-vocational…. ….and Psychology aligns with other non-vocational academic subjects such as History, Biology and Economics rather than with vocational degrees such as Medicine or vocationally oriented subjects such as Business Studies. • The point of studying psychology requires thought about the point of undergraduate education as a whole….

6. Newman - The idea of a University (1852 / 1982)What is the point of undergraduate education? • The greatest contribution of universities has been the education of the mind and the cultivation of understanding, not providing technical skills for the workforce or accumulating knowledge for its own sake • Aim is to develop critical faculties so that students can • see things as they are • get right to the point, • discard what is irrelevant • detect sophistry • A student can then • fill any post with credit • approach any subject without fear • So – lifelong learning, how to learn, global citizenship

7. The point of studying psychology - reconciling the liberal tradition with a re-positioned employability • Graham (2005) distinguishes the point of studying a subject from the benefit of studying it. • ‘literacy, numeracy, articulacy and facility with analysis are benefits (let us hope) of studying philosophy, linguistics, psychology (…..); but it is not in these that we find their point. The point, as I think Newman meant to say, is the exercise and the enriching of the life of the mind for its own sake.’ • Exercising and enriching the life of the mind has the vocational benefit of future-proofing graduates – gives them the intellectual capacity to adapt to and explore the potential of change. • This reconciliation of the liberal tradition with a post-modern re-positioning of employability needs to be made to stakeholders

8. The non-vocational degree • The all-round thinking skills promoted by a non-vocational degree prepares the graduate for their professional career. • Content dates and is forgotten but competencies / intellectual skills / graduate attributes last • Students may not understand this • (see the Father Guido Sarducci 5 minute university sketch on YouTube) • Psychology graduates go on to a huge range of careers.

9. So the reasons for studying a non vocational degree, such as psychology are …. • High level general education, training of the mind, development of mature judgment and reflection, employability.. • …and the pleasure and enjoyment of the subject • Humboldt’s (1810) idea of shared staff and student scholarship. Schools offer accepted and established knowledge, but • “the appropriate stance for a university is to treat scholarship in terms of not yet completely solved problems, whether in research or teaching” • (Elton, 2008)

10. Assumptions about vocational HE seem deeply embedded • Students may assume that because only medics can practice medicine only business graduates can have a business career. • The reality is far more interesting and diverse. • Psychology academic staff include people with degrees in physics, medicine, biology and the social sciences • Aston Business School has more academics with psychology degrees, including the Head of School, than the psychology department.

11. Portfolio careers • Not a single ‘right’ career, but a raft of employment experiences according to circumstances, interests, opportunities and personal development. • Important to have a diversity of career patterns and choices available • for those anticipating families (most of our students are women) mature and non-traditional students. • Examples give students pause to reflect and permission to experiment • Real examples are often wackier than created ones - see BPS PsyPag and SMG

12. A career needs to treated as a personal business project. • Graduates need to take responsibility • for their career, personal and professional development • for initiating, monitoring and recording continuing professional development (CPD) • Strengths must be reinforced, weaknesses managed, knowledge, competencies, skills and experience reviewed and developed, change and new opportunities monitored and evaluated.

13. What makes a student a credible candidate for a psychology profession? • Not just the best grade and the best university • Degree class alone is not a reliable job performance predictor (Barber et al 2005). A level grade does not strongly predict academic (Huws et al 2006) or job performance. • Academic performance (AP) at one point in time is not a final judgement on a student – it may not translate into success at another time or in comparison with other students • See literature on intelligence, personality and academic performance (e.g. Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2008, O'Connor & Paunonen, 2007)

14. Competencies • Employers use competency-based recruitment to find graduates who will be able to grow with the organisation, manage change, and confer competitive advantage • The Psychology Student Employability Guide (Lantz, 2008) lists 28 competencies under six headings • The competencies that make up graduate employability are the obverse of graduate scholarship - the two are alike in many ways

15. Can we persuade students of this? • Schools are now very focussed on getting students the best grades for university entry • Students bring this focus with them and behave as if only grades matter. • They may have little patience for anything that is not part of their study of psychology, and may be reluctant to work for anything that does not have a grade attached. • In a psychology degree, psychology is what they expect to study, not study skills, not developing employability, not personal development planning.

16. A narrow focus on grade…. • ….may help a student to get to their first choice of university, it may not get them into the career they want • Degree grades may not discriminate • about 70% are awarded an upper second class honours degree • Being able to offer evidence of competencies based on work experience, especially at a professional placement level, voluntary activity, involvement in student sport, politics or a society, and scholarly activity such as research, is extremely important

17. To be able to find and use evidence students need to be reflective and self aware …. • …. about what they have learned about themselves and their developing competencies • This will maximise their academic trajectory, their employability and their personal development • This is often difficult for students; reflection and self awareness does not necessarily come easily or quickly. Some students defend themselves from it, others seem unable to grasp it at all • Perhaps developing reflection and self awareness is one of the developmental tasks of early adulthood that come with more sophisticated epistemological reasoning and cognitive development?

18. We need to persuade students to factor in reflection and self awareness • This is not easy, students may resist anything not directly to do with their subject, may not be ready developmentally or may resent intrusion into their personal domain. PDP may be part of the solution, but simply asking students to keep a PDP portfolio may run up against these problems. • How can we integrate / embed this kind of material into a psychology programme? • There may be scope to use students’ interest in understanding other people and themselves to turn some of the psychology curriculum towards reflection and self-awareness.

19. Certificate in Personal and Professional Development (CPPD) • An additional university qualification in parallel with their degree • Three modules: • CPPD 1 (preparation for placement and employment) in the second year • CPPD 2 (on-placement) in the placement year • CPPD 3 (post-placement) in the final year • Students are all enrolled in CPPD 1 (but may opt out). • Passing CPPD 1 is a pre-requisite to enroll on CPPD 2. • Passing CPPD 2 is a pre-requisite to enroll on CPPD 3. • Passing CPPD 3 triggers the award

20. CPPD content • CPPD 1 - prepare for your placement year • training on interviews, writing job applications and CVs • using psychometric measures to learn about your competencies, strengths, weaknesses, career interests and job preferences • keep a reflective log and portfolio which is assessed at the end of the year. • CPPD 2 – on placement • keep a reflective log and write a report and a poster about your placement work and learning. • CPPD 3 – post placement • in the first semester of the final year; reflect on and action your learning and career plans, present your poster to 2nd. years.

21. First year psychology of undergraduate development: Personally relevant and different to A level • Erikson - developmental tasks of adolescence & early adulthood • Piaget, Vygotsky & Kohlberg - cognitive & moral development • Perry, Baxter-Magolda - epistemological reasoning and undergraduate cognitive development • Biggs and others - approach to study & meta-learning • Attraction and relationship formation • Psychometrics, individual differences and the self • Personal interests, preferences, individual differences • Career development theory • Personal Development Planning, preparation for placement and career

22. Embedding material on reflection & self awareness means that it is assessed and taken seriously • HE challenges students to learn in different ways with less support – helps trigger more sophisticated conceptions of learning and knowledge (Säljö 1982) • Students’ sense of their progress effects their sense of worth as students (Snyder 1971) - information about development also informs about progress • Teaching about undergraduate & early adulthood development helps to contextualise the challenge of university with sensitivity and support

23. Psychology is framed by students’ conceptions of knowledge, reflecting their development & epistemological reasoning • Perry (1970), Baxter Magolda (1992, 1999) - important cognitive developments in later adolescence and early adulthood • Conception of knowledge moves from an absolute to a more relativist position, eventually with commitment to a reasoned and evidence-based personal position. • Initially knowledge may be seen as fixed and absolute. From this point of view a good teacher and a good textbook lay out the facts and the student’s role is to learn them. The textbook especially is reverenced as the ultimate source of knowledge, the ultimate authority.

24. Undergraduates need help and support to manage the transitions that they face . • Transitions from • college or sixth form to university, • undergraduate first to second year, • second year to final year or sandwich placement • and then out of the university. • There is much literature on the first (Tinto, 1975) and student concern about entering the final year and leaving university. • Some of my students to have found the transition from first to second year the most difficult as they felt that much more was demanded of them academically.

25. Situated learning • From the view point of situated learning full participation in the university is the preserve of lecturers with undergraduates at the periphery. • Students participate purely as students, thus all that is learned is how to be a student. • A university is an odd community of practice, breaking Lave and Wenger’s (1991) apprenticeship based principles of learning. • The power of situated learning can be seen in students returning from a sandwich placement year feeling the experience to be a vital source of learning, yet hard to articulate.

26. University as a community of learning • A possible solution is to understand the university as a community of learning, after Humboldt (1810, cited in Elton, 2008, Ramsden, 2008) • Humboldt suggests that the teacher is not there primarily for the student but both are there for the sake of learning • This emphasises HE as a constructivist process • It ties in with Humboldt’s distinction between school (knowledge as established fact) and university (scholarship as incompletely solved problems) and with the development of epistemological reasoning • Can a constructivist focused community of learning work in mass HE?

27. Summary: Undergraduate development and employability – a road map for students • There is much that is mysterious to students about undergraduate study, their own intellectual growth and development, careers and the transition to adulthood. • Students may find it very helpful to have it laid out for them in a sort of road map - a module on the psychology of undergraduate and early adulthood development may help. • Can a constructivist focused community of learning work in mass HE?