Høst 2024

PSY-3032 Critical reading, writing and presentation in psychology - 10 stp

The course is administrated by

Institutt for psykologi

Type of course

The course is included as one of the optional courses in the master program in psychology.

The course is only for psychology students (UiT and exchange), and can't be taken as a singular course. Students that have followed PSY-2032 during their bachelor are excluded for this course.

Course overlap

PSY-2032 Critical reading and presentation in psychology 10 ects

Course contents

The purpose of the course is to train students to read and critically evaluate research articles, and communicate the methods and findings to fellow students. By implementing journal club-based teaching, in which the students have to present articles to each other, the students will also be trained in scientific presentation skills. They will also learn to collect and evaluate research articles within a topic of psychology and write a literature review with a critical evaluation of the articles. The course will deal with three different psychology-related topics. Examples of topics that could be addressed are biological psychology, developmental psychology, and the psychology of action. The participating student will get basic insights into all of these topics. However, for their own presentation(s), the student will be able to select topics from a provided list according to their interests.

Objective of the course

At the end of the course, the students are expected to be able to:

Knowledge:

• Describe the structure of a research article.

• Explain basic research methods in the selected topics of psychology.

• Notice and explain strengths and weaknesses in a research articles.

• Gain knowledge about techniques to improve scientific presentations.

Skills:

• Quickly find specific information in research articles.

• Distill the core aspects and conclusions from research articles.

• Characterize strengths and weaknesses of the research described in research articles.

• Evaluate these core aspects/claims based on critically evaluating theory, methods and results.

• Present and communicate the core aspects of research articles in an oral presentation.

• Find research articles within a topic and relay the information into a critical literature review

General competence:

• Being able to critically evaluate research articles in the selected topics of psychology.

• Being able to communicate research methods and finding via oral presentations.

• Being able to summarize and evaluate research findings in a critical literature review

Language of instruction

The teaching will be in English.

The oral exam and written assignment will also be in English.

Teaching methods

The course requires from each participating student to read two research article per session in advance. Furthermore, for each session, 1-2 students are designated to present one of those article in a short oral presentation.

Furthermore, the lectures will cover aspects like how to read and write a scientific article, and how to give a good oral presentation.

The following structure will be used: per journal club, 2 research articles from the selected topic in psychology will be discussed in groups. There will be 3 journal club sessions per topic in psychology (resulting in 6 articles per topic). In total there will be 3 topics in psychology, and thus 9 journal club sessions (resulting in a total 18 research article discussions on 3 different psychology topics).

The journal club starts with a short introduction of the lecturer and will be followed by a 5-10 minute oral presentation of the selected article by the designated student. Then a group discussion in which the article is critically evaluated in whole group of students will follow.

All students are expected to prepare for the journal clubs.