Psychological literacy: Understanding students' epistemological beliefs and the science of psychology

Dr Stephen Provost, Discipline of Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University

2:30pm
Friday, 29 July 2011

Lecture Hall D350 (Coffs Harbour campus)
Video-linked to Lecture Hall P158 (Lismore campus) and to A223 (Tweed Heads Gold Coast Riverside campus)

One of the graduate attributes for psychology students is that they "apply knowledge of the scientific method in thinking about problems".

There are three problems with this attribute:

First, what is meant by "the scientific method"?
Second, how do we teach students to apply knowledge of it?
Third, how do we measure when they have attained this knowledge, given that we do not have any instruments to measure it?

I will discuss some attempts my colleagues and I have made on the third problem, and what they might tell us about possible directions for the second problem. The first problem may not be solvable with the scientific method, so as a student of psychology myself my capabilities are limited, but I hope that thinking about it out loud may elicit some useful feedback for us to consider.

Dr Provost has been at SCU from the founding of Psychology as a School in 2001.

He is an expert in learning, in applied behavior analysis, and in the scholarship of teaching and learning. On this last interest, he has a GradCert HigherEd from UNSW and has won research grants from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching and from the Australian Universities Teaching Committee's Disciplinary Project.

He has been involved with creating the Australian Psychology Educators' Network and the Teaching, Learning and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society (APS). He recently won the 2010 APS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology Education.

See also: Dr Stephen Provost (opens in new page)

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