Why is Psyc 406 a Medium collection?
An academic experiment in blogging
Psyc 406 — Psychological Tests — is often viewed as a dry, although necessary course in the undergraduate psychology curriculum at McGill. It is positioned as an advanced course, for students nearing graduation.
The content of the course includes the basics of psychometrics, measurement in psychology, and the methods for demonstrating reliability and validity. Typical topics include intelligence testing, achievement tests, personality assessment, clinical/diagnostic assessment, personnel testing and forensic assessment. The most well established methods are reviewed.
Big yawn! It’s not that these topics and tests are not important — au contraire — it is just the cookbook nature of the presentation. Check out any of the dozens of textbooks offered for undergraduate and even graduate courses and you will see the formula repeated over and over again.
My way of looking at the course was completely different. This is the 5th time I am teaching Psyc 406 and this time I wanted to do it differently. I began with the idea that students should come to appreciate that testing is everywhere, all the time. They constantly test themselves and others, even if it is informal, unsystematic and unscientific. Psychological tests are an extension and formalization of this natural inquiry. There is literally a test (potentially) for everything.
To implement this point of view and to engage the students in a shared, creative activity, I asked students to write blog posts and submit them to this Medium collection. This was to make the class’ ideas public and allow interaction among the participants. It was a course requirement that students submit 5 posts during the semester. This assignment was worth 15% of the total grade.
All students were encouraged to read each others’ posts and to comment freely. Students could use such feedback to improve their posts. All 5 posts were to be evaluated at the end of the semester.
The content of posts had to have something to do with psychological tests and measurement. The collection was public and others not in the class were able to read and comment on the posts. Students had the option of submitting their posts to additional collections, to increase readership.
As professor I planned to post regularly as well. So could the teaching assistant.
I felt that the blogging would combine well with the other main assignment of the course, the individual Test Project. In the Test Project the student must come up with an original test of any psychological construct, to be administered with online questionnaire software and completed by other members of the class. I am curious to see how the writing assignment connects with the test construction assignment.
We had fun with this exercise in writing, reading, commenting and editing about psychological tests and measurement. Read other posts in this collection to get a better idea of what it was and how it evolved.
Stephen Stotland, Ph.D. Instructor, Psyc 406, Psychological Tests, McGill University, Winter 2014
