Semester 1
PSY3001M – Classic Studies in Psychological Science
PSY3002M – Core Academic Skills
PSY3003M – Understanding Evidence: Science, Myth and Fake News
PSY3001M – Classic Studies in Psychological Science
This module is designed to introduce students to the major schools of thought in psychological science, through the lens of key studies from the history of the discipline. Through a combination of lecture-style delivery, practical workshop activities and supported open learning tasks between timetabled sessions, students are supported to engage with the conceptual, historical and philosophical underpinnings of Psychology as an academic discipline. Students are introduced to the major questions posed by psychological scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the range of empirical methods used to address these questions. The focus on a series of classic studies representing various schools of psychological thought allows students to reflect on the origins of contemporary psychological science and consider how these studies have influenced how the human mind and behaviour are understood today.
PSY3002M – Core academic skills
This module is designed to allow students to develop the foundational study skills required for the duration of the Foundation Year and beyond. The module provides a grounding in core academic skills, including effective reading, academic writing and referencing, and transferable skills, including digital literacy and team working.
PSY3003M – Understanding Evidence: Science, Myth and Fake News
This module is designed to introduce students to the scientific method and encourage a critical approach to the interpretation of different types of evidence. Students are introduced to the hierarchy of evidence and encouraged to unpick media representations of psychological research findings. Common ‘neuromyths’ are used to encourage students to think about where our ‘knowledge’ comes from. Students are introduced to current approaches to knowledge generation in psychological science through the issue of reproducibility and the open science movement.
Semester 2
PSY3004M – Contemporary Debates in Psychological Science
PSY3005M – Core Research Skills
PSY3006M – Extended Project
PSY3004M – Contemporary Debates in Psychological Science
This module builds on PSY3001M ‘Classic studies in psychological science’ to focus on contemporary theory, research, methods, applications and debates in Psychology. Students are encouraged to consider overarching questions that span the discipline through a focus on key recent research studies and applications of Psychology in clinical, educational, forensic and other contexts.
PSY3005M – Core Research Skills
This module is designed to introduce Foundation Year students to key methods of conducting empirical research in psychological science. Using a combination of lecture-style content to introduce key concepts and practical activities to consolidate students’ understanding of empirical methods, the module encourages students to consider alternative ways of generating psychological knowledge.
PSY3006M – Extended Project
This module is designed to enable students to bring together their learning from across the Foundation programme to conduct a small-scale empirical group project and write it up as an individual project report. Students are supported to design a simple empirical study, compose and submit an ethics application, conduct the study, analyse their results, and write up their empirical project in the format of a psychological research report.