PSYC 315: Childhood and Adolescence (Distance Education)
Instructor: Andrew Baron
In every psychology course that I’ve ever taken, we always talk about how people develop certain behaviours. This course goes more in-depth into human development, so some material overlaps with other psychology courses that I’ve taken.
There are 3 quizzes, worth 6% each. One midterm worth 20%. And a final worth 52%. The trend I noticed as I went through all of these tests are that they have some multiple choice answers, some True/False questions, some fill in the blank questions, and some written responses. What’s unique about this distance education psychology course (compared to the other ones I’ve taken) is that Dr. Baron posts the lecture slides. The most important advice I can give you regarding this course is to memorize all the lists in the lecture slides. For example, Piaget’s “Theory of Cognitive Development” which has 4 stages (sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational). In order to answer a written response question, you’d have to list the names of the 4 stages and a description of what happens in these 4 stages.
The reason why you should memorize the lists in the lecture slides is because Dr. Baron usually requires you to describe those lists in written responses on his tests. This is true especially if these lists appear in both the lecture slides and the textbook.
Occasionally, videos accompanied some of the weekly material. There were also a few research papers that we also had to read, most of which were written by Dr. Baron himself. Having research papers to read means that you get a break from reading the textbook.
There were also participation marks for participating in the discussions - a total of 10% of your final grade. To get all 10%, you need to post 4 original posts and make 4 replies to a classmate’s post. For each of these, I wrote roughly 300 words. They will provide you with examples of good vs. bad posts, which is useful because you earn full marks for good posts and no marks for bad posts.  I tend to think that the good posts are the ones that bring in insightful information and have at least one reference.
Overall, I think the course is interesting if you’re interested in child development. Other reasons why you might be interested in taking this course is to learn how to be a better parent and to understand human nature in general... because we were all children at one point in our lives, weren’t we?
