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The assignment

Cut-off date: 13 February 2018

 

Important. These pages provide guidance on how to write your assignment. Please ensure you read all of this information right through until the checklist at the end.

Please note: the upper limit for electronic files submitted for this assignment only is 50 MB (for all other assignments, the limit remains at 10 MB).

Before you start work on this Tutor Marked Assignment (TMA), please ensure that you have read the Assessment Guidance specific to this module and are familiar with the advice in Social Sciences Assessment Information These sources contain support and guidance that you may need in writing your TMA including, for example, advice on plagiarism, referencing and the marking system. Note that failure to comply with relevant guidance could result in the loss of marks or other penalties.

 

There are two parts to this TMA. Please note that you must complete both Part 1 (essay question) and Part 2 (multimedia presentation).

This TMA contributes 20% towards your overall continuous assessment score (OCAS).

Part 1: Essay question (70% of the mark for this TMA)

Review your reflective journal entries and select two examples of your own experiences to analyse for this TMA. Your essay should start by describing the experiences you have chosen, and the main psychological theories and concepts that help you to understand those experiences. You will then need to explain the theories and concepts, using your selected reflective journal experiences to illustrate your answer.

Word limit: 1500 words

Part 2: Multimedia presentation (30% of the mark for this TMA)

Create a multimedia presentation to:

1.  illustrate an experience from your reflective journal

2.  analyse how the way you have illustrated the experience demonstrates its connection to the psychological theories and research covered in Block 3.

Word limit: 500 words

In the following pages, you will find:

·     a list of learning outcomes addressed by this assignment

·     student notes for each part of this assignment

·     a checklist to ensure you have done everything required for this assignment.

 

Learning outcomes

The module learning outcomes assessed by TMA 03 are as follows:

Knowledge and understanding:

·     Understanding of a wide range of basic psychological concepts and an appreciation of how they apply to everyday life.

Cognitive skills

·     Ability to describe, compare and evaluate a range of key concepts in psychology.

·     Ability to construct arguments based on psychological theories and research findings, recognising the significance of differing approaches and subject positions.

Key skills

·     Application of appropriate criteria to select relevant material for specific purposes.

·     Ability to communicate psychological knowledge in a variety of formats, suitable for both traditional academic audiences and wider, non-academic audiences.

·     Ability to apply an appropriate referencing system.

Practical and/or professional skills

·     Production of written work that shows evidence of independent judgement in answer to a set problem.

·     Ability to use and recognise critical, evaluative, practical and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills that are highly transferable to the workplace and other settings.

 

Student notes for Part 1

Focus

This part of the TMA aims to check your understanding of some of the psychological theories and concepts presented in Block 3, and encourages you to relate theoretical ideas to your own real-world experience.

Throughout Block 3 you have been adding entries to your reflective journal, relating your learning to your own everyday experience. This TMA helps you to come full circle and practise applying the theoretical understanding you have gained from the module to your own personal experiences.

This may be a new type of assignment for you, but it should be a relatively simple task. If you get stuck, looking back through Block 3 at the points where you were asked to write journal entries will help you to identify the relevant theories.

Command words

This assignment asks you to describe and then explain, and it is important that you do both.

You are asked to describe two different experiences from your online reflective journal, and the main psychological theories and concepts from Block 3 that would help you to understand each of those experiences. You then need to explain each of the identified theories and concepts by referring to your chosen experiences as illustrations to support your explanation.

 

Important note: the experiences you describe must be your own, not hypothetical examples or someone else’s experiences.

 

Tips for Writing

To start with, choose two different experiences from your journal that you think could be used to help explain some of the psychological theories and related concepts you learned about in Block 3. Think about the key points of each of those experiences, then work out which of the theories and concepts each experience relates to. Make sure that the experiences you choose can be used to explain different theories – you should avoid repeating yourself.

In your essay, give enough description of your experiences for the reader to understand them both (remember that they will not have read your reflective journal). Make sure you also explain clearly which theory or theories each experience relates to.

Remember that all theories and concepts mentioned should be properly referenced, but that you do not need to reference your journal (you may want to re-visit the Week 15 skills activity on ‘when to reference’).

As an example, imagine that a patient in Roger Ulrich’s hospital study (Chapter 8 of the module textbook, Section 3.1) was a student studying DD210 and had written about their stay in the hospital as an entry in their reflective journal. They may have written about their experience of looking out of the window onto trees and adjoining fields, watching some cows and hearing the birds sing. They may also have written about how they felt better when they had this view: more relaxed, with less pain, and feeling more positive. If they chose this journal entry for their TMA 03, then the related theories could include Ulrich’s psychoevolutionary theory and attention restoration theory, as both of these are concerned with the potentially beneficial responses humans have to natural environments. The idea of ecotherapy and fractal preference could also be relevant when considering how the environment affects ongoing medical treatment, and the mental state of the patient. This student would therefore need to describe these theories, explain how and why they relate to their experience in the hospital, and reference them appropriately throughout their essay.

 

Whilst this is not intended to be a compare-and-contrast essay, you may find that there are points of similarity and difference between the two experiences you choose to write about and/or between the theories that you use to explain them. If so, you may find it helpful to reflect back on TMA 02 (Part 1) and apply some of the skills, which you developed through writing that compare-and contrast-assignment, to this essay.

 

Relevant materials

What is relevant to your essay will depend on the specific journal entries/experiences and theories you choose. You can draw on any of the material from Block 3, however the main psychological theories and concepts that may be relevant are:

Week 12 Boundaries of the self

1.  Neisser’s Types of self-knowledge (in Chapter 7 of the module textbook, Section 2).

2.  Embodiment and embedment (in Chapter 7, Section 3).

3.  Thick and thin boundaries, and Place attachment (in Chapter 7, Section 4).

4.  Body ownership (in Section 3 of the online materials).

5.  Body boundaries (in Section 4 of the online materials).

Week 13 Relationships with the natural world

1.  Evolutionary responses (in Chapter 8 of the module textbook, Section 2).

2.  Landscape preference, Fractals (in Chapter 8, Section 2, and Section 2 of the online materials).

3.  Restorative environments, Attention Restoration Theory (in Chapter 8, Section 3).

4.  Ecotherapy (in Chapter 8, Section 4).

5.  Causal features (in Section 4 of the online materials).

6.  Biophilia (in Section 5 of the online materials)

7.  Nature Deficiency Disorder, social support (in Section 6 of the online materials).

Week 14 The urban world

1.  Biophilic design (in Section 3 of the online materials).

2.  Factors relating to crime and aggression (in Section 4).

3.  Interpreting experiences (in Section 6).

Week 15 The wider environment

1.  Defence mechanisms (in Chapter 9 of the module textbook, Section 3)

2.  Socially organised denial (in Chapter 9, Section 4)

3.  Separation, dissociation (in Chapter 9, Section 5)

4.  Human exemptionalism, the New Ecological Paradigm (in Section 3 of the online materials)

5.  Pro-environmental behaviour, non-informational factors in behavioural change (in Section 4 of the online materials)

 

You may also draw on relevant additional material that you have found in your independent study time, but it is not a requirement of this TMA that you do so.

 

 

Student notes for Part 2

Focus

This part of the TMA draws directly on the ‘Developing your skills’ activity from Week 14, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate your ability to communicate ideas using non-textual material as well as words.

The focus of this task is to make use of non-textual content to convey information to an audience.

Using multimedia, you will create a representation of an experience you have had (choose an experience from your reflective journal), so that someone else is able to understand it.

You will then analyse how you have presented the information, in order to show your audience how it relates to the psychological content of Block 3.

Note: You should aim to use your own multimedia content where possible (for example, a photograph you have taken).

Command words

Here you are asked to illustrate an experience, which means to give an account of it using examples. You are also asked to analyse the illustration of that experience, which means to unpack an issue, idea or proposition; breaking it down into its different elements, to examine it critically or in detail.

Tips for writing

Once you have chosen an experience from your reflective journal (which can be one that you wrote about in Part 1 of TMA 03, or a different one if you prefer), you will need to create your first slide:

·     use multimedia (e.g. photos, diagrams, cartoons, audio, text) to make a representation of your experience. Try to illustrate it in such a way that you can fit it onto one slide if possible.

The multimedia you use can be items included in your reflective journal, or new items. Or a mix of both.

·     think about what the key elements of the experience were (how you were affected, what the experience meant to you), and how you might best communicate the experience to someone else who may not have had that type of experience themselves.

You should then make a second slide which is a duplicate of the first:

·     add labels to this second slide, analysing each multimedia element you have included. For example, you might include points like ‘this part of the image shows fractal structures, which [name of theory] theory argues…’. Or ‘this sound file highlights the contrast between urban and natural sounds, which [name of study] study has shown…’.

·     You may well find that you cannot fit all of your analytical points onto the second slide without it becoming too ‘busy’. If so, to communicate your points clearly and effectively, simply create another duplicate of your first slide. This will then be your third slide, and you can split your analytical points between slides 2 and 3.

We recommend that you do not have more than six slides in total – you will probably be able to get you points across in fewer.

·     As you analyse the illustration of your experience, you should briefly refer to relevant theories and/or research findings. However, the emphasis should be on an analysis of the multimedia elements you have included and how they illustrate the relationship between your experience and the Block 3 content. You do not need to give a detailed explanation of the theories and research in this part of the TMA.

Note that we have allowed a 500 word limit for this part of the TMA, but you may well be able to convey your ideas in fewer words, since the images, etc., will do a lot of your ‘talking’ for you.

Relevant materials

As your reflective journal covers all of Block 3, you should re-read the specific sections which are relevant to your chosen example. You can also refer to the list given in the Student notes for Part 1 of TMA 03, as a reminder of where different material appears.

Further resources

If you have not made slides for presentations before, or if you’d like a refresher, then you could use one of the following resources on the Assessment page of the module website:

Presentations – create slides using PowerPoint 2010

Presentations – create slides using PowerPoint 2007

Presentations – create slides using PowerPoint 2003 or OpenOffice

 

If you require further guidance on submitting your slides via the eTMA system, see the following resources:

·     Compressing files (including working with .zip files)

·     Online TMA/EMA service

 

 

Checklist

 

Have I:	Yes	No, where can I look for guidance?
made sure I understand the question?		Look at Getting started in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’ See also Understand the question in ‘Skills for OU Study’.
read all of the guidance notes for this assignment?		Carefully read through the student notes that accompany your assignment to check that you have followed all the advice and instructions.
actively studied the relevant module material and anything else to which I’ve been directed?		See the booklets Reading and Taking Notes and Thinking Critically.
reflected on my learning, including feedback received on earlier assignments, in order to improve my skills?		See Section 2, ‘Active learning’ and Section 4, ‘Being reflective’ of the booklet Develop Effective Study Strategies. See also Learning from feedback in ‘Skills for OU Study’.
thought about how best to structure my answer, and about style and language?		Further advice on structuring answers is available in the relevant sections in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’. See, for example, Skill: Essay writing. For questions relating to style and language, see the section Presentation and language in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’. See also Developing academic English and Writing for university in ‘Skills for OU Study’; and Section 7 ‘Choosing a writing style’ and Section 8 ‘Improving your written English’ of the booklet Preparing Assignments.
written in my own words?		Guidance on writing in your own words is available in the sections on Skill: Understanding plagiarism and Skill: Writing in your own words in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’.
where necessary, used evidence to back my arguments, and referenced correctly?		Advice on using evidence to support your arguments is available in the section on Selecting your examples in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’. See also Gathering your materials in ‘Skills for OU Study’. Guidance on referencing is available in the section on Referencing in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’.
checked my word count?		The guidance notes tell you the word limit for each part of the TMA. An answer that is shorter than the word length by more than 10% is likely to be too short to have fully answered the question. An answer that exceeds the word limit by more than 10% may be penalised. For further information see the section on Word length in ‘Social Sciences Assessment Information’.
written the word count at the end of each part of my TMA?		Check the word count and write that figure clearly at the end of each part of the assignment.
Set out my assignment properly?		See Section 3.4, ‘Conventions for presenting work’ in your module’s ‘Assessment Guidance’, which you will find under ‘Assessment’ on the module website.
Completed each part of the TMA?		Read through these assignment notes carefully to check that you have completed all the necessary tasks.