Advanced Educational Psychology - PSY 501
3 Credits
Spring 2014
Instructor - Dr. Margaret Anderson
Office - 135 Old Main
Office hours – M-R 2:30-4 or by appointment
Phone - 607-753-2048
E-Mail – margaret.anderson@cortland.edu
Course Internet address - http://web.cortland.edu/andersmd/psy501/501home.htm
FAX - 607-753-5738

Readings: The required readings consist of a series of articles which will either be placed on e-reserve in the library or linked to directly from your class web site.  See the class web site for more information about accessing them. In addition you will need to use the materials found in the online tutorials available through the class web site and the basic Educational Psychology text book, also linked from the main class site.

Course Description
Advanced study of psychological principles and theories related to education.
Prerequisite: PSY 231 or 232 or 332 or 333. If you have not completed one of the prerequisites you may still take the course, but be aware that you may need to put in additional time to master the basic material. There is a link from the class site to a current, open source text on Educational Psychology.

Goals of the course:
There are a number of goals of this course. The first is to strengthen your understanding of the core concepts and theories that make up the field of Educational Psychology. The second goal is to build on that foundation and explore how it relates to current issues in the field of Education. A third goal of the course is to demonstrate a wide variety of methods and approaches for gathering knowledge, presenting material and evaluating performance in an educational setting. The fourth goal is to accommodate the various backgrounds, interests, and current commitments of the students in this course.  A final, but vital, goal is to have you experience the use of computers in a variety of ways to support distance education and to discover your reaction to those methods, and hopefully provide models of techniques you can incorporate into your own classes.

Structure of the course:
This course has been developed to afford you the greatest possible flexibility in completing the various assignments. With this increased flexibility, a greater demand is placed on students for personal commitment, organization, and the ability to work independently. You will complete assignments at times, and from locations that are convenient for you in order to meet specified deadlines.

You will be given weekly assignments which you may complete and submit any time before the scheduled deadline. On Monday of each week I will post the assignment which will be due the following Sunday.  Occasionally a due date may fall over a school holiday, that does not mean you must work on the holiday, simply complete your assignment any time in the week prior to the holiday. You may complete the weekly assignments from home, work, or any of computer labs on campus that have Internet capabilities.  While you may complete an assignment before the due date, if an assignment is submitted late you will incur a10% deduction in the possible grade for every 24 hours past the due date the assignment is submitted.

This is a 3 credit graduate level course.  The College anticipates that students will spend approximately 9 hours per week on a 3 credit course (3 hours in class and 6 hours of work out of class).  Since this course does not have scheduled meeting times, you will need to allocate the equivalent amount of time to ensure that you can meet all course requirements.

If at any time you have difficulty with the assignments or the course in general you should feel free to drop me an e-mail message, or stop by my office.

Electronic communication: I encourage students to contact me using e-mail. However I consider all electronic communication to be a form of formal academic communication and I expect that students will follow appropriate protocols [i.e. all messages must come from a professional sounding and identifiable address, there must be a topic in the subject line, there should be a salutation (Dr. Anderson), the content should be grammatical (not necessarily essays, but not texting slang), you should identify the course you are in, and there should be a signature (your name)]. When I send out mailings to the entire class I will use the distribution list on the My Red Dragon system so be sure you check that e-mail frequently. If you send me an individual message from an alternate e-mail address, I will respond to the address from which the message was sent.

Course assignments:
There are three types of assignments for this course.

1) The first type of assignment is for you to demonstrate mastery of the core content, and your ability to apply it to your current situation. In order to do this you will be assigned a basic topic that should have been covered in your undergraduate course. Realizing that you all have different backgrounds and levels of preparation for this course there will be a class based tutorial on the topic as well as the basic on-line undergraduate text on Educational Psychology that you can use as a reference. On the weeks when you are working with the basic content I will ask you to apply it in some way to your current teaching position (more on that later if you are not currently teaching). This material will be posted to the class discussion list and you will be required to read the posts of your peers and respond to some of them. Again, I will provide more specifics on this with the first assignment.

2) The second type of assignment is to encourage you to become a critical thinker and to share your fact based opinions with a variety of different audiences. To accomplish this, the second component of the course is based on the assigned readings. In weeks following the core discussion I will assign a reading (or readings) on a current topic in educational psychology. I will then set a specific question for you to address related to that topic, relate the core material, and present your opinion to a specified audience (e.g. your school principal, students’ parents, students themselves etc). These papers will be submitted directly to me electronically as attachments to an e-mail. Please use a Word format to create all of these assignments.

****Please note that each weekly discussion assignment will require you to include (and use) additional references (not from the assigned readings or class tutorials) that are directly related to the assigned topic. While many references may be applicable to a number of topics, you should not use the same reference twice unless you also include one original one as well as the one you had previously used.  Also, while I strongly encourage you to consult basic text books to provide a foundation for a given topic, I will not accept text books as your additional reference.  The reference you use and cite must be from an academic journal or a reputable (i.e. peer reviewed) web site.

3) The final assignment is to provide you with the opportunity to explore a topic of your personal interest. I will provide you with more information on this assignment later, but basically I will ask you to create a module similar to the ones you have completed during the semester on a topic of your selection.

Please note the College policies on plagiarism in the College Handbook.  Specifically “each student is expected to present his or her own work. All papers, examinations, and other assignments must be original or explicit acknowledgement must be given for the use of other persons’ ideas or language”. (p.47)

Course grades: Final course grades will be determined by a combination of the components listed above in the following manner.
1) On line discussions. Each discussion of the core topic will be worth 10 points. 8 points will be for your initial input and the additional 2 points may be earned by commenting on the posts of your peers. I will give more specific instructions later. There will be 6 core topics for a possible total of 60 points
2) Papers related to assigned readings.  These papers will relate to the readings of current topics related to educational psychology and will be submitted directly to me as electronic Word attachments. There will be 6 current topics for a possible total of 60 points
3) Final summary Project. The project will be worth a total of 50 points. More specific information will follow, (see number 3 of the goals above).


****** All work is due ON or BEFORE the date it is assigned. 10% per day will be deducted from the possible available points for any work turned in late - i.e. a paper that is worth 10 points on Sunday (up until midnight) will only be worth 9 points on Monday, by Friday, that paper is worth at most 5 points! In order to avoid the penalties, be sure to mail or post your work early. The fact that you experienced technical or other problems at the last minute will not excuse late work. If you know you are going to be out of town, or unavailable your may work ahead. You will need to be aware of your own commitments as they interact with this course.  Specifically, if your school has a break and you plan to be out of town, you will need to complete your assignments early or they will be counted as late.


Final grade computation:
On line discussions = 60 points
Assigned short papers = 60 points
Project = 50 points
Total = 170 points

Letter grade conversion:
97% - 100% = A+
94% - 96% = A
90% - 93% = A-
87% - 89% = B+
84% - 86% = B
80% - 83% = B-
77% - 79% = C+
74% - 76% = C
70% - 73% = C-
67% - 69% = D+
64% - 66% = D
60% - 63% = D-
BELOW 60% = E

Assignments:
The list of assignments is provided as a guide for activities during the semester. It may be necessary for us to deviate from this schedule sometimes, if so I will post the changes on the class web site. The discussion topics will be available directly in LiveJournal. The paper topics and associated readings will be listed directly on the main class web site.