Although assessment is acknowledged as being of central importance to the student learning experience, assessment practices have been consistently highlighted as one of the weakest features by the Quality Assurance Agency and identified by many as a crisis within higher education. This paper explores the use of Patchwork Text Assessment within a…

Virtual reality is by no means a new technology, yet it is increasingly being used, to different degrees, in education, training, rehabilitation, therapy, and home entertainment. Although the exact reasons for this shift are not the subject of this short opinion piece, it is possible to speculate that decreased costs, and increased performance, of…

The challenges facing UK higher education are both well documented and controversial; however, pitted against this context is the requirement for psychology departments to provide an increasingly rich and diverse university experience for students, whilst ensuring progression and retention remain central to undergraduate provision. Despite the…

It is well established that the number of males studying psychology in the UK, both at A-level and on degree courses, is disproportionately low compared to females. There is a paucity of research, however, which discusses how psychology is viewed by this group. The present study employed focus groups with 35 pre-tertiary males (some of whom were…

There have been great changes in the numbers of students studying psychology at degree level in the UK since 1961--the year the author graduated. And, similarly there have been great changes in what is taught--with an ever-widening set of theoretical developments and practical applications. Nonetheless, despite these developments, the author…

In his article, "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology", James Hartley concludes that the teaching of psychology has changed relatively little over the past several decades. As someone whose teaching career covered a very similar time period, I agree in general terms with that assessment. In this article, however, I focus on some of the…

In this article, the author shares his response to James Hartley's "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology". The author finds it very interesting to read James Hartley's reflections on the teaching of psychology and he thought it would be worth adding a rather different perspective, while agreeing with Hartley's main conclusions about the…

In this article, the author shares his response to James Hartley's "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology". Hartley concludes that the teaching of psychology has changed relatively little over the past several decades. The author states that his way of teaching now is very different from his way of 1975. This essay is about the…

In his article, "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology", James Hartley concludes that the teaching of psychology has changed relatively little over the past several decades. Hartley begins his paper on a personal note with recollections of his first university teaching experience at Keele University. In his paper Hartley comments on the…

In responding to Hartley (2011), this paper considers his concluding remarks as recommendations for the future of teaching undergraduate psychology and challenges the position that the teaching of psychology hasn't altered vastly during the last 50 years. In doing so, it is acknowledged that the content and delivery of higher education psychology…

In responding to Jim Hartley, with whom I very largely agree, I first reflect on my own experience of teaching Psychology in an institution which was successively college of technology, polytechnic and university. In the second a new and fruitful method of assessing higher education essentially by peer review was developed, only to be destroyed in…

This article presents the author's response to peer commentary on his article entitled "Reflections on 50 years of teaching psychology." The author is pleased that most of them share some of his concerns about the lack of progress in the teaching of psychology over the last 50 years, and he welcomes the fact that they then go on to raise…

This paper presents some possibilities for applying the linguistic and psychological theories of two dialogists, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan, to the classroom. There is a short summary of how the two theories may interact with each other and then a discussion of their two opposing views of identity formation. Bakhtin was a Russian, coming…

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) is committed to enhancing the quality of learning and teaching for all university students in the UK, and the inaugural conference for the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, held in April 2012 at Imperial College, London, aimed to showcase research and evidence-based educational…

In this paper we discuss the development and running of a residential animal behaviour field trip. The trip has a number of elements that challenge and develop the students. First, this trip is open to students at levels two, three and M. This allows us to engineer a certain amount of peer assisted learning. Second, the students live together and…