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Final Year Students’ Reflections on the Final Year Project in Psychology Pete Lonsdale, Claire Fox and Hayley Gilman. Project Blog. HEA-funded Individual Teaching Award Funds to recruit 20 students, paying £100 each. We had six active bloggers
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Final Year Students’ Reflections on the Final Year Project in PsychologyPete Lonsdale, Claire Fox and Hayley Gilman
Project Blog • HEA-funded Individual Teaching Award • Funds to recruit 20 students, paying £100 each. We had six active bloggers • Blogging over the course of their final year project: • Students reflecting on skills, problems etc – employability • Insight into project work – help us to improve support
Recruitment and Support • Asked for volunteers from final year students • All given full details of project, who would see data and when, informed consent, right to withdraw etc. • Reflective Writing workshop for all participants
Blog setup • Used Wordpress – needed anonymity • Created anonymous accounts, kept list of usernames associated with Keele usernames • Pete Lonsdale added as Contributor – can view posts, but not Drafts • Asked to blog, regularly, and substantively
Blog setup (2) • End up with 2 copies: - Version 1: original version, for research - Version 2: edited (by students). Extracts are taken from this version for inclusion in the “helpful guide” created for future students • Students retain admin access and can edit blogs at any time.
Focus Groups • Towards the end of their projects student bloggers were invited to attend a Focus Group • The main aims were to:- • Gain an understanding into the experiences (good and bad) of completing their projects • Have an insight into how students engaged with blogging, and any difficulties they may have had.
Our experiences • Late start due to August approval and need for ethics • Apparent lack of interest from students • Finding which blogging platform to use and exactly which settings to use was tricky • What is the right balance of privacy / prompting / feedback…
Bloggingexperiences “it’s been a good opportunity” “I’ve learnt to write how I feel without making it too biased” “nice to just let the feelings out instead of keeping them tied up” “it helped with my time management etc”
Gaining ethical approval “My ethics got rejected because of a stupid mistake that I made and the fact that I was not perfectly clear about one of my factors” “I wanted to cry, no one had told me there was an ethics meeting the day before and I certainly didn’t think I would have to wait until the end of February to be approved” “The ethics check list is a little difficult to do on your own, I was glad to have my supervisor to help me through it”
Working with a partner “As usual I had waited around in the library for her for over half an hour but she never showed or replied to any of my texts” “Eventually I had to work on my own” “My partner did not turn up on the Thursday. But she did have the decency to text me an hour later and say she slept through it as she had done [been out] the night before”
Presenting a poster “The next ordeal was the actual presentation. My supervisor and other lecturer were actually quite nice and the presentation was completely different to what I thought would happen” “I have my poster presentation tomorrow and I feel quite nervous about it, because my supervisor said it’s gonna be quite formal and perhaps he won’t be as friendly” “This week, I attended the dissertation poster workshop and it was very helpful, as I had pretty much no idea as to what to include on my poster” “They seemed to talk for quite a long time about what they felt I should be doing and did not leave much time for me to speak about it myself or answer questions”
Supervision “I still have not had much contact with my supervisor and am still unsure of what I should be doing” “Well he [supervisor] put PowerPoint’s together, he created YouTube videos etc. and they really helped” “He [supervisor] said that he believes in my ability in doing well, given that he has a positive impression on me being clear and aware of what I’m doing” “I feel extremely blessed to have such an amazing supervisor, who really helped us a lot”
Data collection “I have finally started to collect my data, this seems to be a huge step forward in my project” “I am pleased that I am finally able to start collecting data, however, I am worried that I may be cutting it quite close with collecting data and I am worried about falling behind or having difficulty gaining participants” “After collecting half of my participants I felt a good way ahead and felt particularly upbeat about my next meeting with [my supervisor]” “You will be pleased to know that I got my participants, all 121 of them. Unfortunately not quite the 180 I was supposed to get but I did well to get all the participants I did in 2 weeks, so I’m proud of myself for that”
Data analysis “The data analysis I did was covered in the labs, but we don’t have refresher labs in year 3 and so everything I had learned in year 2 sort of, well, it sort of completely left my mind” “I was told I had to do another type of analyses rather than the one I had already done” “I was told what other analyses I could include and also how to properly justify my unexpected results”
The write-up “Another thing I am struggling with at the moment is the word count. In the module guide, it says that the report should be over 5,000 words but should not exceed 10,000. This is quite a vague word count” “My lab report is going okay so far. However, I haven’t written a lab report in so long that I’m a little unsure of what I need to write” “It goes from excitement, to being down about it, to being stressed about it, to binding it and being like ‘aggghhhh!’ to handing it in when it’s like ‘phew, yay!’” “The draft has helped me a lot though and it is important to produce good quality drafts, because the supervisor gives useful advice according to the draft we submitted”
Skills and experience gained “It [project] feels like a good starting point, I think I could start a career in psychology. Like, I would need guidance and support, but I’ve learned a lot from this experience” “It forces you to research well into a topic; in that sense it was a useful experience, yeah. It makes you make sure that you now your topic” “I’ve learnt how to read journals, gathering information in a limited time etc.” “I’m much better with my time management”
