First Year Seminars (01.138)

Overview and Rationale

Students who take a first-year psychology course are often surprised by how distant the science of psychology is from their own psychological experience. This course is designed to help bridge the gap between the everyday, tacit folk-psychology that new students bring to the university and the social-scientific practice of psychology. By beginning with an everyday concern - motivation - the course starts with what students already understand or assume about human motivation, and provides a context for t hem to explore these assumptions further.

Human motivation itself is a complex topic intersecting with every domain of psychological inquiry (e.g., biological, developmental, cognitive, social and personality). As such, this course allows students to delve deeply into theory and research in any number of areas providing a clear conception of the breadth of analysis possible while allowing for individual choice to pursue aspects of the topic which are of personal interest.

Although it would not be necessary to take Introductory Psychology (49.100) concurrent to this Intensive seminar, it would provide an excellent complement.

The rationale which guides learning activities and evaluation in the seminar is based on six pedagogical goals. These goals form the foundation of the First-Year Seminars at Carleton. Through the first-year seminar we hope to provide all incoming students with an experience which is based on:

  1. close analysis of texts, theories, etc., (not just rote memorization of texts written for first-year courses)
  2. interactive learning (particularly with the instructor),
  3. early assessment and evaluation,
  4. a culminating project (providing a transition to upper-year work),
  5. teamwork (small-group assignments and projects), and
  6. consultation and advising by the instructor in terms of course issues as well as the first-year experience more generally.

Format

The focus of the seminar activities is on the development of university-level critical thinking, reading and writing skills. As discussed above, by beginning with a topic of common interest, students come to the class with many assumptions about and a fa irly well-developed tacit theory of human motivation. These theories will be made more explicit through small-group activities and journal writing. Once explicit, students will be invited to systematically explore aspects of these theories, researching related work, summarizing it in relation to their assumptions and presenting it to the class for discussion. To facilitate sharing of writing and group work, students will be required to create a personal Web site for the course in which they can documen t their research.

Small groups of students with similar interests will then combine efforts in a major course project by bringing together aspects of their own research to explore a problem related to motivation such as procrastination. In addressing this issue, the students in the group will be expected to synthesize various theoretical frameworks in order to provide their own account of why this is a problem related to mot ivation, how it develops and what might be done to resolve it.

The course evaluation consists of wide variety of activities including:

The details regarding evaluation and course activities can be found in the course outline.

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