Teach all the Things!
Distilling complex information into a format that a non-scientific audience can understand/apply is a great way to show me your grasp of a topic.
Instead of writing a paper or an article review... pretend you’re creating a short, educational video on one of the subtopics we’ve talked about (or something closely related) for a group of middle-schoolers. Your audience is completely new to the psychology scene, so they need you to explain things at a level they can pick up on.
Pick a Subtopic
Choose something that you'd like to know more about. It should be a subtopic, not a general module topic. For example, instead of Memory you could go with short-term memory or methods of encoding.
Show me that you took some time to learn a bit more about something from the course by doing your own research. Teach your imaginary middle school class everything you learned in an engaging way.
Keep it Informal…
…but appropriate.
Keep it real: real in the sense that your research on the topic needs to be legit. A reference to at least one academic journal article is necessary.
Keep it at 5 minutes(ish) - no more than 10 minutes.
The Look
It doesn’t need to be all “academic” looking if you don’t want it to be. This is a casual presentation. Think about the best way to teach the topic and go for it.
It can be PowerPoint slides with narration or narrative text; you can go TED talk style; you can sit in front of the camera and talk; you can do a video and/or audio interview with the author of a paper; you can use figures from papers, humor, demos... whatever.
Review a colleague’s project
Part of doing good science is being able to constructively critique other people’s work. After everyone has submitted their projects in Teams, you’ll need to submit a comment reviewing one of your colleagues’ projects. Pick a project that does not already have a review posted, comment that you are preparing a review (so no one else starts reviewing it at the same time) and then post your review of that project when you’re ready.
I will provide a small rubric for everyone to use to guide them through their review. It will be available here soon.
Submitting Your Project
If Something Goes Wrong
Contact me immediately!!! I can’t help if I don’t know what’s happening.