Implementing and Evaluating a Writing Course for Psychology Majors

Abstract

In this article, I describe Writing in Psychology, a semester-length 3-credit elective course designed to improve students' writing skills, familiarize them with psychology's writing conventions, and teach them American Psychological Association (APA) style. Students produced a case report, a report of an empirical study, a conference abstract, and a literature review. An attitude inventory and tests over grammar and APA style revealed significant precourse versus postcourse improvement, providing evidence that the course can be a valuable addition to the undergraduate curriculum.

The “Writing Spiral”: A Practical Tool for Teaching Undergraduates to Write Publication-Quality Manuscripts

“…Early in my career, many of these handouts originated from students' lack of skills in grammar, writing mechanics, scientific tone, and APA style—especially in my research methods course. Although some discourage teaching such mechanics in discipline-specific writing (e.g., arguing that it is time consuming, distracts from content, and that students should be willing, and able to achieve competence in these areas on their own; Willingham, 1990), my experience has been consistent with research showing that direct training in grammar and APA style significantly improves students' skills and confidence (see, for example, Goddard, 2003, who found significant positive changes in students' attitude toward writing, confidence in writing empirical papers, and skills in grammar and APA style following a writing course for psychology majors).…”

“…In particular, I like its description of parallelism, comma splices, fragments, vague pronoun references, and other word-choice errors (e.g., since vs. because, while vs. although/whereas ) that are common (but rarely understood) mistakes made by my students 4 . Intro to APA Style/APA Template . Because research shows that intensive instruction in APA style leads to improved skills and is a precursor to better scientific writing (e.g., Goddard, 2003; Fallahi et al, 2006; Luttrell et al, 2010), there are three handouts on APA style in the spiral. Unfortunately, I am unable to locate the source for this first handout, which I encountered during graduate school at UCLA almost three decades ago.…”

Bones pr�ctiques a les biblioteques de la UAB per evitar el plagi

“…Pueden ser muy útiles con finalidades de investigación o para hablar de estos temas con los alumnos comentando sus respuestas. Algunos de estos artículos (están todos en la bibliografía) son los siguientes: o Goddard (2003), presenta un cuestionario de 14 ítems sobre actitudes y autoeficacia con respecto a los trabajos escritos (evalúa un semestre dedicado a aprender a hacer diversos tipos de trabajos con un diseño pre-post). (2002) reproducen un breve cuestionario de 9 preguntas para que los alumnos den su impresión sobre los informes críticos de artículos de investigación (en Psicología) que han tenido que hacer.…”

A Longitudinal Study of Assessing APA Writing Competence at a BSW Program

“…It has been documented that instructors often avoid focusing on writing skills because it would be labor intensive to do so, and they frequently feel that they lack the training to teach these skills. This fact would appear particularly true for social work faculty (Kahn & Holody, 2009) because many professional program faculty believe that teaching writing is the responsibility of the English Department (Goddard, 2002).…”