I appreciate the responses I've received so far, and I'd like to respond to
some of the issues raised.
Our department has a fairly traditional curriculum (I think). After general
psych students take a 2 semester stats/research methods sequence. They
choose at least one from social, developmental, and personality, and one
from physio, cognitive and learning. History of psych is the senior
capstone class, and students must take at least 5 psych electives in
addition to the required classes. Many seniors take a 2 semester practicum
(supervised internship in mental health setting).
Is our major perceived as easy? It's not so simple to gauge. We do get a
lot of biology major drop-outs. But we have a large percentage of students
who come into college wanting to major in psych because they want to a) help
people b) work with children. We have a low % of students who go on to
Ph.D. programs, but a fair number who go on to pursue masters of some sort.
In VT education students must major is something besides education, so about
30% of our majors are elementary education double majors and that % is
increasing.
Our faculty is reasonably representative of the various subfields (1
developmental, 1 social/personality, 1 learning/physio, 1
experimental/psychometrics, 1 cognitive, 2 clinical). We differ in our
emphasis on scientific rigor in our individual classes, but not so much as a
department. We have spent some time talking about our expectations for
research methods/stats and applying that kind of thinking in other classes.
Our students tend to view research negatively and that is a huge frustration
for most of us, and something we are trying to change.
We have (somewhat informally) analyzed what the students actually take, and
it's clear that they select heavily from the
abnormal/personality/developmental/social courses, and rarely choose more
than the required one of the other group, and its clear that they perceive
the cognitive/physio/learning classes as more difficult, and less "relevant"
(oh how I hate that phrase!!)
We would like to offer more upper level seminars, and give students more
opportunities to be involved in research. But as I said in my earlier post,
even with adjuncts it is difficult to schedule enough seminars and keep them
at a reasonable size to require them. In fact, (and we have said this to the
administration in our many pleas for more faculty) we would all like to
revise our curriculum to make it more rigorous (require more lab experience,
more upper level courses) but we can't make any meaningful changes under the
current condition.
We don't really have the option of not advising students--as a small liberal
arts school we pride ourselves on students getting lots of individual
attention--although psych students get less than some others.
We have discussed many options for limiting the number of
majors--having an exit exam (which would only work over time if became known
that it would be difficult to pass), some sort of exam after general psych
or research methods, minimum grade criteria, requiring all psych majors to
take biology for their science requirement. Using grades in general psych
and research methods seems to be the option that would be least
objectionable to the administration (although we haven't presented this to
them as yet) and achieve our goals.
Sorry to go on so long!!!
Kris
