Independent Study: Year 2, Summer Term 2007
Course Overview
Official Course Title: Independent Study.
Official Course Code: C8033
Course Organiser: This course is organised by Dr Zoltán Dienes, a member of the Department of Psychology in the School of Life Sciences. You are welcome to direct queries concerning the structure of the course to Zoltán during his office hour in Pevensey1 2B2 (Thursday 9:00-10:00 am), or by e-mail ().
Type of Course: Independent Study is taken by all students on BA and BSc Psychology programmes, except for (a) students taking a programme with a minor component; and (b) BA Psych students who take a spring/summer elective. Students on the Sociology with Social Psychology programme and Psychology with Neuroscience also take the course. It is available to Visiting and Exchange students from any School. The course is a 6-credit Level 2 course running in the Summer Term.
Course Aims: The aim of this course is to understand and evaluate one current perspective on a broad topic in psychology.
Course Objectives: The course will give students experience in:
- Writing a cogent and concise report on some aspect of psychology.
- Drawing on a variety of evidence to assess complex issues.
- Evaluating the most important strengths, weaknesses, or implications of a recent theory.
Course Summary: For this course you will read a review article published in the previous year in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and write a 1000-word commentary on the article. You are given a choice of possible articles. There is no formal teaching on the course, but you may show a plan of the structure of your commentary to your Personal Tutor.
Course Description
Choose one of the following articles published in the 2005 volume of Behavioral and Brain Sciences:
1) Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe: A 48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating
David P. Schmitt
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 28, Issue 02, April 2005, pp 247-275
2)Moral heuristics
Cass R. Sunstein
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 28, Issue 04, August 2005, pp 531-542
3) Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition
Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne and Henrike Moll
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 28, Issue 05, October 2005, pp 675-691
All these papers, plus commentaries on them by other academics, are available on-line by going to
clicking on “electronic library”, logging on, clicking on “electronic journals”, and then on the journal title, “Behavioural and Brain Sciences”. This takes you to:
Click on “browse journals”, then select “Behavioral and Brain Sciences”.
All three articles are also on Life Sci Interactive under “course materials” for this course.
A hard copy of the journal is available in the Library’s Main Collection (QZ 10 Beh).
Each target article in Behavioral and Brain Science (BBS) is followed by around 30 commentaries by experts from various fields related to the target article. Your task is to also write a commentary for the target article, following the same guidelines an official commentator would use. Specifically:
a)Make up your own title; having chosen it, you must make sure that your answer specifically addresses the issue/question indicated in your title.
b)Do not devote the limited space in your commentary to repeating the contents of the target article. That is, do not simply summarize the target article. Nor should you simply paraphrase any one of the other commentaries.
c)Commentaries should be no more than 1000 words.
d)Include a short abstract of about 100 words (the abstract does not count as part of the 1000-word limit). The abstract should provide a summary of the structure of your commentary. (Check that your structure does fit that in the abstract.) It follows that the abstract should indicate how you have answered the question you set yourself in your title. (Check that the structure indicated in your abstract is a logical way of answering the issue posed in your title.)
e)Have a bibliography section at the end. The actual commentaries appear not to have this, but that is only because they have all been amalgamated to one bibliography at the end of the treatment.
Your commentary should consist of drawing out one or more key strengths, weaknesses, or implications - as you see it - of the target article. You may wish to read around the topic and dip into the other commentaries to form your opinion. (When you use ideas from other sources, like other commentaries, make sure you reference them as normal.) Relate the work to other things you have learned on your degree. Your commentary could be critical, praising, or simply indicating how the ideas link to other phenomena or ideas that interest you, or all of the above. There is no one right answer. There will not be space to address all the points that arise from a target article, so your commentary will deal with only one or a few connected issues that arise. Do make sure though that it is continuously clear how your comments relate to the target article.
As in all essays, make sure you cite the sources for any claims you make. If a source is one of the published commentaries, cite this just like any paper. For example, “Dienes and Perner (1994) said…” might appear in your text and the following in the bibliography :
Dienes, Z., & Perner, J. (1994). Dissociable definitions of consciousness. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 17, 403-404.
Note the page numbers are the actual page numbers of the commentary, not the main article.
Reading commentaries can be a good way of forming and integrating your own ideas about the target article, but bear in mind that commentators often themselves misunderstand crucial points from the target article and you should not uncritically accept criticisms contained in the commentaries. Several commentators might raise the same objection and still be wrong in thinking the objection is valid. Form your own opinion.
Last year students asked for more guidance on the structure of commentaries. The reason more guidance was not given is that there is no specific structure for a commentary. (A commentary is different from a lab report in this respect.) There must be some structure, well designed for answering the question you have set yourself, but it is up to you to work out what a good structure would be for you. No marks go on whether you used a particular structure, only on whether you used a structure. The markers have no structure in mind that they expect you to use. Plan the flow of your argument and ask yourself for every paragraph: Why am I saying this now? How does it follow from the last paragraph and how does it lead to the next? Is there a missing step in my argument? Am I saying some things that are unnecessary? A good answer will have been repeatedly changed in the light of these questions before finally being submitted. (All your tutors will repeatedly rework their writings in the light of these questions before submitting any of their papers to journals.)
Who knows, if your commentary is outstanding, it could be submitted to BBS as part of their “continuing commentary”!
As the title of this course suggests, this work is conducted largely on your own. But you may, if you choose, show your Personal Tutor your suggested title and structure of your answer. Your Personal Tutor is unlikely to know the details of the target article or even anything about the more general area; but he or she will be able to probe you for whether the structure is well organized and well suited to addressing (specifically) the exact title you have set yourself. Your Personal Tutor will not be interested in the details of your answer nor whether you have your facts straight; just whether you seem to have thought about the structure of your answer. You should see your Personal Tutor about this by the end of Week 4 (Summer Term) at the latest. The people marking your commentary will of course know the target article and the published commentaries.
You need to submit your commentary in the Summer Term; the exact date, time and location of submission will be displayed on the Psychology Second Year notice board by Psychology Office. As the commentary is submitted during the exam period, you will receive your mark back for it at the same time as all your second year exams. Unfortunately, because of the heavy marking load during this period, there is no time for markers to record feedback – just as for exams, for this assignment you will simply be given a mark.
This course has 6 credits; that is, it represents about the half the amount of work of one of your second-year core courses (like “Developmental Psychology”). That means we expect you to devote about 60 hours of work in total to this course. (For example, you may have to pursue your own background reading to make sure you understand key points in the article.) It also means the mark for this course contributes to your end-of-year mark, and hence to your final degree classification; the mark for this course will count fully half as much as the mark for any of your second-year core courses (which are 12 credits).
Your answer will be assessed according to:
a)Evidence that you taken on board one or more key points from the target article;
b)Whether you have addressed specifically the title you have set yourself and not in any way written material irrelevant to that title;
c)Whether you have structured your answer well so that each point you make is made at that stage in the commentary for a clear reason;
d)The extent to which you have related ideas, data, and theory together.
Zoltán Dienes