Although I've been at one university for the past way long time, I did play freeway tag (what we call adjunct appointments in southern california where you spend more time commuting ridiculous distances in congested traffic between jobs than you do teaching, prepping all together) between several universities, professional schools and community colleges for a few years. And, marching to my own drummer, attended 7 different schools before finishing up my BA, I can say that generally I'd characterize the difference as prereqs are lower division and courses in the major are upper division.
I have seen many problems come up when community colleges teach content courses in the major at the lower division because we have no consistent way to validate that they had the prereqs we require for these same courses, and therefore taught the quantity and quality of content we teach. We require all content courses in the major to have a prereq of intro, stats and methods--the underlying idea is that students need to understand how we acquire knowledge, to understand how we have reached the conclusions we have reached that form the content of the courses in the major. They may be just as much 'survey' as perhaps a lower division course, such as abnormal or developmental or social psych, but because they presume that students now understand how researchers reached their conclusions then we consider them at a higher level, because we don't go over the methods underlying each finding. We "presume" (probabably falsely) that students now understand the basis of the validity and reliability of the findings. And, thus, we can cover more material. Now, in practice, we don't have any rules about it; but among individual profs I know that there are varying degrees of how much we rely on students understanding the studies on which we base our conclusions. As a cognitive person, for example, I go over several studies in painful detail in the survey upper division course in cognitive psych for example, to demonstrate why we can conclude that there is something qualitatively different between short and long term memory stores, based on quantitative studies. Now, as far as differentiating 100 from 200 level courses, I don't think we have any distinction there and we teach all of our survey courses at the 300 level; 400 level is really just reserved for special topics and anything involving any degree of independent work. This seems in contrast to Bob's description! Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- Original message ---- >Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:32:20 -0500 >From: Robert Wildblood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Re: [tips] upper and lower level courses >To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> > > I have worked at 7 different 4-year colleges and > universities. There seems to be a great deal of > agreement with those courses numbered at the 100 and > 400 levels with a fair amount of disagreement at the > 200 and 300 level course. The interesting thing is > that this disagreement at the 200 and 300 level has > become more political in many states in which the > legislatures are giving more support to the > community colleges and reducing real dollar support > to 4-year colleges and universities. We have a > strong movement in Indiana to make the previously > almost exclusively technical 2 year colleges into a > statewide community college system with a mandate > from the legislature to have articulation agreements > which will make the 200 - 300 level courses an area > of contention. We have seen it already and two of > the courses that seem to be most popular on the list > are Abnormal and Social psychology. Most of the > colleges and universities have been teaching these > courses at the 300 level (verboten to the "community > colleges" and most of the new "community colleges" > want to be able to teach them at the 200 level and > have them be transferrable with full credit to the > colleges and universities. I so wish that as > educators we didn't have to deal with politics. > On 10 Jan 2008, at 16:04, Paul Schulman wrote: > > Does anyone out there know of any published (or > anecdotal) guidelines that differentiate > upper-level courses from lower-level courses? Our > department is trying to come up with some policy > (however vague) that would guide our expectations > in these courses. Do your schools have some sort > of understanding about this? Thanks > > Dr. Bob Wildblood > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --- > To make changes to your subscription contact: > > Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
