Hello and welcome to the seventy-second Personality Pedagogy newsletter highlighting what’s new at http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu. For more about the links below and approximately 2,567 other interesting links related to personality, please visit: http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu.
Personality Pedagogy this month is all about ethics. In July, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology (OTRP) introduced two new resources to help instructors teach students about ethics. The first one focuses on ethical issues in research and is called “Beyond Milgram: Expanding Research Ethics Education to Participant Responsibilities”. The second, “Educating Students About Plagiarism,” focuses on plagiarism and provides materials to help students and instructors recognize and respond to plagiarism. You will find links to these two resources below, along with a few other sites on research ethics, including the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, Teaching Ethical Issues Through Movies and Other Art Resources, Moral Games for Teaching Ethics, and a repeat of the link to the complete set of three videos on Protecting Human Subjects Training from the United States Health Resources and Services Administration.
This month, Personality Pedagogy is pleased to debut two new pages. We have collected so many links to assignments, exercises, activities, case studies, electronic texts, examples, illustrations, lectures, lecture notes, lecture slides, tests, measures, scales, and audio and visual resources that we had to create stand-alone pages for Happiness and for Personality Development. Until now, resources for Happiness were mixed in the general Positive Psychology page, while resources for Personality Development, including stability, change, and personality coherence, were mixed in the Trait Theories page. We hope this change will help instructors find quality resources more efficiently.
If you, like us, are savoring what’s left of the summer with one eye out on the year ahead, don’t forget to check out our General Resources page where you can find lots of ideas, from ice-breakers for the first day of class to clickers and crossword puzzles, to study strategies and online textbooks in personality theory. Whether you are new to teaching personality or an “old dog” who could use some new tricks and a little inspiration, there’s something for everybody there. Check it out!
As ever, please pass this newsletter on to interested colleagues and invite them to sign up for future issues and to visit the home of Personality Pedagogy: http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu. Remember, you can view the current newsletter, comment on newsletters, re-read what you missed in previous newsletters, or search all newsletters by checking out our blog at https://personalitypedagogy.wordpress.com and you can even receive Personality Pedagogy newsletters via RSS feed as soon as they are posted, by clicking on the “RSS-posts” button on the bottom right.
miserandino “at” arcadia “dot” edu
1. The Personality Pedagogy Monthly Newsletter
Sign up here to receive this newsletter delivered to your e-mail inbox once a month! We promise never to share your information with anybody else or to use it for any other purpose than “Personality Pedagogy”.
By Larissa K. Barber (Northern Illinois University) and Patricia G. Bagsby (Saint Louis University), this 33 page document describes participant ethics and an educational approach to participant rights and responsibilities that addresses the reciprocal nature of the researcher-participant relationship. It also provides four instructor resources: (a) websites that discuss participants’ rights and responsibilities, (b) a student learning module, (c) supplemental module resources (a Knowledge Retention Quiz, Answers to the quiz, a questionnaire to assess students’ beliefs about research ethics, and suggested discussion questions), and (d) references for additional resources and readings.
The declaration, endorsed in 2005, addresses “ethical issues related to medicine, life sciences and associated technologies as applied to human beings, taking into account their social, legal and environmental dimensions.” Available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic.
This program takes users through UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights exploring human dignity and human rights, benefit and harm, autonomy and responsibility, respect, equality, privacy, cultural diversity and more. Each unit includes 2-5 minute video excerpts from movies (e.g., “Twelve Angry Men”) and TV shows (e.g., “Grey’s Anatomy”) to spark discussion. Also available in Spanish.
Darryl R. J. Macer wrote this UNESCO guide for instructors teaching bioethics. Through these 43 games which spark critical thinking and values clarification as students “plan, act, monitor, evaluate, and reflect on moral choices.” Opens in PDF format.
Developed with the NIH Department of Bioethics and written by Education Development Center, Inc. this guide “supports high school biology teachers in raising and addressing bioethical issues with their students and engages students in rigorous thinking and discussions. By providing conceptual guidelines that promote careful thinking about difficult cases, it stresses the importance of presenting thoughtful and relevant reasons for considered positions on ethical issues”. The guide includes six teaching modules each with activities, masters, lesson plans, and teacher support materials. While designed for grades 9-12 most of the information is readily adaptable to college level courses. Two of the modules are particularly suitable for psychology classes (e.g., research ethics of human experimentation, genetic testing).
By Marika Lamoreaux, Kim Darnell, Elizabeth Sheehan, and Chantal
Tusher (Georgia State University), this resource contains materials to help educate students about plagiarism and to help faculty understand how to handle it if it occurs. Included are an overview for faculty “Educating Students,” a slide show for a lecture “Plagiarism,” a worksheet for students “Recognizing Plagiarism,” a plagiarism contract students sign “Plagiarism Contract,” suggested answers faculty can offer to respond to common student excuses “Answers to Common Excuses,” and a flowchart showing how one university handles plagiarism reports “Academic Dishonesty Flowchart.”
Created by psychologist Sue Franz “finding new technologies so you don’t have to” where she shares her discoveries of technology which enhances her teaching or the learning of her students. Includes an overview and description of tech essentials, handouts from her workshops, and handy information on everything from blogging to presentations to file management and downloading videos.
Originally designed for English teachers to help their students understand and describe nuances of character, this site offers 10 activities exploring adjectives helping students to describe the personality of themselves and others. Includes links to positive personality adjectives and negative personality adjectives. Good for an ice breaker or as a class exercise to introduce trait theory.
As part of the “Teaching Clinical Psychology” webpage, John Suler, Rider University, includes this exercise on the shadow. Students reflect on a person they don’t like very much and consider if the traits they dislike in another reflect traits they don’t like in themselves.
Stephen A. Diamond describes how to understand the unconscious dark side of our psyche in this article from “Psychology Today”, April 2012.
Stephen A. Diamond wonders if recent cases of mass hysteria may be due to the impressive power of the unconscious reasserting itself in an anti-psychodynamic, pharmacologically-indoctrinated climate. From “Psychology Today”, February 2012.
As part of the “Teaching Clinical Psychology” webpage, John Suler, Rider University, includes this exercise on memories. Students reflect on one or two early childhood memories and answer questions. Good for illustrating aspects of Alfred Adler’s and Sigmund Freud’s theories.
This page includes the full 128-item scale as well as scoring instructions for the Leary Interpersonal circumplex model of personality. The model uses the two dimensions of dominant-submissive and love-hate to form 16 categories. Also check out the full text of Leary’s original 1957 paper here.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow” (Runs 18 minutes, 59 seconds).
Scientists have discovered twins show differences in their DNA at birth due to differences in their epigenetics, the molecules that act on genes, according to this article, by Stephen Ornes, in “Science News for Kids”, July 31, 2012.
The complete set of three videos is available from the Health Resources and Services Administration. Modules 1 and 2: Evolving Concern: Protection for Human Subjects (22 minutes) and The Belmont Report: Basic Ethical Principles and Their Application (28 minutes); Module 3: Balancing Society’s Mandates: Criteria for Protocol Review (36 minutes)