Lifespan Schedule Winter 2024
Brian Holt
2024-02-25
Background before we begin
A. First of all, welcome. My intention is to keep instructions brief and simple.
C. It is absolutely crucial that students, teachers, all of us, respect that everybody comes to this class with different experiences, abilities, and intentions..
D. It can be embarrassing to ask for help. Please try to ask anyway.
E. My intention as the instructor is to teach you ways to evaluate quality knowledge and to practice quality thinking and quality writing. The context of this endeavor is going to be in psychology.
F. Computer requirements:
You must have access to a real computer for writing. If you cannot afford a laptop or do not have a laptop or computer please contact me because we actually have free rentals for students.
A tablet or smartphone will be insufficient. It’s fine to do some communication (texting etc) using those tools, but for real writing you’re going to need a real computer or a laptop.
You’ll need to have quality access to the internet. IF you don’t have consistent access to the internet from home, we have loaner hotspots that you can borrow for free. They should give you internet at home.
G. Software (apps)
A web browser, like firefox, chrome.
A free Google doc account. If you have Gmail you already have a Google account for documents and spreadsheets. This is a requirement; no other word processing software will be allowed. I have reasons and we can talk about them but unless it is related to a disability accommodation you must be using Google docs.
You will need Slack, which is a communication platform; you can use the web browser version or you can use the desktop version. I use the desktop version and I also have it installed on my smartphone. The main purpose of slack is for communication between students and the teacher.
H. Here is the pattern of the course:
- Each week you will be given a list of things to read and it’s list of things to do.
- Most of what you’ll do is some type of writing assignment in google docs. I will give you instructions and support for how to do this.
- When you have finished the weeks assignment, you will post a link to your work in slack.
Week 1 Jan 1
What do you want to focus on
Think about what you want to learn in Lifespan psychology.
It is an incredibly broad discipline. The big question you could use to orient your thinking is: In what ways do psychological factors impact a given person–perhaps a client, a patient, a friend–given that they are of a particular age, gender, and ethnicity?
Developmental and lifespan psychologists study how people change, psychologically, over time.
Some topics in the past that I have taught include the following and you may find them useful starting points to think about your own process for this quarter.
- Critical thinking
- Technical writing new paragraph finding published research
- Evaluating the quality of published articles, for example contrasting popular sources from academic or scholarly.
- General introduction to the content of psychology
- Theories within psychology, broadly, or within lifespan.
- Criticisms of psychology
- Limits of psychology
- Philosophy of science
- Working within groups
- Psychology as it relates to other disciplines
- Etiology of Abnormal psychology (causes) across the lifespan
Any and all of these above could qualify.
The goal here is for us to collectively think of it about what you’d like to learn in our time together.
This list is not exhaustive. There’s some things that you may want to focus on or add. Perhaps this might include cognitive dissonance about being a white person and being told that you’ve got white privilege. What are some ways one can think about opening up to that feedback?
Although I have some expert content knowledge in psychology, it’s not exhaustive. I don’t know everything, I have my own biases and that there may be things you’d like to learn about and practice and I would be open to hearing those things as well as how to incorporate it into the overall class.
Read the following
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 (in the syllabus)
Dictionary/Wikipedia definitions on:
*Anthropomorphize
*Ethnocentrism
Okay, the following items ( 7, 8, 9) deserve a little bit of explanation on my side, and patience on yours. You may be a very practical sort of person who very much does not like philosophy. Still, without it, we would not have science. It’s True! Do you know what Ph.D stands for? Check it out.
Anyway. While watching these videos, and reading the sources, just down some notes, including reactions, emotions and thoughts, try to track where your mind wanders (if it wanders), also notice when you get distracted, what part of the reading or video were you just watching? And don’t be afraid to keep asking ‘so what?’
That’s the kind of question you can put in your one-document-to-rule, or even ask questions on the muddy point channel
Also, I hope to make these videos a lot better in terms of production. I think I made them at the beginning of the pandemic and well, bleh.
- watch intro lecture on epistemology
Skim from page 2, sub heading “The Theory of Knowledge”** of the article: An introduction to Stephen C. Pepper’s philosophical system via World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence**, Berry (1984) shortcut link
Watch two vids on Ontology, essentially a review of the World hypotheses reading above:
- Read about “stereotype threat”. Not stereotypes. There is a difference. You’ll need to find a source or two on your own.
Do the following
Introduce yourself the Slack #introductions channel
Write something about what interests you about Lifespan psychology in your one google doc. Be sure to give it a title. You can also insert a page break between your writings.
On the same google document, make a new page, title it, and write some thoughts down to the following prompts. When you are done, post to the #week_1 slack channel by including a link to your document from step 2 above.
What is your process for thinking clearly?
How do you know something is true?
Read some of your classmates’ posts and comment on some.
The idea is to be doing weekly writing about the things we read and the prompts that I give you and then you’re going to share that information in slack.
Week 2 Jan 8
Orientation
There are several things to think about this week. And I’m probably giving you too much to do so I want you to be thoughtful about your limits and to focus on the things that interest you.
One broad way to look at lifespan psychology is to see how textbooks break the units up: Developmental psychology textbooks typically break every unit into three sections and sometimes that shows up in each chapter. Basically biological section cognitive section and a social / emotional section.
I like to call this the Humpty Dumpty approach to studying people. We break complex individuals into sections.
| Biological | Cognitive | Social |
|---|---|---|
| What biological changes are there? | What cognitive changes? | what social/emotional? |
| E.g.,: number of neurons | short term memory capacity | ability to code shift |
This pattern is repeated throughout the text. And it’s not a bad framework.
Because this is a psychology class I prefer to spend time thinking about psychology and not biology. There are cases where we’ve got pretty clear evidence that biological insults can lead to psychological impact. And in those situations I reluctantly like to learn a little bit about them. Reluctantly because I find that biological insults are pretty rare and knowing about them and more generally how the brain works doesn’t often lead to knowing how to handle a particular psychological situation. Just because my kid has an immature brain and can’t tolerate frustration does nothing for me when I am trying to actually help him.
I actually think that a lot of the biological influences on human behavior, though important, are really secondary to how complex humans are when it comes to their language and cognitive abilities. But that’s my perspective.
This week we sprint through a few chapters and think about prenatal, infants, and toddlers.
Supporting materials
If I were to be doing this in a traditional class I’d be quizzing you on this stuff, but for our purposes, it may be sufficient for you to read these or at least skim them and to reflect on whether or not any of them grab your attention. If they do grab your attention, that’s an indicator that you may want to explore that content more which means you should let me know that so I can help guide your exploration.
Chapter 2 and 3 Learning Objectives
Some learning objectives for the textbook (not necessarily the course) can be found here Lally and Valentine-French Lifespan textbook learning objectives
Read/watch some stuff
Skim the Textbook, chapter 2: Heredity and prenatal development
Read/skim Schwartz (2008). Take notes on more then just the content. Note your emotional reactions and where your mind goes. Added 1/9/23: Here is the direct link to the article (so you don’t have to jump to the bottom of this document to get it): Importance of Stupidity, Schwartz 2008
A few things:
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note that the first link for the Schwartz article doesn’t take you to the article; it takes you to the references in the schedule. There, you will sometimes find the link to the actual article; other times you may have to use our library’s database. I’ve added a direct link above.
-
If you’ve taken one of my classes in the recent few years you have read The Schwartz article and so I’m sorry that you get to read it again. However, there’s a good reason to review it, and another reason for me assigning it is that not everybody who is in this life span class has had my other classes.
48 minutes Watch dev video from Bilkent University (Turkey) Dr. Hande Ilgaz, Ph.D. Bilkent Üniversitesi (2017a)
as an aside, there are several things in the video that are incorrect. For instance, I don’t believe Darwin said that genes are passed down from one to their offspring. He hypothesized something must be, but he did not know the mechanism. That knowledge came later. He also didn’t advocate for ‘survival of the fittest,’ a concept that is actually contradictory to his theory. At best it could be described as ‘survival of the fittest group’ because there are some genetic traits that are quite harmful to individuals but helpful to the group (sickle cell anemia being the obvious one).
When the video gets to the section on theories, you may want to pause, revisit the ontology videos from week 1, and then listen for content that overlaps.
There is a short segment in the video discussing the history of Thalidomide. It’s brutal. Speaking of theories, the professor does a good job introducing them in the next video:
Developmental Psych Lecture 2 from Bilkent University (Turkey) Dr. Hande Ilgaz, Ph.D.Bilkent Üniversitesi (2017b)
Read William perry developmental stages as summarized by William Rappaport Rappaport (2018)
Do some stuff
So, that’s a lot of reading/watching.
A. Synthesize the following readings: Rappaport (2018), Schwartz (2008), then post your work to #week-2
Please do not summarise these articles. Synthesize. Use the lecture just below to help
B. In your one document to rule them all, write 3 questions you have about each of the first 3 chapters in your textbook. You don’t need to share the google doc again, but pick 1 question from the list you generated, and post it in the #muddy-points channel.
Week 3 Jan 15
Read some stuff
A. Read Chapter 4 from your Textbook
B. Watch this playlist of youtube videos from your instructor on Piaget’s theory of equilibrium
C. Watch this toddler react to his candy being eaten
Do some stuff
A. Do this case study about a 9 month old
B. Ponder a bit and write some thoughts (in your one doc) about the 3 yr old finding out that his candy was eaten. Maybe consider whether this kiddo reacted that ways due to nature or nurture (that, by the way, is a false choice). Muse a bit. post your thoughts to the #nature-nurture channel
C. What are the differences between the following (there can also be overlap):
sensation
perception
cognition
D. How can you tell whether a 1 year old is doing one or the other of these? This is a very challenging question, likely too challenging for our level. But how would you approach organizing some ideas, questions, readings? Don’t try to come to a concrete answer…you don’t have time.
E. When done, post to the slack channel #week-3
Week 4 Jan 22
orientation
Getting into week 4 and the rest of the quarter you’re going to find that the chapters we’re going to be a little bit more intense broad because once you get out of infancy you begin to the rapid development in all aspects of psychology and that means we need more words to describe what’s going on.
Some big topics in this chapter, somewhat in the chapter’s organization:
| themes | ||
|---|---|---|
| toilet training | parenting styles | siblings |
| memory | cognitive development | motor skills (fine and gross) |
| gender | autism | theory of mind |
| sexuality | play | child care |
Wow that seems like a big spread of content.
Because this is about the time where memory skills began to bloom, this chapter goes into more depth about the cognitive model of memory (which overlaps with some of the things I said in replies of the #muddy-point channel)
Chapter 4 Learning Objectives
Some learning objectives for the textbook (not necessarily the course) can be found here Lally and Valentine-French Lifespan textbook learning objectives
Read some stuff
First do this: write down your ideas about the effectiveness of spanking children. Just a few sentences will do. Maybe answer whether you think it works, and why or why not.
Read the following on spanking
Search for and find some data on the development of Object Permanence, world wide. This might be really hard to do. You might begin with google scholar.
Consider the breadth of this chapter. Pick 1 or 2 topics from the chapter and do some digging on some content that you think would be helpful to you either personally or professionally.
The next two items are links into canvas/panapto folders (not videos directly) because I’m using copyrighted videos (from previous textbooks) that I don’t want to put up on youtube.
If you can’t access them, please let me know
.
- Watch videos and Brian Commentary on Attachment and the strange
situation
- Read (re-read) text on attachment theory as a reminder
- Watch the commentary videos last
- link to Canvas/panopto folder containing videos
- Watch videos and Brian Commentary on Theory of Mind
- Read (re-read) text on Theory of mind as a reminder
- Watch the commentary videos last
- link to Canvas/panopto folder containing videos https://northseattle.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx?folderID=ca3d24ba-08e9-4213-bb57-ad13012095be
Do some stuff
A. in your one Google doc, make a heading/title and write a bit about what you found in terms of object permanence.
B. Revisit your thoughts from #1 above. Has your mind changed about spanking? What would you tell friends who spank their kids? For this last question, how would you deliver that information? For that matter, what would prevent you from talking to your friends about spanking?
C. From #6 above, write a few paragraphs of what you found, what you think.
D. Post your work to #week4 channel.
Week 5 Jan 29
Chapter 5 Learning Objectives
Some learning objectives for the textbook (not necessarily the course) can be found here Lally and Valentine-French Lifespan textbook learning objectives
Read/watch some stuff
Pick a chapter from one of the 4 volumes of the Handbook of Developmental Psychology https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Handbook+of+Child+Psychology+and+Developmental+Science%2C+Volume+2%2C+Cognitive+Processes%2C+7th+Edition-p-9781118136782
This resource has 4 volumes The link above goes to the 2nd volume of the set. At the bottom, you can see the table of contents for that 2nd volume.
However, just above the table of contents for volume 2, there are 3 URL links to volumes 1, 3, and 4, each with their own table of contents.
You’ll need to skim all of those table of contents to find something interesting.
Send your choice to your instructor via a DM in Slack
Read Nancy Chick, Metacognition https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/
Read Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/
Do stuff
B. Post your case to the Week 5 channel
C. Make a simple table to compare the first 3 phases of Piaget and Erickson.
- For instance you might have a column of for each theorist, a row for each stage of the first 3 stages, and then a column that you share some bullet like notes that do some comparison
- a comparison could be on how they are different, or where they support one another, or even some questions you may have about the theories and or phases/stages.
D. Find some online sources that describe the kind of chores a 6 year old child could perform. List 4 or 5 (Be sure to include references). Using one of the cognitive theories of development (e.g., Vygotsky, Piaget, Information Processing) justify why the 6 year old would be able to do one (just 1) of those chores. Post your work to the channel week 5
E. Do A self-reflection Survey https://forms.gle/xb8EiFuLuynJTMG19 * BUT DO NOT DO THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE POSTED YOUR WORK TO ALL OF THE WEEKLY CHANNELS.
- the text boxes you see in this ‘quiz’ will expand to accommodate what you need to write. In other words, don’t feel like you must only say like 3 words
F. Do a Survey on how important sex is to you. This might seem out of the blue, which it is, but there are several things I hope to accomplish here. Don’t put your score in the google doc.
it’s optional and anonymous. I do require that you put your age and sex-assigned-at-birth because that is how the original study was conducted. Don’t put your score in the google doc.
It gives us a chance to talk about
hypothetical constructs
difficulty in social science research
statistics
Have I said to not put your score in the google doc.
Once I get enough data in the survey, we can make use of it to think about various things.
Week 6 Feb 5
Orientation
I’ve been re-reading the lifespan textbook and I am wondering if there some ways to think about how text books organized information the net as possible that they are oversimplifications.
Here are some examples:
Claim:
In addition to dopamine, the adolescent brain is affected by oxytocin which facilitates bonding and makes social connections more rewarding.
No reference though. Possibly connects to Dobbs listed just above. My quick check on that resource goes to a national geographic article. That’s weird. And my knowledge of these sorts of claims comes from my experience that most of those research claims are hypothetical, or based on other mammals.
I worry that this bit about oxytocin is overgeneralized (cf replication crisis)
As you read the textbook, keep track of its claims that either don’t have references, or give you the vibes that there is an oversimplification.
Chapter 6 Learning Objectives
Some learning objectives for the textbook (not necessarily the course) can be found here Lally and Valentine-French Lifespan textbook learning objectives
Read some stuff
-
- While reading, take some notes regarding textbook claims that might sounds too simple. Keep track of their locations.
Read your chosen article from handbook volume. Okay..skim it, but find some sections that you find interesting.
Do some stuff
A. Write a summary..yes, a summary of what you read from your chosen chapter/section from the Developmental Handbook (Lerner, Overton, and Molenaar 2015) that you asked for in week 5. The goal is to write for your understanding, which means you may want to write a bit about questions you have, connections to your work/childhood/relevant stuff to you.
B. I want you to have questions about this article you read. So, please list at least 3.
C. How, go to chat gpt: https://chat.openai.com/
You will need to register an account with them.
Think of gpt as a person to converse with. Be skeptical of it, so if it says something as if it were all knowing, don’t believe it. I am still working on the right metaphor here. Like, what if you had access to a professor in a discipline and could ask them anything? And that you could treat them as someone who actually doesn’t know more than you, is biased, narrow minded, that you are essentially above them in status and so if they say something, you don’t reflexively think they are right and are also not afraid of calling out their B.S.
Give chat gpt an introduction to your question. You are framing the conversation here.
ask your question
when it answers, use the critical thinking standards to think about its answer. Is there an area that is weak? Ask GPT to explain, to reconcile itself, to consider things it left out.
Highlight and copy the chat gpt thread and paste it into your google doc. You might need to edit the formatting a bit.
D. Share your notes/questions in from #1 above regarding textbook claims that are either missing references, or that you feel skeptical in its presentation. If you have done some extra research on these topics, include that as well; I think future weeks we may come back to this.
E. You might want to use chat gpt to justify/critically analyze the textbook.
F. Share your work in the #week 6 channel
Week 7 Adolescence redux Feb 12
Last week was a mix of self-reflection assignments and article summary. But we didn’t get into much of the adolescent part of development, and really, it’s an important period of time for humans.
Consider some of these concepts:
Risks
Fables
Formal Reasoning
Identity Formation
These are some big ideas and issues.
Read some stuff
Without putting too much research into it, what are some examples of risky behavior that come to mind? What makes them risky? Consider the ideas of control, power, parental fears, etc. Write down your ideas in your one google doc.
Read/skim Chapter 21 from Volume 3, The development of sexuality Lerner, Overton, and Molenaar (2015)
Do some stuff
A. Case 3
B. Write a bit about risks now that you’ve done some reading about it. Some questions to consider:
- what makes something risky? Who owns the term?
- what are areas of disagreement between parents and adolescents about risky behavior, and what can be done to bring them together..to see eye to eye so to speak?
- Put your thoughts, questions, answers into your google document
C. Ask Chat gpt what it thinks are cliche’s about adolescence. Ask it about cultural differences. Ask it meta questions. In other words, don’t think of chat gpt as a source of content or correct, objective, knowledge. Think of it instead as someone who does not think critically but has access to a lot of information and can emotionally handle tough questions (because, of course, it’s not human.)
D. Post your work to the week 7 slack channel
Week 8 Emerging adulthood Feb 19
The rest of the quarter is really about the process of getting older and becoming more mature as an adult. But these are terms that are massively influenced by culture and zeitgeist. Nonetheless, all cultures recognize that there is some process where a child turns into an adult and historically (like before 100 years ago) adolescence was that time. But, things have changed and some even argue that adolescence has been drawn out to the mid 20’s.
But now that you’re out of adolescence, what now?
Chapter 7 Learning Objectives
Some learning objectives for the textbook (not necessarily the course) can be found here Lally and Valentine-French Lifespan textbook learning objectives
Read/watch some stuff
Watch a 5 min youtube video by Barton Paulson on Emergent adulthood
Watch a longer video by Paulson on Early adulthood
- I found his comments on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation a bit light. I wonder about the boredom he mentions later on and the relationship between extrinsic motivation and boredom.
Do stuff
Complete a metacognitive assignment.
- This may take some time.
- Post your work in the #week 8 channel.
What are some cliche’s of young adulthood? How accurate are they? For instance, is “birds of a feather flock together” or “opposites attract?” more accurate? I’ve got old cliche’s…but what is the new wisdom?
To what degree does this apparent contradiction “career focus vs changing the world” represent some aspect of William Perry’s development of thought?
With an assumption that many of my students are in this domain of emerging adulthood, what aspects do you think are missing from the text?
Post your musings to #week 8
Week 9 Middle adulthood Feb 26
Now we see that people are faced with life challenges that comes with middle age. Physical declines, life satisfaction, family and work responsibilities, all with existential issues in the backdrop
Read some stuff
watch about a 12 min video by Paulson on middle adulthood
Do some stuff
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- If you have taken my intro class recently, you’ve probably taken this test and now would be an interesting time to retake it and see whether your scores have changed. This would be a simple reliability test of the big 5, for you.
- There are 2 versions to choose from, a short and long.
- You may want to save your output for posterity. The output should
include your score on the 5 dimensions (OCEAN) plus 6 sub-tests for a
total of 30 results.
Don’t publish this in your one-doc to rule…You can if you want but it is somewhat private information.
Case Study 4. This will be sent out in slack via direct message. When you are ready, send me a direct message. When you have finished the case, share this work in the #Week-9
Using the critical thinking standards try to find and evaluate some sources on the Intelligence quotient (IQ) and other measures of intellectual abilities. Write your ideas into your one google doc, and then share them in your google document. Debate is welcome on this one.
Week 10 Late Adulthood March 4
Late adulthood has physical and mental decline, potential for depression and suicide, but also the depth of what is meaningful.
Read some stuff
Watch Grief walker. The link takes you to a google doc of instructions, along with links to the video. This is a kind of case study, but more suggestive. It’s not a perfect film, certainly. And the protagonist is not a perfect person. I say more in the prompt.
Watch about a 16 min video by Paulson on late adulthood
Do some stuff
- Share your Grief walker assignment in the #week 10 channel
Week 11 Death and Dying Mar 11
Read some stuff
Do some stuff
Do some research on 4 different cultures and their practices around death. Try to write up about 1 or 2 paragraphs on each.
Post your work on the case study and the cultural practices into #week 11
Deadline for the quarter is Sunday March 17th, late evening.
Appendix
Link to getting started help documents
A lot of non-syllabus and/or technical instructions can be found in the getting_started document
Using the library
Note: Don’t pay for articles
One important word of advice is to never pay for a scholarly article. If you go online and use Google, or even Google Scholar to find online sources, you may be directed to the publication that will charge you a large amount of money to access just one article. So don’t do that.
Generally there are ways to get articles through our library, so don’t pay for articles.
To get started with our readings, you’ll need to use our Library (online, of course) to obtain many of the articles.
Finding journal articles is a skill that gets better with practice. This happens to be why Librarians are so helpful. They’ve actually been trained so if you can’t find an article, it’s okay to ask librarians for help.
In fact, here is how you can get help from North Seattle’s library staff.
Relationship of an article to its Journal
Using hierarchies helps us organize information. Journal articles, or for that matter the file directories on your computer, work somewhat like an address for a person’s home. There are several different parts that give us information to track down and locate whatever it is we’re looking for, be it a computer file, or Journal article. Basically, a journal article has the following components, some of which may be familiar to you :
Database (of periodicals)
Periodical (eg., magazine, newspaper, scholarly journal)
Year (of publication)
Volume Number
Volumne Issue number
Page Number (optional, often unnecessary)
Article Title
AuthorSo, to find an article, you’ll need to know the parts above. When you are given a list of references, or citations, nearly all of the information needed above is given to you. What is not given, or at least is done implicitly with web searches, is access to the top part, the database.
Here is a typical citation:
Author(s). (year of pub). “Article Title.” Periodical title. Volume Number (issue number).
The information in a citation isn’t presented in the same hierarchy as above, but all of the necessary parts are there.
Here is an example citation (reference) for something we may read. Can you identify the periodical?
Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, Mitchell Greene. 2007. “Defining Psychotherapy: The Last 25 Years Have Taught Us That It’s Neither Art nor Science.” Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2).
Most of the items in the list above are self-explanatory. I want to focus a bit about periodicals.
Note on formatting citations: underlining publication titles
In print, publication titles are italicized. I have a very hard time noticing that subtle font.
When you submit a written manuscript for printing, publication titles are underlined because traditionally manuscripts were typed with typewriters, and to be able to type italicized words required an entire additional alphabet represented in the hammers. So, underlining was how you could emphasize a word, and the printer–a physical person–could notice the author’s formatting intent and correctly publish the final product in italics.
It’s a bit different now with our computers, obviously. Still, I have a hard time seeing italicized words and will occasionally use underline.
So, sometimes I’ll underline pub titles, sometimes I’ll italicize. I have no rule on this. I am chaos manifested. Beware.
Periodicals
These are just the names of the major publication. The New York Times, is colloquially known as a newspaper but technically it is a periodical. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology is also a periodical.
When we search for articles, we have to first know which journal, or periodical, owns that article. So it is a little counter intuitive but once we have identified an article we would like to read, we have to first find out whether or not our College has access to that periodical.
To do that, we have to use our colleges periodical locator.
Finding a journal using Periodical locator
Periodical locator
Notice the first link within North’s Article page. It should say “Periodical Locator”
There are many databases, inside of these databases are pages of journals, and inside those journals are articles.
We need to use the periodical locator to determine which database houses which periodical. With that, we can then open up that periodical and get the article
Note on ‘free’ articles and tuition/fees
Part of the fees that you pay as a student are used to pay subscriptions for these periodical databases. We have a small, but pretty good selection. Major universities have much larger collections due to their size and tuition/fee structure.
So in a way, you are not actually getting this for free because you are paying for library access. That’s the benefit of taking classes from a college. If you were not an active student, you would not be able to see many of these articles.
So, download them all!
Here’s the main point:
I’ve given you a list of Articles to read. To read them, you must first find them; some will be out in the internet, some will be in our schools’ databases. So, use the information I’ve given you to find out which location (database, Wikipedia, Google, Google scholar) you’ll need to search to obtain the full article. You will start by using the periodicals locator tool.
Let’s use that Efran, Lukens, and Greene (2007///Mar/Apr) article.
Go to North’s Article page and click on the periodical locator.
Type in the periodical for Efran’s piece.
You will see a link with the periodical’s name. Go ahead and click on this but beware of the next instruction:
- Once you have clicked on that link you may want to start searching within that publication. But do not do that. Instead, notice a little bit further down the search box you should see something that says “View online” and beneath that you should see something that says “proquest research library”. It’s this piece we need.
That Proquest research library is the database that you’ve all paid fees to access. So you need to remember that database name.
While remembering that database name, you need to go back to North’s Article page.
Notice what is presented here. You can see Periodical locator, but notice “A to Z” list of databases. (You might also notice just below two links; one to academic search and the other to Proquest).
Click on “A to Z”
You might notice that there are 67 databases that North Seattle has premium access to. In our case we’re going to be looking for the proquest direct database. And we can either click on the letter “P” or we can just type in proquest direct.
Note on Popular sources
You may also notice the little tag “popular” next to proquest link. That’s an indicator that the articles are not peer reviewed and so aren’t exactly cutting edge science. Even though this particular journal we are looking for, Psychotherapy Networker, is flagged as a popular type, it is a place for therapists to share their thoughts on the profession so there is a lot of value in it.
For help in distinguishing the different types of sources, the library has some guides:
Opening Proquest from your home, or remotely, you will need to validate your credentials. In other words, you need to prove that your are in fact students of North Seattle before you can continue, which is why you’ve been prompted to give your last name and student ID number. Once you do that you’ll then be able to see inside of the proquest database. Then you can now search for the article.
You should see you simple search box, where you can enter in important bits of information. I often start with the author’s last name, in this case, Efran,and then some unique identifying feature of the article. A few key words of the article title, or perhaps the full article title will be useful.
But notice that next to the text boxes there are drop down menus. You need to use those, otherwise the search engine will just search for your terms anywhere in the document and will provide too many ‘hits’. Instead, you should indicate ‘Efran’ as author, and “defining” in the document title. (of course, you could search any way you like).
When you search for those two terms in their respective fields, you will get two hits and one of them is the article we need. You should notice that it is a full text, not all databases provide full text documents. But in this case it’s a full text. You can either print it or read it online.
Yay. Now you can find the other articles.