What is hands-on coursework?
Each of the courses below have been designated by the faculty as involving out-of-the-classroom experiential learning, hands-on learning, or training that provides applied experience.
What classes include a hands-on component?
DEP 4930 – Death and Dying:
Death and Dying is offered as an advanced course in Developmental Psychology that focuses on the final stage of life. University of Florida students from a variety of majors are eligible to enroll. The course provides learning experiences that help students to prepare for dealing with and assisting others with psychosocial aspects of death and dying in their own lives. It is also a useful course for students preparing for careers in Medicine, Nursing and other Health Professions who will face death-related issues in their professional work-life. The course involves small-group learning about how death and dying are represented in the media, in popular culture and in scientific research and how it is experienced in our own lives. Students enjoy hands-on experience with life skills such as end-of-life care planning, decisions on burial and cremation options, obituary-writing and memorializing lost loved ones. Students meet with representatives from a variety of community organizations including Compassionate Friends, UF Health Palliative Care, Haven Hospice, Streetlight, and the Florida State Anatomical Board. These interactions provide real-world information, opportunities for professional guidance, and resources for becoming involved in volunteer activities. In some semesters, students are invited to be involved in events based on national initiatives such as a Before I Die Wall. There are no prerequisites.
DEP 4930 – Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience:
Students are required to attend lab tours of the EEG lab, learn about the technique, participate in an adult cogn neuro study, and write up a summary of their experience and how the research with adults might be modified to test something in developmental populations. Students prepare a research proposal and present it to the class in 10 minute presentations.
EAB 4714C – Laboratory in Applied Behavior Analysis:
University of Florida students who meet the pre-requisite requirements are eligible to enroll for this hands-on and experiential learning course. Although there is a weekly meeting on campus each Monday evening of the semester, twice weekly the UF students go to the Florida Autism Center where they work directly with children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders, under the supervision of professors, post-doctoral assistants, and doctoral students, who are Board Certified Behavior Analysts. Students learn to implement behavioral procedures to teach self-care, communication, and academic skills; they learn to collect and analyze data for behavioral research; they learn to teach skills to families, and they work side-by-side with professionals in the field. The pre-requisite is to have taken either EAB 3002 or EAB 3764, or both.
EXP 4174C – Laboratory in Sensory Processes:
The goal of the course is to gain hands-on experience in the techniques and procedures of perceptual psychophysics and psychology research. This high level, undergraduate class challenges students to think carefully and critically about every aspect of the research process in order to understand benefits and limitations of the scientific method in psychological research. After completing a progression of small assignments involving data manipulation, students conduct an instructor-supervised group project to replicate a previously published sensory processes experiment. In the Psychology computer laboratory, and on their personal computers, students work collaboratively with one or two of their classmates in order to construct a experiment on perception. Using their experiment, students collect behavioral data, and grapple with producing tables, visualizations, and inferential statistics in order to compare their data with the experimental results from the original research. In order to summarize their results and experiences, students do several presentations, lab write ups, and then a final paper.
PCO 4272 – Advanced Seminar in Psychology of Women:
Advanced Seminar in Psychology of Women is a fully online course available to University of Florida students who meet the pre-requisite requirement. Each module within the course takes students through a journey of beginning with traditional teaching/learning modalities (i.e., readings) and then translating this iteratively into more experiential learning, first through media illustrations (e.g., videos, podcasts) and then further into an experiential learning assignment and reflection/discussion to synthesize. Specifically, each module within the course comprises textbook and scholarly readings, including original research articles from top psychology journals. These traditional sources are brought to life or made more “experiential” with online content, including videos and podcasts that extend key concepts with real life illustrations. Finally, each module includes a “Get Involved Assignment” created by the instructor that involves applying or investigating key concepts from the module in the real world. Students then engage in discussion about each experiential learning assignments in the module’s weekly discussion board, synthesizing and connecting what they learned from the assignment with the scholarly readings and other module content. Prereq: PSY 2012
PCO 4930 – Behavioral Addictions:
Students develop a Personal Project in which they identify a high frequency behavioral addiction (e.g., Checking Facebook, doing Instagram, Netflix Bingeing). Students then engage in regular assessment and systematic journaling as they try to relinquish (Abstinence) or reduce (Harm Reduction) that behavior, comparing it with models of addiction and recovery discussed in class.
PSB 4343C – Laboratory in Cognitive Neuroscience
PSY 4930 – TED Talks
Students prepare and give several presentation during the class. The course ends with each one giving a 10 minute TED-like talk that is recorded and they can use it for a portfolio, etc. In the end this is an in-class experience, but most of the prep and practice is done with groups outside of class.
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Individual Work Courses
PSY 4911 – Undergraduate Research Experience
PSY4940 – Introduction to Teaching in Psychology
PSY 4949 – Community Work in Psychology
PSY 4970 – Senior Thesis
Follow this link to learn more about the individual work courses.