Excelling Psychology

I, Jyotika Varmani, tutor students of Psychology at all levels. I reside in Mumbai and tutor students online. You can contact me personally on my e-mail id jyotikapsychology@gmail.com or call/message me on 9892507784 for enquiries. --- The myriads of questions that students pose to their tutors are more than satisfying for them, for they reflect students' curiosity and their desire for knowledge. Among these countless questions that are impossible to keep track of, are a few that the tutor cannot help but notice as being distinctive, for they come to her so often that they enter her personal collection of FAQs that she then anticipates and incorporates into her lessons. My own lessons have benefited from quite a few such questions themselves and in this series, I present a selection of those questions and answers that have made their way into my personal repository of tutoring. In this first post of the FAQ series, I address a query on psychological research, full of misconceptio...

Report writing is a necessary skill and one that easily contributes to the student's final marks if learnt correctly. I've already given an orientation to this subject here . It's time to get practical now. Keep in mind that I am discussing the report written after psychological tests and experiments, and not a dissertation or full-fledged paper. Let's look at how the report is written in the APA format, looking step-by-step at the different sections : Introduction What this section is not meant for: Giving lengthy explanations of theories Increasing the length of the report Covering up for lack of knowledge of how to write the other sections What this section is meant for: Explaining why the experiment/test was conducted A succinct review of theories relevant to the present experiment Making evidence-based predictions of expected results from the conduct How this section should be organized (in general): Introduction of the research problem in t...

Psychology is a science and not an art. It fascinates me when students debate over how they can make their report more 'attractive.'This is a very poor objective, for the essence of a good report is its communicative ability and not the creativity of the report writer.  Try an exercise of empathy here. Imagine you are a researcher who has decided to investigate the impact of regular smoking on female adolescents. Now, as a first step in your research, you will look at past studies done in this area, to find out how much is already known, and gauge what is still desired to be known. Suppose you find fifty relevant, published articles on this topic.Now imagine these were all written in different formats, and every writer had decided for him/herself how much to report and how much to omit. You find that some reports cover fifty pages of narratives including the writer's own opinions and struggles with the topic; while others complete the entire report in two paragraphs...

(The present syllabus of the TYBA level of Mumbai University can be found here. ) The TYBA  Psychology curriculum of the University of Mumbai is divided into two semesters: semester V and semester VI . This division is from the examination point-of-view , since the same subjects are covered in both semesters, only the  coverage is divided into equal halves so that students are not burdened with having to learn the entire syllabus at a go, unlike a few years ago. This is in contrast with the MA level semester division, where the subjects to be learnt change by the semester. The Subjects There are six subjects covered in the TYBA, which can be roughly divided from a student point-of-view into dry and interesting subjects. The dry subjects are Psychological Testing and Statistics and Cognitive Psychology. The interesting subjects are Abnormal Psychology, Industrial Psychology and Counseling . Practical Psychology stands somewhere in between - it is dry bec...

Year after year, there is an incredible fear of statistics from students across Universities. I would expect students to be excited for the subject, for it is such a relief from theory, and is very 'scoring.' On the contrary, students wish it were one subject they did not have to deal with. Why do students fear statistics? There are two answers to this. The first is that it's fear has been hyped beyond measure through the years, and students are not particularly known to pause and think about the rationality of what goes around. The second is that professors fail to teach statistics on two counts - they are unable to present solutions in a clear, step-by-step manner and they are unable to make students see the importance of statistics in the field of Psychology. I remember one of my professors coming into the class and laughing about the fact that she barely knew anything about statistics. She would then open a statistics book every lecture and dictate whatever was w...