Reaction Journal Option
The traditional approach to education, in many instances, is to base all grades strictly on the result of conventional paper-and-pencil tests. This works great for students who happen to test well. But what if you're not one of those? What if you are convinced that you understand the material more thoroughly than your exam scores indicate?
Each semester, I try to provide some means by which students can demonstrate comprehension other than by means of a conventional test. This semester, I'm making available the following option to students. This is an option: you can ignore this entirely if you want to; it's not a course requirement. But if you complete this assignment and get a higher grade on it than on one or more of the unit exams, I'll substitute your grade on the assignment for your lowest exam grade. (In other words, you can't lose.)
What is the assignment all about?
The purpose of the assignment is to encourage you to think about the lecture material, particularly about how theories, concepts, and ideas in psychology might be applied to real life (including your life personally).
To have your Reaction Journal considered for grading, you must write a minimum of one page (double spaced, 1" margins, 12 point font... please, no handwritten submissions, since all of my students seem to have completely illegible handwriting) regarding each of the 12 lecture units of this class. (Yep, in case you can't count, that adds up to a 12 page minimum. There is no maximum; hand in a 1200 page document if you want to. But I'll be grading on quality, not quantity.)
For each lecture unit, react to what you've learned. What do you agree (or disagree) with, and why? What practical implications of the course information do you see? How might a person's knowledge of information from that unit impact their life or make them more effective in everyday life?
There's no single acceptable way to react to something: your reactions are just that, your own. I may provide a model to follow later on in the semester, but don't wait for it. If I were you, I'd be working on this throughout the entire semester... it's a lot easier to react to each lecture unit as soon as you've encountered it than it is to try to feverishly write about all 12 units at the last minute. (But that's up to you... if your hobby is procrastination, by all means don't put that off.)