Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Davidson College/Issues in Psychology section C (2013 Q1)/Course description

This is the final unit of a 400-level senior capstone seminar in psychology. The final major writing assignment (19% of the final grade) is a Wikipedia entry about a topic in psychology. This assignment follows the call made by a past president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), one of our field's major professional societies. Click here to see that editorial.

The final unit in this course is about "giving psychology away". Our class time is devoted to discussions about sharing psychology with the general public, including the need to be clear (e.g., we discussed this TED talk and the formulas at the end of it). Students are also discussing articles with different perspectives on the value of giving psychology way, varying degrees of success in giving it away, difficulties that arise due to miscommunication about psychology to the public, among others.

As in the prior 10 times I have taught the course, students practice "giving psychology away" as their final writing assignment. We are trying (for the first time) to use Wikipedia as the outlet for this work. Based on feedback from Wikipedians, I have asked students to use only secondary sources as they add five citations to a Wikipedia article. Given this is a small assignment, I have encouraged them to work on an existing article rather than creating a new one. Many students have selected articles that have a note at the top indicating that the article needs work or are adding a section missing from an otherwise clear page (and I am communicating with the others to move them in that direction). Students have been instructed to prioritize peer-review articles that are reviews in the area they are writing, then scholarly books and/or book chapters, and then upper-level text books in the field. Students have also been encouraged to use their skills as writers to clarify the Wikipedia articles that they have chosen.

Students and their professor have completed Wikipedia's on-line training course, but most of us are admittedly new to Wikipedia. This project will unfold over several weeks so please do not judge us too harshly as we get started. Thank you in advance to the current Wikipedians who will be reaching out to us!