This site contains information for students who are working on their capstone project in psychology @CSUMB.
START HERE: It's summer 2020 and this summer is special and different. How so? Read on.
1. What will you work on for your capstone? You get to decide. This course is different from other courses you have taken in many ways. The biggest difference is that we will create it together. I do not plan out the curriculum ahead of time. The curriculum is what you want and what you need for this stage in your schooling. We will follow the course description and that states that each of you will produce a project or a portfolio that highlights your experiences in previous classes and demonstrates what you have learned in those classes. So you have some choices to make and we will spend Week 1 in discussion online about those choices. Thereafter I will guide you and support you to execute your choice.
2. Learning during this pandemic. You are all in different locations under different kinds of stressors due to the pandemic. I hope during the term that we can share with each other the challenges we face. I know this time is not typical in any way. I am prepared to make many adjustments all throughout this term so we can learn to the best of our ability. But our "best" is different at different times in our lives and in different circumstances. What you would have accomplished during a more typical summer term is likely not the same as what you will accomplish this term. That is ok. I will work with you to embrace the reality of the situation and see what we can do to adjust. Our mental and physical health is our top priority. I do believe you can produce a quality capstone while attending to your mental and physical health, but it takes flexibility and understanding from all of us.
3. Learning in an online course. You may or may not be enthused about taking an online course. That there is a pandemic going on may further complicate your approach. I understand this and will work with you to mitigate the challenges. Right off the bat there are two best practices that I'd like to employ for our class that come from experts in online learning:
distributed practice
social interaction
Hopefully you have learned about distributed practice in cognitive psychology. We know from research in cognitive psychology that people learn the most and are the most productive when they can work on something a little bit every day rather than cramming everything into one or two days with many days in between. Therefore, I'm going to set up our tasks such that you do a little each day. And we are doing in 8 weeks what students in the fall/spring terms do in 16 weeks, so each week is even a bit more intense during the summer. I suggest that you devote two hours per day, Monday through Friday to capstone. That will be 80 hours total which is just under what most students do in the regular term. Some of you might be able to do more and some of you might do a little less, but you should aim for two hours per day. And it doesn't have to be a two-hour block. You can split it up. We will work with this, adjust as needed, and refine as we go.
As for social interaction. Learning is social. And human beings learn best in connection with other human beings. Furthermore, collaborating with others makes for better capstone projects. In class on campus there are social interactions that organically happen. Online we have to work at it a bit more. I will set up assignments so that you're interacting with each other. In addition, I'm hoping that through our discussion this week people will choose to work with others on their project. As I said in my previous email to you all, during summer capstone I have had all students working together on the same project. If that happens here that's fine. If it doesn't that's fine too. It's most important that you work on a topic in which you have genuine interest, otherwise it will be a difficult summer. And it is summer after all, so let's have a little fun.