Dr. Connie K. Varnhagen

Basic Psychological Processes

This is the first half of the Department's introductory psychology course sequence. Topics covered include psychological research methods, the adaptiveness of behaviour, the functioning of the brain and nervous system, sensation and perception, learning, memory, emotion and motivation. Important goals of the course are to inspire an interest in psychology and to help students acquire critical thinking skills so that they can clearly and objectively describe and explain psychological phenomena. I teach this course as the technologically enhanced intro.psych section. Check out this year's great course by going to WebCT and logging on with user name and password, "psychguest".

Advanced Topics in Developmental Psychology: Children and the Web

This courses is designed to help students apply what they have learned about cognitive and social development to understanding how children get along in the virtual world of the Web. This course challenges all of us to extend what we know about developmental psychology to infer how children interact with and learn from the Web. How do children who supposedly lack reversible thought understand the concept of the “Back” button? How do children recognize hate on the Web? How do they distinguish advertisement from entertainment? At the same time and we examine the development of children's critical appraisal of the Web, students have to develop their own critical appraisal skills. We exercise these skills in a laboratory component of the course – surfing and appraising different types of Web resources (we are the only class on campus with university permission to surf for porn!). The final project is to develop a resource to help children of different age groups develop critical appraisal skills. Students have developed very creative resources, ranging from games to magazines to an automated online tool for critically appraisal that we are using in ongoing research. Check out last year's great course by going to WebCT and logging on with user name and password, "psychguest".

Honors Seminar

The goal of this course is to learn professional skills important for Psychology and other sciences. Students concentrate on skills related to critical appraisal of psychological research, knowledge translation, visual communication, and project management. They learn these skills through a series of small assignments and activities and apply these skills in designing, developing, and evaluating a set of resources that translate scientific findings to a lay audience. Check out the syllabus for this year.