Social psychology in a secondary college and its part-evaluation

Abstract

For the first time in the ACT, Social Psychology was introduced as a discrete course of study at Hawker College in 1976. Its implementation represented some eight months of research. This field study reports part of the course and its evaluation, and it comes in two distinct segments: the detailed content of the first third of the course (i.e. the first two units of a six-unit course) and its part-evaluation. The term, 'part-evaluation' was chosen with care. It serves two meanings: firstly, it refers to an evaluation of part of the social psychology course, and secondly, it indicates that the evaluation was completed by a novice, who is not qualified to investigate and operationalise either a comprehensive, or a thorough and controlled, evaluation of the units. The field study is produced in six chapters. The first provides a backcloth, as it were, to the emergence of social psychology as a discipline of study at Hawker College. The second chapter continues the theme, and it presents social psychology in a historical perspective, and it outlines the mechanism which eventually effected the implementation of the course at Hawker College. The third chapter analyses social psychology as a body of knowledge in the light of recent curriculum philosophy. The detailed content of Units 1 and 2 form the fourth chapter. Chapter 5 is lengthy, and it addresses itself to the part-evaluation process, and in so doing, makes use of Robert Stake's 'countenance model, and in particular, to his three major components: antecedents, transactions, and actual outcomes. The first part of the chapter, however, introduces the concept of evaluation and the particular stance taken towards it by the author. The last two chapters, in turn, report the major findings of the partevaluation, and relate them to the literature. This field study serves the major purpose of providing the initial research for a full and comprehensive evaluation of the social psychology course which will be conducted in the third term of 1978. (See 6.3 and 6.4).

Date of Award	1977
Original language	English