The following was written for Teaching High School Psychology at the request of Chuck Schalhorn. I am reproducing the post here only to maintain a personal copy.

I feel a little disengenuous writing about “writing in Psychology” because I don’t think I do a particularly good job at it. That is not to say my students are not good writers; in fact, I think they’re excellent¹ — I just can’t claim any of the credit! Our English department and the others in the Social Science department teach my students how to write well. I don’t know how, I’m just grateful that they do.

If you’re still reading this, Chuck asked me to share one particular writing assignment that we do in the Development Unit; we call it The Toy Project. Based on those two pieces of information – Development unit and “Toy project” – you already guessed that it’s based on Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development. As you suspect, students go to a toy store near them, choose a toy that corresponds to a stage of cognitive development, and they write about it².

If you’re still reading this, there are a few additional details that we work into the project³. Here is how the project is currently assigned. Note:

• Students work in groups of their own choosing, from across any section/ any instructor
• Students can ‘Google Doc’ their paper (thereby collaboratively writing it), but do not have to
• Students have to take pictures of themselves in the toy store for full credit⁴
• The finished product is uploaded to Canvas, in our case, where I grade it — and Canvas automatically forwards the paper to turnitin.com for “checking"…
• There are three distinct parts to the paper. Part 1 connects one toy with each of Piaget’s Stages; part 2 harkens back to the Research Methods unit; and Part 3 connects to our discussion of gender schema theory vis-a-vis elements in the design of toys and toy stores.

One of the things that I like so much about this paper is that it can be done with any amount of technology. I had students take physical photos back in the aughts; they paperclipped Polaroids or 3x5 photos to their printed paper. That evolved into inserting digital images into their word processed paper before printing it. For a few years, every student had their own blog for Psychology (using Blogger), and they posted their assignment and embedded their images there. For a few years, I had them share a Google Doc with me, like this one. And now they use whatever they want to word process the paper, export it to a PDF, and upload it to our LMS.

As an aside, we do two other "projects” like this. One is the Scary Movie Project, which coincides with Sensation & Perception, and the other is a Social Norms Project. When I share any of these three, I’m invariably asked, “What’s your rubric for assessment?” This may stray from what Chuck was looking for… but I don’t have a rubric for these. First, the assignments are constructed in such a way that they guide students through each step or part of the assignment. Second, as I read the resulting paper, I am correcting for conceptual understanding, correct usage of Psychology vocabulary, and correct application of the concepts. I am not grading for grammar, syntax, spelling, or anything else like that. Again, this goes back to the I-don’t-teach-students–how-to-write… I’m lucky that they come prepared for this work. Third, I grade these papers on a very simple scale: A, B, C, D, or F. For these three papers, it is – frankly – rare for students to not receive full credit. Now, part of that is because these are sort of enrichment activities. They’re kinda just for fun. I certainly don’t tell them that! But it’s part of my hidden curriculum; I want them to have enjoyable experiences while studying Psychology.

On a final note, for each chapter besides the three mentioned above students complete a traditional free-response question, modelled on the FRQs from the AP Psychology exam, and those are graded according to strict College Board-esque rubrics.

I hope that gives some insight into one way of doing “writing in Psychology.” If you have any questions at all, give me a tweet!