EXPLAINING BEHAVIOR FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
Explore social psychology, personality psychology, and sociology in their approaches to explaining behavior. Consider the following scenario of Jason:
Jason is a college student accused of making and distributing methamphetamine. If charged and convicted, Jason’s dreams of medical school would be dashed. How would a social psychologist explain Jason’s behavior and his decision to take this risk?
RESOURCES
Be sure to review the Learning Resources before completing this activity.
Click the weekly resources link to access the resources.
WEEKLY RESOURCES
TO PREPARE
Review the Learning Resources for this week and consider how a social psychologist would approach and explain Jason’s behavior and decision.
Also, consider how a personality psychologist or a sociologist would explain Jason’s behavior and decision. Consider how each approach is different from a social psychologist’s approach.
BY DAY 3
Post an explanation of Jason’s behavior from the perspective of a social psychologist. Support your explanation with references to social psychology theory and research.
Read your colleagues’ postings.
BY DAY 5
Respond to one of your colleagues’ posts as either a personality psychologist or a sociologist. From this perspective, compare your colleague’s explanation to how you as the personality psychologist or sociologist would explain Jason’s behavior and decision to make and distribute methamphetamine.
analysing Standard 1, classrooms will consist of a diverse set of children from differing backgrounds, who may have different needs, from dyslexia or Autism spectrum disorders to physical difficulties. We must take these differences into account when managing classroom behaviour .A pupil’s needs may lead a teacher to believe they are being “difficult” or disruptive or not making an effort to understand, when this is not in fact the case (Goepel et al. 2014) Frustrated pupils who lack support are less likely to meet the high expectations of behaviour we have set. Therefore, we must remove barriers to learning. I observed several ways of doing this to provide an inclusive classroom, such as offering a variety of ways of recording their work. Not every child is happy with writing; for children with dyslexia, writing can be a frustrating task. The teacher offered the class options such as drawing, poster creation, making diagrams, or working in pairs where one child writes and the other dictates orally, to be delivered as a joint oral and written presentation. This is known as differentiation or personalisation of assessments. Other strategies to manage a diverse classroom are provided by Evans (2007):
- Making use of enlarged print, visual prompts, symbols, coloured paper or overlays
- Make full use of ICT and appropriate software to support learning
- Breaking work into small and manageable chunks
- Provide supporting resources such as spelling banks and number lines
- Allowing extra time for the completion of tasks.