PSYH1028 Advanced Developmental Psychology  Level 7 Assessment Guidance

Coursework Assessment Guidance 

1. Learning outcomes of the assessment 

This piece of coursework is designed to assess your ability to integrate material relating to concepts in two different topic areas within developmental psychology and design an alternative study that addresses some of the shortcomings that you have identified in the literature.  

You will need to:  

1). Critically evaluate research in two areas of developmental psychology 
2). Identify theoretically important overlaps between these two areas 
3). Be able to provide a brief research proposal for a new study 

2. Rationale for assessment 

Students will develop the ability to review and critically analyse research literature. This is a critical skill for evidence-based practice in psychology, and for writing funding applications and research proposals. 

Such skills are increasingly important in the workplace, even outside of research settings. For example, more and more organisations that fund children’s services expect to see plans for the evaluation of services included in funding applications. Successful completion of this assessment should improve employability.  

3. Guidelines for the assessment 

Imagine you are a researcher and want to bid for funds to conduct some research. This might be within the setting of a university department, or you might be working for a charity, a local authority or some other organisation. How do you convince a funder that the research that you want to do is worthwhile?  

You do this by writing an application that reviews the area of research relevant to your idea and convinces the funder of the need for your new research study. Your task is to a conduct a brief literature review on two topics in developmental psychology, critique this research and offer a new research proposal. You will need to explore the relationship between these two topics by locating and evaluating evidence relevant to the overlaps you have identified.  

Your two topics will need to correspond to two separate lectures covered in the course. Examples of concepts from different topic areas that might be integrated are:  

Conduct disorder in adolescence. 

The relationship between autism and executive functioning. 
The development of literacy in ADHD. 

However, there are many other combinations of topics you could choose. Please note that you are not required to discuss all the issues covered in the two lectures relevant to your two topics – this would be impossible in 2,500 words. You will need to narrow your focus to more specific issues within an individual topic. You should read extensively on the two topics you are reviewing, primarily recent scientific journal articles.   

You will then conclude with a brief research proposal describing your new study (more details below).    

Structuring the Report   

You are advised to structure your report in the following way:  

A very brief introduction that provides an outline of your portfolio. It is always useful to provide some of the aims of your assessment here, preferably in the order that you will address them. This allows the reader to know what is coming next which, in turn, helps them to absorb what you are going to say. 

A review of theories/concepts and research evidence relating to this, including an evaluation/critique, which should provide a justification for your research proposal.

Aim to incorporate your critical evaluation of the research all the way through this section. This generally reads better than a very descriptive section describing the relevant research followed by some paragraphs at the end highlighting strengths and weaknesses. You will want to highlight what the research literature does not tell us about the issue that you are interested in (i.e. what are the gaps in the research literature).

Also, remember that this is meant to be integrative. A review that describes one area of research, then describes another area of research without describing the relationship between those two areas will not do well. 

The primary aims of this are to: 

Emphasise the importance of the two topics that you have chosen 
Highlight the overlaps between the two topics and explain why that overlap matters and what it might tell us about child and adolescent development Provide a rationale and justification for your research proposal. 

A research proposal. Keep in mind that this should be brief: aim for 500-700 words. So, I’m not looking for an extremely detailed methodology. Instead, your proposal should give the reader some indication of how your proposed study will help to answer some of the issues that you have raised in your review. There are a number of different ways of structuring the review. For example, you might just describe the proposed study in a few paragraphs. However, you may find it easier to use a structured format. 

This could follow the format of a structured abstract of an article (see Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry as an example).   

For example:   

• Background: just a couple of lines summarising your review 
• Aims/hypotheses: what is your research question? What are you trying to find out? 
• Participants: who will you study, how will they be recruited? 
• Measures: how will you go about measuring the variables that you are interested in? 
• Procedure: what will happen in the study and in what order? 
• Implications: what will the results tell us about the issue that you are interested in? What are the potential implications for children, adolescents, families, children’s services, policy etc (if relevant). 

You can be as ambitious as you like. Remember that this research proposal should be very different from your own MSc research project (otherwise you will risk problems with Turnitin’s similarity checker). 

So, if you want to design a multi-million pound, international, genetically informed, multi-centre, five-arm, randomised controlled trial of different interventions for x, y, and z, then go for it. However, don’t expect to get higher marks because you propose a more complicated and difficult study.

Higher marks will go to studies that are best designed to test the research question. I.e. if a small, exploratory pilot study costing very little is the most appropriate research design, then you will get higher marks if you propose it. 

A brief conclusion – just provide a quick summary. V. Reference list. 

Formative Assessment  

You have the opportunity to write a one-page formative assessment in order to receive feedback on your plans for your portfolio. This should be in the form of an essay plan, not in the form of the first page of your summative assessment. The aim here is to give you guidance on the proposed content, structure and argument of your portfolio, NOT to advise you on your writing style. The formative assessment is due on Friday 22th March 2024 by 23.30pm (GMT).  

Recommended reading

You should read extensively on the two topics you are reviewing, primarily recent journal articles. See the reading lists provided by the relevant lecturers. You are meant to be reviewing and identifying a gap in the research in the overlap between two specific topics, so if you don’t read extensively, and read up to date research, you are unlikely to do well.