Teaching
- We publish our teaching materials as open educational resources on the following website:
https://www.oer.psy.lmu.de/ - At the moment, all our teaching is in German and our students have a legal right to be taught in German (at least in the Bachelor program).
Attitude in Teaching
In our teaching, we communicate our content as precisely as necessary (and it must be precise to enable genuine methodological understanding) and as clearly as possible (we use visualisations, animations and examples wherever possible to explain the theory as clearly as possible). We are aware that our students come to the psychology programme with different goals, backgrounds and interests. Methods are not usually the first priority. We see methods and statistics as an auxiliary science for psychology and not as an end in itself. The course content taught should enable students to independently assess the methodological aspects of the scientific credibility of research results. In our opinion a real understanding of the specialist literature, the assessment of the reliability of scientific research findings (also due to the implications for practice) as well as a responsible application of the methods, require a sound statistical knowledge, going beyond the ‘I somewhat understand how this works’ level, which is also widespread in the psychological world. This is why we accept that our teaching content is perceived as demanding. We treat students with respect and take questions and feedback very seriously. We try to encourage students who stand out for their knowledge and motivation at an early stage and inspire them to join the department.
Teaching Content
The course contents build on each other across the different semesters. That is why it is also important that we think about this content together and discuss it across lectures. As lecturers, each of us has a slightly different didactic style and methodological interests - which is perfectly fine. However, we endeavour to ensure that the lectures and content are designed in such a way that each of us can identify with the content and the attitude reflected in it. We are convinced that this is one of the most important factors of good teaching. In addition, this coordination makes it easier for us to cover for each other (e.g. during parental leave) and allows us to expand our teaching repertoire by giving different lectures (which can be important for our qualifications).
We publish our teaching materials as open educational resources on our OER website. In addition, we use Moodle (https://moodle.lmu.de/) as an accompanying teaching and learning platform for the courses.
We make sure that we use inclusive examples in our teaching materials and our teaching. We try to avoid examples that use clichés (e.g. crude examples of gender).
Teaching Quality
We value regular voluntary evaluations of our courses. We report the results back to the students in a summarised form for reasons of transparency, to invite them to a dialogue, to promote a good feedback culture, and to highlight the conclusions that can be drawn for the future design of the course. With this, we show that students’ feedback is taken seriously and has an impact. For those of us who plan to qualify for positions in academia, these evaluations can be a useful indication of one’s teaching experience. Of course, exceptionally good evaluations can be beneficial in future application procedures.
Another benefit of these evaluations is that it teaches us how to process anonymous - and sometimes harsh and reprimanding - feedback appropriately. It can be a challenge not to let overly critical and loud voices get you down, while ignoring the positive and supportive voices. The goal of pleasing everyone is impossible due to the diverse interests and backgrounds of our students. But we always endeavour to make the best courses for most of them.
Exam grading
Written exams are generally corrected twice (except for MC questions that have already been automatically graded) in order to avoid errors when awarding grades. In the grading period of the semester, we help each other out where possible because these are phases of very concentrated work. And it’s simply more fun to correct together! If the first and second correctors disagree, we bring in a third colleague. The responsible person for the lecture has the last word in the grading of the exam. Errors should not occur during grading - however, they cannot be ruled out 100%. If errors become known after grading that have impacted a student’s grade, the errors will be corrected and the actual examination result will be subsequently changed in consultation with the Examinations Office (Prüfungsamt).
Grading of Term Papers (Hausarbeiten)
We grade term papers in an anonymised version (only the matriculation number is written on the cover sheet).