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Academic Goals
Departmental Learning Goals for PSYCH 470: Psychology of Music
Ellen Covey
- Students will broaden, deepen and reinforce their basic working knowledge about behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and other disciplines acquired in lower level Psychology classes, and discover how each of these disciplines can be related to music.
- Students will develop a basic working knowledge of the physics of musical sound, psychoacoustics, and neural mechanisms for processing, learning, and producing patterns of sound. They will also learn basic concepts of music theory if they do not have this knowledge already.
- Students will deepen and refine the knowledge about hypothesis testing and experimental design acquired in Psych 209 and Psych 330/331, and learn how these methods can be applied to study multiple aspects of the psychology of music.
- Students will develop an understanding of music from an evolutionary point of view. They will learn to appreciate the ways in which physics and biology shape the fundamental characteristics of music, the ways in which music and emotion are related, and the interactive relationship between music and human society and culture. This will include understanding how physical and biological factors influence characteristics of music and/or music perception that are shared across, or may differ across, cultural, ethnic, gender, geographic, or other boundaries.
- Students will develop an understanding of the study of the psychology of music within the historical context of the field, and potential future directions of the field. This includes understanding the tentative nature of knowledge, tolerating ambiguity in what can be a highly subjective field, and using skeptical inquiry to discover discrepancies and/or gaps in current knowledge and theory.
- Students will develop the ability to identify an appropriate and tractable topic of study within a general scientific or social science field.
- Students will develop and refine their ability to perform a directed scientific literature search, create an appropriate bibliography, and cite literature appropriately in support of written statements.
- Students will build upon the knowledge of experimental design and hypothesis testing acquired in Psych 209 and Psych 330/331 to develop their ability to identify appropriate topics for experimental testing, formulate testable hypotheses, and design experiments that will provide definitive tests of these hypotheses.
- Students will develop and refine their ability to critically read and understand scientific literature, understand and use scientific and technical vocabulary, and synthesize information from multiple sources. This will include refining their ability to evaluate research evidence to assess the strength of support for authors’ statements, conclusions, and theories.
- Students will refine their scientific writing skills, focusing on choice of content, organization, logic, and clarity of expression.
- Students will refine their oral presentation skills, focusing on choice of content, organization, design and use of visual aids, pacing, and speaking style.
- Students will be encouraged to reflect on the information they learn about the psychology and social science of music and apply it to their own lives and the world around them.
