Pre-arrival Preparation
MSc Psychology of Education (BPS and non-BPS)
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the School of Education and onto the MSc
Psychology of Education programme.
To help you prepare over the coming weeks and months, we have put together an outline of
some of the key resources you may wish to consult before starting on the programme. We
recognise that our students come from a wide range of backgrounds and so the following details
may be more useful to some students than others. We do recommend, however, that you read
this closely and pay particular attention to the taught unit specific preparation suggestions
detailed towards the end of this document.
Learning about Psychology
For some of you, psychology will be a relatively new subject and therefore you may wish to do
some background reading to familiarise yourself with the field. There is an abundance of
introductory psychology texts which you could review. One which we find particularly useful to
give a wide understanding of psychology is the following:
Gross, R. (2015). Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour (7th Ed). London:
Hodder Education.
This is not a necessary purchase and we will not be using this text during your taught units, but it
will provide you with some background and you may be able to refer to this throughout the
programme.
For students on the MSc Psychology of Education (BPS), we also strongly encourage you to join
the British Psychological Society (BPS) as a student member. Doing so will enable you to access
resources such as The Psychologist magazine which will provide you with up-to-date knowledge
of the field. Full details of the membership benefits, fees and how to apply can be found here:
https://beta.bps.org.uk/join-us/membership/student-membership
Reading and Writing in Psychology
Psychology adopts a very specific writing style which may be different to what you have
previously experienced. There are a number of ways you can prepare for this in terms of your
reading and your writing, for your assignments and for your dissertation:
1. Read some psychology journal articles. Useful journals to think about include: Child
Development; Cognition; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; American
Psychologist. If you are unable to access these, you will find academics often make their
papers available on researchgate and academia.edu. You could begin by using an online
search engine, such as google, to find a topic you are interested in and do a bit of reading
around it to give you a feel for psychology reading and writing.
2. Review online writing guides. Online writing resources are plentiful. One short guide
which you may find useful, published by the Harvard Writing Centre, can be accessed
here: https://writingproject.fas.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/bg_psychology.pdf
3. Buy a book. You will find lots of books available to purchase to support you with your
writing. The book suggested below is an advanced book which some students may find
useful (this is not a compulsory purchase for the programme). The first half of the book
covers: how to generate, evaluate and sell ideas, reviewing the literature, how to write
psychology papers and how to navigate the psychology writing style and APA
referencing. The second half is more advanced and would be interesting to those who
wish to continue on to further study in psychology and focuses on preparing papers for
journal articles and presenting yourself to others (posters, grant applications, job
interviews and lecture preparation).
● Sternberg, R.J. & Sternberg, K. (2016). The Psychologist's Companion: A Guide to
Success for Students, Teachers, and Researchers (6th Edition). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
You may also find the following resources useful in preparing you for your dissertation:
● Hart, C. (2005). Doing your masters dissertation. Sage Publications: London.
● Dissertations and Research: http://www.apa.org/education/grad/research.aspx
Referencing in Psychology
You will become familiar with APA referencing style during the programme but should you wish
to get a head-start on this, you will find the Sternberg and Sternberg (2016) book mentioned
above useful for this, as well as other resources including the APA manual and online guides.
This website is a good place to start: http://www.apastyle.org/
Preparing for your Taught Units
Each taught unit will have a unit handbook and a Blackboard page which you will be able to
access once you start the programme. This will include a detailed list of the readings which you
need to do on a weekly basis. If you wish to prepare some of this in advance, you may decide to
review the unit catalogue for the programme. We do, however, advise that you instead pay
particular attention to the following pre-arrival preparation suggestions for the core Autumn
2017 units:
Introduction to Educational Inquiry
It is recommended that you consult and purchase the following core text in advance of the unit
(some copies will be available, print and online, via the School of Education library)
Matthews, B. & Ross, L. (2010). Research methods a practical guide for the social
sciences. Longman: UK.
Statistics in Education
The key course text is as follows:
Field, A. (2013). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (4th Edition). Sage
Publications: London.
This is a comprehensive text that goes beyond the Statistics in Education unit content and is a
useful reference for those who go on to do more advanced statistics. The unit itself covers the
topics in Chapters 1 to 7, 9 and 18. Recommended pre-course reading is Chapters 1 and 2. For
those who would prefer a gentler introduction, a somewhat more accessible text is as follows:
Salkind, N. J. (2016). Statistics for people who (think they) hate statistics (6th Edition).
Sage Publications: London.
Brain, Mind and Education
A useful pre-reading resource for this unit is the freely available to download book (either as a
PDF or audio-file) entitled ‘Brain facts – a primer on the brain and nervous system’, published by
the Society for Neuroscience.
Units which have not been outlined above (for example, Cognition and Learning) do not have
any pre-arrival readings. Recommend and essential readings will be suggested in the Unit
handbook and on Blackboard.
