Building on our joint experience of making the Video Course in Behavioural Observation [2], we got together to make a multimedia course to teach methods and techniques in behavioral observation. Our purpose is to provide a complete course designed primarily for undergraduate students of psychology and behavioral biology to enable them to carry out their own observational studies. Some of the material will also be accessible to senior school students. There will also be more advanced material suitable for postgraduate training, derived from the GSEQ [1] and Theme [3] packages for advanced sequential and temporal analysis.

The course will deal with the purposes, background, methods and techniques of behavioral observation, and will give explicit exercises in categorizing and coding behavior using a variety of digital video clips of several species, and in ways of analyzing the data obtained. The orientation of the course is ethological in its inception but broadened to include other approaches. The multimedia format will offer numerous advantages beyond the Video Course, including the following planned features:

• Much more interaction between the user and the program.
• Incorporation of relevant parts of The Observer Video-Pro (Noldus Information Technology), enabling film clips to be observed and coded on the one computer screen.
• Giving feedback on the user’s performance on the coding exercises in terms of degree of agreement with a "master file".
• Structuring the carrying out of a small project in the field and guiding the write-up of the report on this.
• Encouraging reflection by means of self-assessment tests and exercises at appropriate points in the program.
• Providing a glossary of technical terms and concepts.
• Providing a full bibliography.
• Evaluating knowledge gained by means of a multiple choice examination at the end.

In addition to the examination, the effectiveness of the program will be measured in order to develop it further by the following incorporated elements:

• Obtaining feedback from users and tutors by means of a user’s evaluation questionnaire.
• Monitoring in detail the actual use to which the program is put by means of explicit tracking of the sequence and duration of visits to the different sections and subsections made by each individual user.

Our progress on this project beyond the prototype produced last year will be presented in a demonstration, and we hope conference members will try out sections of the program for themselves and give us the benefit of their criticisms and comments to promote the evolution of this project.

This project receives partial funding from the European Commission (Socrates project no. 25230-CP-1-96-1-GB-ODL).

References

1. Bakeman, R.; Quera, V. (1995). Analyzing Interaction: Sequential Analysis with SDIS and GSEQ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Dickins, D.W. (1993-1996). Video Course in Behavioural Observation, 4 volumes, as listed below, each with a 60-90 min. film, disks with supporting excerpts from The Observer software (except in Vol.1), tutor’s notes, & recording proformas. Published by Noldus Information Technology b.v., Wageningen, The Netherlands and the University of Liverpool in the following volumes: "Focussing In" (1993, with R.A. Clark), "Keys to Success" (1994, with R.A. Clark), "Representative Samples" (1996) and "Observing Ourselves" (1996).
3. Magnusson, M.S. (1996). Hidden real-time patterns in intra- and inter-individual behavior: description and detection. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 12, 112-123.