Measuring Behavior 2005: Oates

fOCUS: A tool for teaching observational skills to undergraduate psychology and postgraduate clinical psychology students

J. Oates

School of Education, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

fOCUS is a generic multimedia application developed by the Open University and the BBC in collaboration with PSYCLE Interactive (www.psycle.com). It provides an innovative, multimedia approach to observation skills training and includes functions for observing, annotating, coding and analyzing digitized video and audio. Linked hypertext supports students’ learning and the software functions. The media content can be easily versioned, making it a flexible, adaptable resource. fOCUS is already extensively used by the Open University to support undergraduate and postgraduate courses and won the European Academic Software Award 2000 for the social and behavioral sciences.

fOCUS has been further developed within a three year project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL). The aim of the Observation Skills in Psychology project is to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of training in systematic observation and assessment skills in undergraduate psychology and postgraduate clinical psychology courses. It is a consortium partner project between Leeds Metropolitan University, the Universities of Newcastle, Oxford and Sheffield, led by the Open University.

Learning units have been developed on coding schemes, reliability and validity, opening and closing clinical psychology sessions and taking clinical notes. These units, along with further developments of the fOCUS software, have been through two phases of field piloting and will be finalized during 2005. The learning units are designed to be stand-alone, and each can be completed within a 2-3 study session.

This tutorial will explain the development of these learning units, the philosophy behind them and will demonstrate them in action. A discussion will be encouraged to explore further uses of the software and the approach to teaching and learning that we have been developing.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.