Critically exploring psychology

This free course introduces you to critical thinking as a tool for psychology.As you work your way through the course you will learn what critical thinking is, and why it is important to use in the study of psychology. In particular, it will help you to think about how to use it when doing independent research.This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course D810 Critically exploring psychology 1 andD811 Critically exploring psychology 2.

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Different schools of thought in psychology
• 1 Different schools of thought in psychology
• 1.1 Cognitive psychology
• 1.2 Social psychology
• 1.3 Developmental psychology
• 1.4 Biological psychology
• 1.5 Individual differences
• 2 Critical thinking in psychology
• 2 Critical thinking in psychology
• 2.1 What is critical thinking?
• 3 Ontology, epistemology and methodology
• 3 Ontology, epistemology and methodology
• 3.1 Positivism and constructivism
• 4 How do I put critical thinking into action?
• 4 How do I put critical thinking into action?
• 4.1 A positive or constructivist approach?
• 4.2 Developing a research question
• 5 Criticality at different stages of research
• 5 Criticality at different stages of research
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements