Master of Education (Developmental Psychology)

Full-time

Minimum

1 year

Maximum

2 years

Part-time

Minimum

2 years

Maximum

4 years

Course Descriptors

MDP901 Social and Emotional Development and Assessment (4 AUs)
This course is one of the two core (required specialization) modules in the Master of Education (Developmental Psychology) programme. The course contains major and classic social and emotional development theories that are fundamental to the participants before they take on other more specialized courses in the programme. It also introduces how to assess childrens social and emotional development.

MDP902 Children Cognitive Development and Assessment (4 AUs)
Children's cognitive development is the emergence of the ability to process information, think, and understand. Understanding children's cognitive development is essential for curriculum development, effective teaching, and good policy making.

MDP903 Counselling Children and Adolescents (4 AUs)
Teachers and other helping professionals who might not have the knowledge about basic counselling concepts and skills are often at a loss when faced with children or adolescents who need psycho-social and emotional support. This course provides one with information and skills needed to do basic counselling in settings such as schools and other educational centers.

MDP904 Motivation, Volition and Learning-in-Action (4 AUs)
This course is designed to empower teachers, coaches, supervisors or parents to motivate their charges and to develop their volition to love, to will, to think and to make personal improvements so that they become happy and well-adjusted members of the community. The course examines biological-psychological research and theories related to enhancing motivation and volition in young and adult learners. It helps participants to understand why some renowned persons drive themselves to success while others seem to remain in mediocrity. Participants will engage in research practices and reflections as they relate their experiences to theories and hypotheses in daily practices based on the framework of Knowledge-Volition-Action.

MDP906 Personality and Attitude Assessment (4 AUs)
This course covers the non-cognitive aspects of educational assessment. Non-cognitive attributes such as attitudes, interests, and personality are important to education for the 21st century. The course complements those of cognitive assessments, to provide the breadth of knowledge for a MEd (Educational Assessment) specialist.

MDP907 How to Nurture Creative and Happy Learners (4 AUs)
It has been said that we live in the VUCA world  Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Creative individuals will cope well in the VUCA world, due to their capacity to think of original solutions to complex and challenging problems. At the same time, via incremental improvement or radical transformation of the VUCA world they live in, creative individuals can live happy, enriched and meaningful lives in society. 

This module infuses its participants with relevant KSAOs (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Others) to nurture creative and happy learners in the Singapore context. It achieves this goal by immersing participants in the theoretical and empirical research on creativity and happiness. By mastering this psychological domain of knowledge, participants will become skillful facilitators of creative and happy learners in the classroom, and thereby prepare their students for living and thriving in the VUCA world.

MDP908 Evaluation of Programs in Schools and Community Organizations (4 AUs)
It is important that stakeholders are able to know if current programmes in schools and organisations are effective and are bringing about the intended outcomes as planned. Periodic monitoring is also important to ensure that the standard and quality of the programmes remain robust. This course is therefore designed to help practitioners learn the skills of programme evaluation to enable them to appraise educational, social and community programmes in their organisations in a scientific and systematic manner - one that is grounded in the science of programme evaluation.

MDP909 Assessment and Development of 21st Century Competencies (4 AUs)
The 21st century is often described as a VUCA world  one that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. With new demands coming from the 21st workplace, it is thus imperative for educators in various educational institutions to develop students capacities to match the needs of the students future workplace. This thus indicates an imperative need to change the way educators craft their lessons and learning tasks so as to provide students with ample opportunities to gain authentic learning experiences and enable the transfer of relevant knowledge and skills from their classrooms to solve real world problems.

MDP910 Theory, Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning (4 AUs)
This course provides a detailed analysis of contemporary learning theories and practices as they relate to education. It embarks on a detailed investigation of major research in educational psychology focusing on learning cognition. Historically, the field of educational psychology gained from a series of learning theories, including behaviourism, social cognitive theory, information processing, and constructivism. In this course, these theories are examined in depth. The question "how do humans learn (effectively)?" is at the heart of such theories, and participants are invited to construct and reconstruct their personal theories of learning throughout the course. However, modern day educational psychologists face questions that are considerably more varied and diverse than simply, what constitutes learning? Increasingly, they are concerned with a variety of topics, including knowledge building, the role of working memory, the importance of emotions and student well-being, encouraging innovation and critical thinking, incorporating learners with special needs, as well as engaging adult learners. In considering these topics, a common theme continues to be how psychological principles can illuminate processes of learning and teaching. This course thus considers how theory, research, and practice inform each other in order to improve the efforts of educators.

MDP911 Understanding Learner Motivation: Theory, Research and Practice (4 AUs)
This course provides participants with an in-depth understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of learner motivation. The course covers an overview of the central theories of motivation, with a focus on how these can be applied in the classroom context to foster learning. In doing so, participants will be invited to explore issues related to the motivation of learner, the factors affecting learner motivation, and how this motivation and its underpinning factors can be assessed. Further, the strategies that could be employed to promote motivation will also be explored.

Participants will be required to carry out a critical review of existing literature on motivational constructs of their interest, which leads to the development of a research proposal.

MDP912 Gestures in learning and development: theory, research, practice (4 AUs)
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the role of hand gestures (e.g., pointing, creating a shape with the hands) in learning and development. This course examines the research on hand gestures across a variety of educational contexts for children and adolescents, looking at when a teachers gestures can affect learning and what students gestures are telling us. This course introduces methods of classifying gestures and provides a broad overview of how gestures can help learning. This course will help you to make sense of students gestures from an intentional, theory-based perspective and provide you with knowledge on evidence-based practices. The course is for all students who are interested in non-verbal communication, body language and learning.

MED900 Educational Inquiry (4 AUs)
This course introduces participants to the fundamental processes involved in conducting research such as formulating research questions, writing a review of the literature by synthesizing empirical studies, understanding various methodological approaches, collecting and interpreting research data. Participants in this course will have opportunities to develop the skills, knowledge and strategies needed to read, interpret, and evaluate the quality of research reports. In addition, participants will gain a critical understanding of quantitative, qualitative, and combined research approaches.

MED901 Academic Writing for Postgraduate Students (4 AUs)
This course will guide postgraduate students in studying the discourse and linguistic conventions of academic writing in their own discipline so that they can better manage the writing of their thesis/research paper. In addition to studying the discourse practices of academic writing, students will also examine the thinking processes underlying the production of those practices.

MED902 Integrative Project (2 AUs)
This capstone course requires participants to identify an education issue which forms the focus of inquiry, locate and read the most relevant literature to generate suggested potential solution to address the problem. The solution should show evidence that they are able to take the available information and restructure it in an appropriate way to deal with the issue.