Posted: September 16th, 2017

Q6. Synthesizing Psychology Research

Q6. Synthesizing Psychology Research

Order Description

Unit 6 Critical Thinking in Psychology Practice
Introduction
In Unit 5, we defined critical thinking and started making connections to key competencies in the field of psychology. In this unit, we continue practicing critical thinking by looking at another model of critical thinking. Critical thinking skills are often called higher order cognitive skills to distinguish them from lower order skills such as simple recall. Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is a model created by educational psychologists to categorize different outcomes of learning. Within the cognitive, or thinking, domain, there are three levels of understanding that make up the lower order skills—knowledge, comprehension, and application, and three levels in the higher order skills—analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This model provides an excellent framework to analyze the level of your current skills and develop your capacity for more advanced critical thinking in your writing and work in the field.

In this unit, you will continue exploring critical thinking by reviewing Bloom’s Taxonomy in more depth and practice using the model to synthesize literature and research within the field of psychology. This will help you further develop your ability to integrate strategies and best practices in the field for application. It will also help you improve your ability to communicate themes and findings within the scholarly and practitioner literature. You will use this framework as a guide for your Unit 7 assignment.

Reference
Bloom B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, handbook I: The cognitive domain. New York, NY: David McKay.

Objectives
To successfully complete this learning unit, you will be expected to:
1. Evaluate critical thinking tools applicable to the field of psychology.
2. Define cognitive complexity and relate it to practitioner and academic roles.
3. Apply critical thinking tools to synthesize research in psychology.

Q6. Synthesizing Psychology Research
Resources
As we mentioned in the introduction, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a model developed by educational psychologists to help categorize learning. For this unit and your Unit 7 assignment, you are using this model to improve the cognitive complexity of your thinking and support your synthesis of the psychology relevant to your interests in the field. Let’s share the insights we gathered about using the taxonomy in this discussion. Use your completed work from the discussion preparation study to respond to the following questions:
•What does synthesize mean within the context of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Granello’s article?
•What patterns have you started to identify from reading your research articles so far?
•What strategies will you use to ensure you meet the expectations for synthesis within your paper?
If you have any trouble understanding Bloom’s Taxonomy or the strategies in the Granello article, use this discussion to receive support from your peers and instructor to work through your challenges.