What do a trip to Bosnia, one-way mirrors and Gummy bears have in common? Each played a rolein the graduate programs selected
by APA's Board of Educational Affairs (BEA) for the 2006 Award for Innovative Practices in
Graduate Education in Psychology. BEA sponsors the annual award in cooperation with the Council
of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP) to recognize innovative practices in graduate
education and training.
Out of 10 entries for 2006, three schools shared the prize:
• The University of Denver's Graduate School of Professional Psychology, for its
International Disaster Psychology Program.
• The University of Minnesota's Department of Educational Psychology, for its
program preparing faculty in the teaching of statistics.
• The School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University, for its Mental Health
and Deafness Program.
The winners each received a plaque and $2,000 at COGDOP's 2007 annual meeting in February.
"This award is not about how well you do the standard kinds of things," says 2006 BEA
Awards Committee Chair and APA Board of Directors member Barry Anton, PhD, "but how you innovate
and respond to needs that are not normally met."
Preparing for disaster
There is an increasing need for mental health clinicians to assist communities affected by
both natural and man-made disasters and pandemics. Recognizing this need, in 2002, the University
of Denver (DU) Graduate School of Professional Psychology began offering classes to PsyD students
on the topic of international disaster psychology, and two years ago, launched a master's
degree program in this area.
"Our program provides students with the background they need to intervene at multiple
levels to address the psychosocial needs of trauma-affected communities," says program
director Judith Fox, PhD. "Students acquire a broad perspective on international development
and disaster, relevant clinical skills and knowledge in research program evaluation and trauma
in order to engage in work that can result in sustainable benefits for these communities."
The program provides an interdisciplinary perspective on international disaster psychology,
with faculty trained in such areas as clinical psychology and trauma, international development
and psychosocial programming, public health, program evaluation and mental health systems in
developing countries. Course offerings include cross-cultural analysis, trauma and development,
crisis intervention, humanitarian law and gender-based violence. Master's students complete
two years of coursework and domestic field placements, as well as a two-month summer internship
at an international disaster organization in such countries as Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and South
Africa. The program's PsyD concentration in international disaster psychology includes
a trauma seminar and fieldwork abroad alongside the master's students.
DU's humanitarian focus piqued the interests of second-year master's student
Molly Firkaly by combining aspects of child psychology and peace studies. After two internships
working with African refugees in the Denver area, Firkaly will complete her fieldwork this summer
at SOS Kinder, an orphanagein Sarajevo, where she will help provide residents with psychosocial
interventions and education. She hopes to get a job next year doing gender-based violence and conflict
prevention work in West Africa.
"I was very excited to hear [this program] existed," Firkaly says. "It's
filling such a great need."
Stimulating statistics
Ten years ago, the department of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota (U of
M) enlisted psychology professor Joan Garfield, PhD, to help redesign their introductory statistics
courses and better prepare graduate students to teach them.
Now, dry, lecture-based introductory statistics courses are a thing of the past, thanks to
the department's award-winning emphasis on developing, supervising and mentoring psychology
graduate students to teach these courses.
Garfield, now director of the program, helped change statistics' bad reputation by advocating
a student-centered, interactive approach. She teaches graduate students to use hands-on activities
like Gummy bear launch labs, where students learn what makes a well-designed experiment by exploring
how factors like the height of the launch pad affect the distance that Gummy bears travel after being
launched in the air using tongue depressors and a rubber band. She also recommends running simulations
of the game show "Let's Make a Deal" to confront students' faulty intuitions
about probability. One lesson even has students measure their own body dimensions, such as head
circumference, to help them understand the concept of variability. And nearly all of the lessons
require that students spend time in U of M's state-of-the-art computer lab, where they use
data analysis software to create charts and graphs to illustrate the day's lessons.
In 2002, Garfield helped launch a three-course graduate-level concentration in statistics
education. The program includes a doctoral seminar examining research on teaching and learning
statistics, a course on becoming a teacher of statistics and a supervised teaching internship.
Next spring, U of M will introduce an online version of this course for anyone interested in teaching
statistics. Plans are also under way to develop an online version of the research seminar to allow
graduate students at other institutions to participate via web cameras.
Garfield's efforts seem to be paying off. Since the course redesign, U of M reports increased
demand for stats courses, fewer incompletes and dropouts, and higher mean ratings on course evaluations.
It's also led to a more confident student body, says Garfield.
"Students seem to be much more excited about the subject and their ability to use statistics
in other contexts," she says.
Signs of change
Without a background in deaf culture and sign language, treating a deaf person with depression
can be a daunting task. But a collaborative graduate program within the School of Professional
Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, may help, says program director Robert
Basil, PsyD.
The school's Mental Health and Deafness Program trains clinicians in such fields as psychology,
psychiatry, rehabilitation and mental health counseling—alongside graduate and undergraduate
level interpreters—about how to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate psychological services to the deaf
and hard-of-hearing communities.
"While the deaf community would love to have clinicians with whom they can converse directly
to, we don't have many mental health professionals who are fluent in sign language,"
Basil says. But training clinicians and interpreters to work together to properly diagnose and
treat a deaf individual's mental health condition is much more effective than training clinicians
alone, says Basil, and fills a significant gap in services to this population.
Throughout the eight-month program, students attend lectures by program staff or guest speakers
every other week on topics such as understanding deaf culture, psychological assessment and therapy
approaches with deaf clients as well as interpreting in mental health settings. Every week for
three hours, students practice what they've learned at a supervised clinic for deaf clients.
With the use of one-way mirrors and an FM microphone/earpiece system, interpreter trainees and
mental health students receive immediate faculty feedback as they work in pairs to counsel clients.
All sessions are videotaped, both to help with diagnosis in the event a client signs too quickly,
and for future training purposes. Basil says the videotapes, available to students at the school's
library, will come in handy as he prepares to offer a Web-based course on the subject. He's
working on replicating the program via the Internet and video-conferences to three other clinical
sites in Ohio.
"If we can be successful in Ohio, I think we can take this [interpreter-clinician training]
model and developa national mental health for deafness program," says Basil .
