Instructions – Coursework Two (Essay)
This individual coursework counts 60% toward your final course mark.
Course Learning Outcomes: This coursework has been designed to test your achievement of the following course learning outcomes:
1. Apply concepts from social, cognitive, developmental and biological psychology to a forensic context, that inform the policies and procedures of the criminal justice system.
2. Appraise the merits and limitations of the theories and procedures underlying criminal profiling, and its role in identifying and apprehending criminals.
3. Evaluate the aims of each sentencing option that the criminal justice system may apply, and their impact on our work as forensic psychologists at the individual, community and societal level.
4. Formulate an application of the course content to a real-life criminal, to enable better understanding of that person’s criminal behaviour and prosecution.
5. Design appropriate communications to express forensic psychology concepts to different audiences (laypeople versus psychology experts).
Coursework instructions: In Weeks 5-11 (Module 2), we will be covering a range of topics relating to forensic psychology. In this essay, you will be choosing 2 topics covered in these weeks and applying them to a real-life criminal. [This could be the same criminal that you examined for CW1, or a different criminal.]. Like CW1, CW2 is an individual assignment that you must work on independently. You should pick 2 topics from Module 2 that you consider relevant to the issues that arose in the investigation, apprehension, prosecution or sentencing of your chosen criminal. The 6 topics from Module 2 that you can choose from are listed below:
- Criminal profiling (Wk 5)
- Eyewitnesses (Wk 7)
- False memories (Wk 8)
- Lie Detection (Wk 9)
- Jury Decision-Making (Wk 10)
- Sentencing (Wk 11)
Word limit: 2000 words (excluding the list of references). Please write the word count on the first or last page of your submission document. Please do not go more than 10% above the word limit (i.e. up to 2200 words); otherwise, this will get reflected in your mark and will be indicated in the marking rubric (e.g. in regards to writing concisely, keeping your arguments focused and relevant. etc.).
Intended audience: The general public. Do not assume the reader will have prior extensive knowledge of the case, or of psychological, legal or technical concepts or principles. Make sure you explain any jargon in a clear manner.
References: You need to cite references, and have a references list, in your essay.
Examples: Example essays from 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 students are available to give you further guidance.
TIPS:
- Like in CW1, don’t expect to find journal articles that take topics that we have discussed in this course and apply those topics directly to your chosen criminal (that would make this assessment easy!). You need to be drawing the links yourself. The vast majority of criminal cases do not have academic papers written specifically about them. Part of this assessment is looking at your ability to extrapolate information from the existing research literature and apply it to your specific case (i.e., make your own links to general literature regarding – for example – sentencing and jury-decision making).
- Talk in specifics, not just generics. What specific elements of the case, its investigation, its prosecution, the media coverage around it, etc., are relevant to the topics that we have covered in C99FY? For example, you may discuss any amendments or modifications to typical procedures that the police or court system implemented so as to address concerns that may have arisen, and why these were appropriate given the relevant psychological research. Or you may discuss how some process or procedure went wrong in the case and interfered with goals such as the police’s interviewing techniques not contaminating a witness’s memory of the crime.
- You are to cover two topics that we raise in this course in Module 2 (i.e., Weeks 5-11). We want to see you apply the theoretical knowledge attained in the class to a real-world case, so you can see how psychological theory and principles that we discuss in-class can influence important outcomes and processes in the criminal justice system.
PICK TWO TOPICS THAT WOULD RELATE TO ROSEMARY WESTS CASE AND LET ME KNOW WHICH ONE I WILL SEND YOU NOTES OF THOSE TOPICS.