Overview
This is a gamified active learning activity where students have to create a dating profile that highlights the key feature of the major Anormality Models in the field of Psychology.
The aim of this activity is to familiarize the students with the main characteristics of the most commonly used therapeutic approaches in Clinical Psychology.
Instructional Objectives
Students will be able to describe the therapy models, identify and list their main components, understand them and how they interact with one another and eventually apply the concept to new cases.
Contributor's Notes
Selma Hamdani
Dawson College, Montreal
Benefits
- Presents relevant information in an interesting way that students remember
- Students create their own lists of attributes/components. They take agency over their learning
- Creates a classroom community spirit and group cohesion that is very useful and important in later tasks
Challenges
- Keeping the students on task and reminding them of the learning objectives of the activity
- It’s tempting for students to focus more on the game aspect of the task than on its purpose
Tips
- Making the grading rubric of this ALA available to students from the start of the activity highlights the elements that students have to pay attention to (i.e. more points allocated to the identification of the concept elements than to creativity)
- I would also recommend reminding the students of be respectful when creating the dating profiles
- Keeping an eye on the progression of each team by circulating among them and guiding and keeping them on task
- The debriefing time at the end of all the presentations helps students identify the important elements of each profile and consolidate them
Published: 24/01/2024
Copyright: © 2025 Hamdani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication on this website is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.