ERQs in PSYCHOLOGY?You need ideal, peace and grave

One of the most challenging things I must do in my course is to teach students how to write an ERQ or Essay Response Questions. Several skills must be considered, as an ERQ must:

• show knowledge and comprehension

• summarize pertinent empirical evidence which must be briefly evaluate and explicitly linked to the idea that is supporting

• apply critical thinking according to the command term

• keep the focus

• be organised

Maybe it sounds easy, but our team has struggled to discover how to improve the way to teach this… because we taught it, but the message did not always arrive as we were expecting. After we got the three key acronyms:

And not, this is not about milk, Woodstock or something creepy …. But these 3 words are key elements of a good Psychology ERQ.

In which IDEALc is really IDEAL:

IDEAL + PEACE + GRAVE (a bit strange..isn’t it) can be used to write all the ERQs.

The use of mind maps make it clearer:

As well an ERQ requires:

Time management...

And a bit of magic... if the knowledge disappear leave a space but do not wait (at least not much)

Ideal, Peace and Grave are keywords for me and my students. I have seen students changing from ”I write a lot of ideas related to the topic that I know” to “I can write a coherent and fluent text, which is focuses on the question, answers the command term, shows accurate knowledge and comprehension, uses well connected and summarized empirical evidence and shows critical thinking”.