Psychology taught through the medium of dance

To make the subject more understandable, Middlesex University psychologist Lucy Irving has decided to communicate these concepts via the medium of dance – recording a series of films that has now amassed more than 40,000 views on YouTube.

The project, entitled “Communicating psychology to the public through dance”, aims to help students to understand correlation, variance, frequency distributions, sampling and standard error, which according to Ms Irving are seen by many as the most difficult part of a psychology degree.

“I was hoping that by representing complicated psychological constructs and statistical procedures in a memorable way would enable more psychology students to understand and engage with them,” she said. “I hope that people will either tell students about the films or use them in their own lectures and research methods classes.”

The videos, which were produced with the help of fellow Sussex psychologist Andy Field, choreographer Masha Gurina, dancer and project manager Elise Phillips, and filmmaker Kyle Stevenson, are available on the British Psychological Society’s You Tube channel.

chris.parr@tsleducation.com