Student Learning Outcomes - Official Course Outline of Record

“Kiss someone like it's the last one you give.”

― Mattéo Bonnet

Student Learning Outcomes - Psych 56

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Describe major theories, principles, and trends that address the process of aging, dying, death, and bereavement from cross-cultural, historical, and contemporary perspectives.

2. Identify different types of death systems, death rituals, ways to mourn, and belief systems about what happens beyond death.

3. Examine the role of ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and historical circumstances when dealing with loss, aging, dying, and death.

4. Describe the experience and understanding of death from a developmental perspective.

5. Apply course knowledge to personal and responses to mortality and experiences of bereavement.

Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Describe current trends in life expectancies, demographics, and attitudes toward adulthood, "old age," death and dying.

2. Compare and contrast prominent theories on adult development and aging.

3. Summarize age-related physical diseases and psychological problems.

4. Explain how the process of aging affects intelligence, memory, creativity, problem-solving and decision-making skills.

5. Describe different types of intimate partnerships in adulthood.

6. Examine the role of gender, socioeconomic status, personality, and health on work choice. Include a description of retirement, its reasons, timing, and effects.

7. Provide a list of stressors encountered by the aging person and generate ways to ameliorate the stress.

8. Discriminate among concepts of suicide, assisted-suicide, and euthanasia; and summarize death/burial rituals and the grieving process following death.

9. Summarize a variety of modes/types of death and review the bereavement, grief and mourning process of the survivor.

10. Describe the American funeral system, with emphasis in death notifi-cation, funeral service selection and its cost, and body disposition.

Topics and Scope

1. Defining the Journey: Some Assumptions, Definitions, and Methods
2. Theories of Adult Development and Learning About Death: The Influences of Sociocultural Forces
3. Physical Changes
4. Health, Health Habits, and Health Care
5. Changes in Cognitive Abilities
6. Social Roles
7. Development of Relationships
8. Work and Retirement
9. Personality Stability and Change
10. Stress and Resistance
11. Death, Dying and Bereavement
12. Facing Death: Living with Life-Threatening Illness
13. Medical Ethics: Dying in a Technological Age
14. Survivors: Understanding the Experience of Loss
15. Late Rites: Funerals and Body Disposition
16. The Law and Death
17. Death in the Lives of Children and Adolescents
18. Suicide
19. Risks of Death in the Modern World
20. Beyond Death/After Life

Typical Assignments

1. Read approximately 50 - 100 texbook pages per week.

2. Take two to five exams on lecture, reading, website visits, concepts, and terminology.

3. Write 2-3 or more evaluation and/or analytical papers, approximately 3-12 pages in length on assigned readings and lectures.

4. Write a term or course research paper approximately 4-5 pages in length for the purpose of learning research skills, enhancing course knowledge, and improving writing skills.

5. Utilize a journal or interactive workbook for purposes of enhancing learning.,

Assignment Feedback Form - Online Psych 56

Distance Education office at Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, CA USA