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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Positive Psychology: Character, Grit and Research Methods by University of Pennsylvania

4.4
stars
1,127 ratings

About the Course

Learners discover how apply to research methods to their study of Positive Psychology. In this course, we study with Dr. Angela Duckworth and Dr. Claire Robertson-Kraft. Through an exploration their work "True Grit" and interviews with researchers and practitioners, you develop a research hypothesis and learn how to understand the difference between internal and external validity. You also begin to understand and apply the strengths and weaknesses associated with different types of measurements and evaluation designs. You then interpret the results in an empirical study. Suggested prerequisites: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science and Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions....

Top reviews

SM

Oct 21, 2022

An extremely well developed course about not such a simple topic ir research methods. The instructors broke the topics down into easy to learn bytes such that an interested learner can complete easily

RW

Dec 27, 2019

Though i have nightmares of research design from my undergraduate career, this puts a neat spin on it and reminds the sheer importance of it. Thanks for the reminder of what is important UPENN!

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201 - 225 of 329 Reviews for Positive Psychology: Character, Grit and Research Methods

By Mabel T

Aug 25, 2017

Great course

By RASULOVA R I

Jan 29, 2019

Thank you

By Maria M B

Jan 31, 2023

Excelent

By Mirsad A

May 17, 2019

Perfect!

By Giovanna d F m

Feb 23, 2024

Amazing

By Ebert A R A

May 21, 2023

Ninguna

By Hisami U

Jun 3, 2022

-

By Srihari B

Sep 22, 2017

b

By Shiuan L

Jun 29, 2021

I think this course is a good inclusion in the Specialization in Positive Psychology program. As a former grad student, I recognize the importance of being an educated consumer of research, and even as a practitioner, this is necessary training. This course is much more demanding than all the other courses in the specialization, so one should be prepared to take lots of notes and rewatch some lectures. The material is dense and I think the instructors already have done a pretty good job of trying to pack so much material into such a short course. That being said, there are some design flaws with the course, including the assignment scoring rubric in week 3 (I've put in a note to the forum and hopefully that will get fixed). The practitioner interviews are thoughtful but without a good grasp of the basics, it may seem like filler or kind of confusing. The other lectures are very dense. Although it was just right for me who already has a research background, I can imagine it being frustrating to understand for someone who hasn't had any type of research design training or whose native language isn't English. I recommend this course only in context of the positive psychology specialization.

By Jessica C

Jan 6, 2018

Truly, I would characterize this as more than a 4-star experience. My only reservation from a full-on 5 is that many of the activities required more of a research design/research science mindset than I was really prepared for given my interest in taking the course and specialization in positive psychology. I appreciate very much how highly valued understanding research methods was presented. Being able to apply that knowledge in the specific peer-reviewed activities was less useful to me though. Specifically, the rubric's associated for grading required a higher level of methodology than I felt warranted in my circumstances. My choice was either to imagine/conceptualize a study that I actually had no intention of ever seeing through (and to a degree of specificity that far exceeded what I would really consider for a hypothetical scenario), or to put forward more personally relevant application but which I knew did not fully connect to the scoring system. That said: loved loved loved the videos, lectures, and practitioner testimonials. The readings were rigorous but very relevant and interesting.

By Sanika

Jul 12, 2018

I got to learn a lot about research in positive psychology and about how to conduct and consume research in general. My Heartfelt thanks to the instructors for the wonderful enlightening videos and content. The assignments and quizzes were fun and challenging and gave an opportunity to really test and apply all the knowledge that we acquired.I would have loved to learn a lot more from Angela Duckworth and felt her videos were too less and short. Would wish them to be more detailed. Sometimes the course felt too rushed and I felt bombarded by a lot of information in very less time. The assignments could also have a bit more clarity.Overall though the course certainly has a lot more strengths than weaknesses and I greatly benefited from them. I express my deep gratitude to Claire Robertson-Kraft for being such a wonderful teacher and also Angela Duckworth for sharing her amazing research experiences. Also thanks to University of Pennsylvania and coursera for bringing this great course to us.

By Bruce N

Jul 20, 2021

This was a tough course to rate. On the one hand, I found the professors and guest speakers highly intelligent and proficient in their explanation of this fascinating material. For that alone, I would have rated the course a 5. On the other hand, after reading many of the other ratings prior to the course I expected there to be a possibility this course would not be for beginners and therefore I had a fear of being in over my head. Truth be told...I was in over my head. I was challenged every step of the way and while I recognize this challenge as a blessing in disguise, it was more than I anticipated.

It's not that I didn't learn more than I thought I would, because I did. I think I just would have liked the syllabus to have informed me more appropriately in advance.

By Jenny P

Aug 24, 2020

This course was very helpful in breaking down research articles and data analysis. I would recommend it for anyone who is a novice in social sciences and needs a foundation in interpreting research findings. My only suggestion for improvement is that the class creators reevaluate the time commitments assigned to the reading articles. Some of the articles were quite long (30 pages or more) but only gave an estimated time commitment of 25 minutes; while others which were quite short were assigned larger amounts of time. Ironing out the logistics of the course would make it a little more user-friendly.

By 杨建文

May 9, 2017

Obversely this course is much less popular than other coures in this seris. Most people taking this course are not going to be an experimental psychologist, they just want to learn some practical skills to lead a better life, and there are many other ways to evaluate a psychological trick, no need to systematically learn the study methods, so no wander that people are not quite interested in this. It seems that this course do not provide methods to enhance self-control and grit, but Kelly M.'s The Willpower Instinct introduces a lot of useful methods.

By Michael M

Sep 5, 2020

This is a far more technical course than expected. However, it's an excellent overview of the details behind research and research methodologies. It affords the whole concept of positive psychology a very important depth of credibility. It can be very easy to dismiss PP due to negativity biases, but as the old saying goes, numbers don't lie. Understanding the application of statistics in this research can help us assert PP as insights worth paying attention to.

Thank you for not pandering and allowing your students to be challenged!

By Kathryn W

May 3, 2020

For me, this has been the most challenging unit in the Positive Psychology specialisation so far. The content is heavily weighted to research and statistics, and I don't think this is made clear in the unit summary. From what I saw of the discussion and work, some of my fellow students were struggling more than myself. I have rated the course 4/5 because I appreciated the challenge, but I have a rusty recollection to draw upon having completed statistics and research methods when I completed my psychology major nearly 20 years ago.

By Marc G

Feb 11, 2018

It's a good course, but it's heavily focused on the "research methods" part of the title, with a less intent focus on grit and, particularly, character. It's basically a simple introduction to research methodology and design, with an overview of quantitative and qualitative research and how to measure their quality (validity and reliability). The parts that relate to grit are mostly snippets from Duckworth's lectures. I wish there would have been more of that! I particularly enjoyed having access to practitioners' points of view.

By Lauran H

May 4, 2020

I think there is a glitch in your grading and peer review assignments pages. Grades won't come up when submissions are reviewed and neither are the submissions for us learners to review. This has been really frustrating for us throughout the weeks. Please have the Coursera team fix this. Thank you.

Overall good course.

You can also maybe have a clearer example on how to conduct the research design on your Assignment Instructions so that students can gauge how they are setting up their information.

Just a suggestion.

Thanks.

By Wilma M - P

Sep 22, 2018

I find this course equally important with the rest of the specialization courses. Dr. Claire Robertson-Kraft did a very practical, simple yet comprehensive way of teaching research, and I now clearly understand and appreciate the essence of research. The character and grit part of the course also enhanced my level of perseverance as Dr. Angela Duckworth did her very spontaneous and casual way of imparting her knowledge and her research findings in these subjects. Thank you to both of you!

By Elena K

Jan 10, 2021

I really don't think that this is good idea to dedicade a whole course to analysis of statistic methods. All the information was interesting, but there were too much specific points. The home tasks were not very good explained, so I often didn't understand the task properly and during all course I was stressed, because I wasn't sure if I do everything correctly. And I also had difficulties with assessment of other participants - I wasn't really sure that they also did all right.

By Bob R

Jul 2, 2017

This is the best course so far, thanks to interplay between Angela Duckworth (with her "applied" Grit stuff) and the other woman lecturer, whose content and presentation were crisp and clear.

Thank you for not forcing us to endure further Seligman Worship during this course. Dr Seligman praises himself enough to last a lifetime, and I have been getting discouraged by these UPenn courses which suck up to him even further.

By Eric L B

Mar 18, 2019

A good introduction to research methods. I would like to see even more of Dr. Duckworth's lectures --- she seems fantastic. I found the structure very good. The other students have a broad range of motivations for being here and self-grading is difficult for something so specific to research methods. I would like to here from an professional (event grad student) and not just a peer on these assignments especially.

By Ursula W

Sep 23, 2020

I really liked the course on research and the quizzes in this course were much better then in previous course (which sometime give you really silly answers to choose from). We had to come up with an own hypothesis and continously work through out the course on it. I would have rather practices to read research properly - closed tasks. The feedback from participants is not always pushing you forward.

By Dana O

Apr 14, 2021

The presentations are well done but a research course seems like it shouldn’t be in a foundations sequence. As someone taking the sequence for fun or personal growth, I would have preferred a course just on the concept of grit and character strength. Clearly some participants want to build research proposals but think they should have their own sequence for that purpose.

By Deleted A

Feb 18, 2019

I really enjoyed Angela's in class videos, they made me feel a part of Penn State. I would also like to compliment Claire's way of explaining the course, she did so in a clear and enthusiastic manner. However, I did not give five stars because I felt there was a lot of massive texts to read. Personally, I found it hard to concentrate while reading a lot of information.