"COMPARISON OF THE SK AND ALBERTA PSYCHOLOGY 20 CURRICULUM DOCUMENT"

// My main teaching area is Social Sciences/Psychology in a high school setting. For this, I will be focusing on the Psychology 20 course.

There is a stark structural difference with the Psychology 20 curriculum between Saskatchewan and Alberta. What I found from the Alberta curriculum websites (learnAlberta and alberta.ca) was quite minimal for the Psychology department. From the only document I found that involved the Alberta curriculum for Psychology 20, it only listed an objective and the content themes that the course entails. The content is as follows:

The objectives of the 3-credit courses in psychology are designed to develop within the student the skills and understandings that make it possible for more effective living in our complex environment. The student’s attention will focus on the scientific approach to understanding human behaviour so that he or she may appreciate more fully the reasons that underlie one’s own acts and those of one’s fellows.

In the Alberta Psychology curriculum, it is broken up into 3 parts: Personal Psychology 20, General Psychology 20, and Experimental Psychology 30.

The Alberta Psychology curriculum online resource is lackluster in comparison to the Saskatchewan Psychology curriculum online resource. The Saskatchewan curriculum for Psychology 20 is very versatile and diverse. Unlike Alberta’s separation between Personal and General Psychology 20, Saskatchewan’s Psychology 20 combines everything into one course. The curriculum also features CCC’s, Goals, Inquiry, Outcomes and Objectives, Indicators and Broad Areas of Learning. Along with the in-depth explanation of each outcome using indicators, the Saskatchewan Psychology 20 curriculum online resource features a lot of detail that the Alberta curriculum seems to lack.

"PREFERENCE"

I would much prefer to use the Saskatchewan Psychology 20 curriculum due to the amounts of resources accessible and available for teachers. Alberta seems to not provide resources from the initial look of the curriculum document, however there may be the case of Alberta teachers receiving resources for the course afterwards whilst teaching.