In English 110, we have been building the skill of integrating the ideas of other sources into our own work. In Psychology 105, we are assigned weekly writing assignments which partly consist of our own views and partly consist of reflecting on and building off of the ideas of others. My grades have been improving immensely in this class since I started integrating sources the way we learned to in English. Here is a sample from a psych paper I wrote about two weeks ago:

“Jimmy Conrad, host for IDG.tv, visited Sensiks to experience a full-body sensory reality pod. Founder and CEO of Sensiks, Fred Galstaun, explained that the pod measures the user’s heartbeat, brain waves, and skin conduction to ensure that they have the optimal Virtual Reality experience. Conrad put on his Virtual Reality goggles and entered a virtual city. He moved backwards out of the city through suburbs, then to a forest where there were no roads or people. He traveled through a forest fire, then at the end of the experience had a view of the mountains he had come from. From a crowded city to a forest fire, Conrad was provided the appropriate sight, scent, heat and light for each environment. He described his experience in the pod as one that provided all of the senses what he needed to make him believe he was in the virtual world. Conrad goes on to mention that Virtual Reality goggles can be used in the medical field as well. There are videos that are useful to people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dementia, and mental disabilities.”

In this passage, I used a summary style to integrate this video source. I included key parts of the video which were important to my paper about Virtual Reality goggles. I used the summary skills in this paper that I had practiced in English when writing a summary of Jia Jiang’s TED Talk. This skill has helped me to write almost every psych paper!