What Kind of Mind?

The What Kind of Mind? project has been produced by the University of St Andrews, in conjunction with the Department of Philosophy and the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, using funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

What Kind of Mind? provides teaching resources to introduce pupils to research ideas about animal minds. Over the course of the program, many questions will be explored, including: 

• What is a mind? 
• What constitutes intelligence? 
• What is evolution? 
• Why is discussion about animal minds important? 
• How do philosophy and psychology impact us?  
• How do we find out about other minds? 
• How should experiments be controlled? 
• How do we compare to our ancestors? 
• How can we find out about other minds? 
• What is language? 
• Why do we play? 
• What is curiosity?  
• How do researchers come up with a hypothesis?

About the resources

• The lesson program is aimed at pupils aged approximately 8-12 years old (in Scotland P5-P7).
  
• Resources include lesson plans, presentations, detailed teacher notes, class activities and associated materials. The resources are listed for download under the individual lessons.
  
• Aspects of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence which are used in the lesson are shown by SCN-numbers, listed in the skills section.
  
• The resources are free to use but we would be extremely grateful if you could send us completed pre- and post- program questionnaires filled in by yourselves and the pupils. The questionnaires are designed to help the researchers measure the applicability and impact of the resources they have produced, and do not ask for names. These questionnaires are embedded in the lessons and should be sent to ams18@st-andrews.ac.uk when completed.

"Living Links" Learning Programme at RZSS

A bespoke learning programme of interactive, interdisciplinary and online sessions on themes from What Kind of Mind? has been developed by the "Living Links" collaboration between the University of St Andrews and RZSS aiming to deepen learners' connections with nature, increase awareness of how our minds affect our health and wellbeing, and promote an understanding of the role of research in scientific development.

This free resource can be found on the RZSS Discovery and Learning ZOOdle (Zoo "Digital Learning Environment") websiteat https://discover.rzss.org.uk/livinglinks.

Further information and links

If you have other any questions, suggestions or feedback, do not hesitate to get in touch! Also, feel free to take a look at some of our sister projects in more depth: http://living-links.org/ and http://developmentlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/