A Welsh university has found a new way of teaching students the principles of positive psychology ¨C by getting them to run a marathon.

Twenty-two psychology undergraduates signed up to Bangor University¡¯s Born to Run: Achieve Your Goals module, which mixed lectures and workshops on topics such as motivation and resilience with training runs.

To enrol, students had to be able to run 5km ¡°reasonably comfortably¡± and had to pledge to run three times a week ¨C however none of them had ever run a marathon before.

After the completion of classes, 13 of the students ran the Liverpool Rock ¡¯n¡¯ Roll Marathon, alongside Frances Garrad-Cole, a senior lecturer in psychology at Bangor. Three more completed a half-marathon, and two others plan to run marathons in their home countries of Germany and Canada.

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Places are now filling up for next year¡¯s module.

Dr Garrad-Cole described how, on the first Monday of the course, ¡°we gave them a two-hour lecture about various theories of motivation, goal-directed behaviour, drive, resilience and so on. On the Tuesday, we all turned up in our running gear¡­We discussed the theories and how they applied to our running, we talked about issues such as blisters, hydration, hills and training schemes ¨C and then we all went for a run.¡±

Dr Garrad-Cole ¨C who taught the course with head of school John Parkinson, himself a keen runner and an expert in motivational psychology ¨C had run two half-marathons previously. ¡°I am 39, have had three children and am slightly overweight, so I was quite a good icon for them,¡± she said.

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Since neither Dr Garrad-Cole nor Professor Parkinson is a sports coach, she said, they were wary of giving running advice and instead encouraged students to ¡°listen to their own bodies and do their own research¡±. They also brought in a physiotherapist, someone from the sports psychology department and some highly experienced runners as guest lecturers.

Student evaluations suggested that the Born to Run module offered a very effective way of putting across the intellectual content, Dr Garrad-Cole said, with one commenting that ¡°having a theory session, quickly followed by a practical session in which we could discuss the ideas and attempt to apply them, made them salient and gave us the chance to test them out¡±.

Dr Garrad-Cole estimated that ¡°individual performance was higher in this module than others for probably three-quarters of the class¡±.?

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com