Best Practices for Teaching Introduction to Psychology

Dana S. Dunn, Stephen L. Chew

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780805852172
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135606565
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This new book provides a scholarly, yet practical approach to the challenges found in teaching introductory psychology. Best Practices for Teaching Introduction to Psychology addresses:

• developing the course and assessing student performance
• selecting which topics to cover and in how much depth
• the effective use of teaching assistants (TAs) and efficient and fair ways to construct and grade exams
• choosing the best textbook
• assessment advice on how to demonstrate students are learning;
• using on-line instruction, writing exercises, and class demonstrations
• teaching majors and non-majors in the same classroom.

This book will appeal to veteran and novice educators who teach introductory psychology as well as graduate students teaching the course for the first time. It will also serve as an excellent resource in faculty workshops on teaching introductory psychology.

Chapter 1
Grounding the Teaching of Introductory Psychology: Rationale for and Overview of Best Practices

Dana S. Dunn

Moravian College

Stephen L. Chew

Samford University

Introductory psychology is often the first course—indeed, possibly the only psychology course—that undergraduate students take in the discipline. As a result, students and their teachers harbor great expectations about the course. Students anticipate being exposed to the whole field of psychology, a proverbial Cook’s tour in one term. They are curious to learn, but their curiosity is often tempered, if not colored, by prior expectations about what they believe psychology is. Many students are surprised to learn that, although important, a mental health service orientation is but one aspect of the discipline. Learning that psychology is a science committed to discovery, as well as application, is often news to undergraduate students, but this message is especially critical in the introductory course.

For their part, teachers want to do justice to the discipline by presenting the necessarily broad survey of psychological phenomena in a rigorous and scientific manner. The matter of coverage immediately becomes a paramount concern: so much material, so little time in the typical term. Teachers wrestle with the inherent trade-off between focusing on breadth or depth, or finding a balance between classic findings and timely results. Each time they teach the introductory class, instructors must distill a wealth of research results into a brief period of time (e.g., “it’s class three—time to present the neuron”).

This book offers a range of solutions to the challenges and dilemmas of teaching the first course in psychology. The contributions herein are designed to appeal to the needs of students and the consciences of teachers. The authors in this volume advocate that teachers make the commitment to ground their teaching of introductory psychology. A grounded course is one that furnishes students with a real foundation for learning psychological knowledge through the use of best teaching practices. Grounding, then, means that teachers must create a coherent justification for the course by using scholarship concerning the teaching of psychology. The justification must be satisfying to both parties, which means that matters of coverage, active learning, assessment and learning outcomes, and teaching philosophy must be articulated. This collection of chapters is meant to help secondary and postsecondary teachers ground the teaching of this essential course in psychology. The remainder of this first chapter identifies key issues in the teaching of introductory psychology and then presents a précis of each section of the text and its contents.

ISSUES IN TEACHING INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY

Scholarship on teaching the first course in psychology—variously called introductory psychology, introduction to psychology, or general psychology—typically focuses on practical pedagogical issues, including text selection (e.g., Landrum & Hormel, 2002), traditional versus modular presentation (e.g., Nevid & Carmony, 2002), and whether to require a laboratory component (e.g., Berthold, Hakala, & Goff, 2003). Although these are important considerations, especially for the novice instructor, they barely begin to address the complex challenges presented in the introductory psychology course. Veteran psychology instructors are likely to list introductory psychology as the most difficult psychology course to teach well (with the possible exception of statistics), and these teachers report continuing to wrestle with the challenges of the course throughout their careers. Ironically, introductory psychology is typically the first course graduate students and new assistant professors teach, and they usually do it with little or no teacher training.

Teaching introductory psychology raises challenges not found in later psychology courses. Besides the sheer breadth and number of new concepts for students to learn, they must also develop a basic conceptual framework for understanding psychology. Teachers convey the importance of the scientific process in the discipline of psychology (e.g., Miller, 1992), and how to distinguish scientific psychology from popular and pseudoscientific views. Many students come to the course with gross misconceptions about psychology’s domains of inquiry and ignorance about what psychologists do. Instructors must confront these mistaken beliefs and correct them accordingly.

Introductory psychology teachers truly need a resource in order to teach the fundamental first course effectively. Until now, outside of periodical pieces (both stand-alone articles and book-length compendiums of previously published work), no single, up-to-date resource on teaching introductory psychology has been available. Instructor’s manuals that accompany introductory psychology texts tend to provide practical help tailored to that specific text, such as lecture outlines, previously published class activities, relevant videos, and additional lecture topics. Yet these ancillaries provide little help in improving overall teaching effectiveness in the course, such as overcoming student misconceptions, teaching students with diverse cultural backgrounds, teaching the course in the context of liberal education or improving student learning through assessment.

The contributors to this volume go beyond teaching tips and reviews of the technical aspects of teaching to introduce a more scholarly approach. Halpern et al. (1998) defined the “scholarship of teaching in psychology” as pedagogical research aimed specifically at investigating and improving the learning of psychology. Such scholarship is needed to address issues in teaching the course that have no single best solution for all teachers and all students in all situations. As readers will learn, the term best practice implies that, where feasible, there is empirical support for the effectiveness of a teaching technique.

BEST PRACTICES FOR TEACHING INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY

Basic Issues in Teaching Introductory Psychology

This book is based on the premise that teaching introductory psychology raises challenges in teaching that are both fundamentally different and substantially more complex than teaching subsequent psychology courses. Furthermore, the extent to which these challenges are successfully met is measured in student learning. The opening section of the book deals with basic issues that are particularly relevant to instructors teaching introductory psychology for the first time. More experienced instructors, nevertheless, will also find these chapters of value because they address issues that teachers of psychology must address and resolve multiple times in their careers.

The first critical decision facing any teacher of introductory psychology is selecting a textbook that will complement and enhance classroom instruction. Publishers offer a large array of textbooks pitched for different audiences with different kinds of pedagogical features. Teachers usually select textbooks based on their own preferences, teaching style, and intuition, but without any real evidence about the substantive differences in textbooks or the actual impact of pedagogical aids on learning. Griggs (chap. 2, this volume) did an extensive study on the substantive differences among textbooks and his chapter provides a set of meaningful dimensions that will help instructors make more informed choices.

One challenge facing all teachers of introductory psychology is teaching subjects that they do not know well. Psychology is such a broad and diverse field, and graduate training is typically so narrowly focused, that no new instructor is equally familiar with all aspects of the field. The expedient solution is not to teach those troublesome areas, but Dunn, Schmidt, and Zaremba (chap. 3, this volume) offer better, long-term solutions in their chapter on covering less familiar topics. They focus on both short-term solutions for the new instructor and longer term solutions that will help instructors grow into master teachers of general psychology.

Gurung and Daniel (chap. 4, this volume) subject pedagogical features found in textbooks to empirical tests to determine which aids actually influence student learning and which are mere window dressing. The results turn out to be both surprising and interesting. All instructors who ever wondered if a particular feature of a textbook was designed more to sell books than aid student learning will benefit from reading this chapter.

Appleby (chap. 5, this volume) examines the role of critical thinking in teaching introductory psychology effectively. First, he describes and compares the various extant definitions of critical thinking. He then resolves the issue of which definition is best suited to introductory psychology in a unique and creative way. He assigns a series of critical thinking projects (CTPs) that challenge his students to think about authentic problems in psychology within a framework of critical thinking that they choose as being most applicable to their own educational goals. Appleby describes his method for developing, utilizing, and assessing CTPs, and provides some examples of student learning that demonstrate their flexibility and effectiveness in promoting critical thinking.

At large research universities, much of the responsibility for teaching introductory psychology falls on graduate teaching assistants. In recent years, many universities have increased their emphasis on training teaching assistants for their duties, in part because of external pressures to improve undergraduate courses and in part because such training increases the marketability of graduate students. Hackney, Korn, and Buskist (chap. 6, this volume) describe two successful programs for preparing graduate students to teach introductory psychology. They argue that the foundation of teaching introduction to psychology effectively is not sound technique, but developing a now examine philosophy of teaching. All pedagogical choices and approaches then flow from this philosophy.

Alternative Approaches to Teaching Introductory Psychology

The stereotypical introductory psychology class is large, lecture-oriented, and reliant on a big textbook, but this arrangement is becoming less common with the introduction of alternative approaches to teaching the course. A major stimulus for these nontraditional approaches is the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of students taking the course, especially at community colleges. Another impetus is technology. The second section of the book explores these alternative approaches to teaching general psychology.

Johnson and Carton (chap. 7, this volume) address how to teach introductory psychology without using the traditional, encyclopedic textbook. They argue that large textbooks can be counterproductive to student learning, because they promote skimming, shallow processing of information, and memorization of arcane detail rather than understanding of basic principles. Their solution is to have students read two briefer books that are closer to primary sources. These books focus more on the rationale, method, results, and implications of key studies in psychology, but the studies have been paraphrased to be accessible to introductory psychology students. By reducing the reading load but increasing the depth of focus on key studies, Johnson and Carton argue that students come a way with a better understanding of the process of psychological research and application across all areas.

In recent years, the field of psychology has paid increasing attention to the influence of racial, ethnic, and cultural influences on behavior both in terms of research and teaching. The content of introductory psychology textbooks certainly reflects this move toward inclusiveness. Teachers of introductory psychology would likely agree that issues of race, ethnicity, and culture should be considerations both in terms of content and teaching practice. Most teachers, however, are unaware of the history, development, and uses of the constructs of race and ethnicity. Trimble (chap. 8, this volume) addresses these issues in his chapter, reviewing the development of the constructs from biological, anthropological, sociological, and psychological perspectives. He addresses the question of how racial and ethnic diversity are best integrated into the general psychology course through several examples. He recognizes that discussion of racial and ethnic issues often evokes strong emotional reactions among students, but argues that their inclusion can greatly enrich introductory psychology.

Stoddart and McKinley (chap. 9, this volume) describe how they each teach introductory psychology within an interdisciplinary context through the use of literature, narratives, and primary sources. In their chapter, they argue forcefully, using current pedagogical theory, that such an approach can enhance student learning and appreciation of psychology as a scientific enterprise rather than detract from it. They argue that close reading of narratives and literature yields students better equipped to apply psychological concepts to complex situations. Stoddart and McKinley arrived at this teaching approach at their respective institutions independently and through different routes, but the goal of both is to enhance the learning experience of students in introductory psychology through interdisciplinary connections between psychology and other fields. They provide extensive lists of readings and activities for teachers interested in this approach.

Nothing has had a greater impact on course delivery in recent years than advances in technology. Advances in multimedia technology and the emergence of the Internet as a cultural cornerstone have changed the nature of the classroom experience and created whole new ways for teachers to teach and students to learn. Finley (chap. 10, this volume) examines how to teach introductory psychology in an online environment and still keep the students active and engaged in the learning process. Due to the asynchronous nature of student participation, teaching online requires a different way of approaching the course and designing content. What is lost in face-to-face interaction can be compensated for by richer discussions and utilization of web resources. Finley argues that, although the learning goals remain the same, the online environment requires a change in the traditional roles of teacher and student. She examines the advantages and disadvantages of teaching introductory psychology online, and the mechanics of developing, implementing, and assessing learning activities for this environment.

Ludwig and Perdue (chap. 11, this volume) examine how the classroom experience in introductory psychology has changed due to the developments in multimedia and information technology. Most colleges and universities now boast multimedia classrooms with Internet access through networked computers, and the ability to present material through presentation software and digital video. Ludwig and Perdue trace the historical development of multimedia technology in the classroom starting from chalkboards to the current day. They examine ways of using technology to enhance student learning, and how to avoid its perils and pitfalls. Taking lessons from both their personal experience and the research literature, they summarize general principles for the effective use of multimedia for introductory psychology that should apply as the technology continues to evolve. Psychologists have prided themselves on their emphasis on ethics, but in introductory psychology, this subject is mainly touched on at the beginning of the course with...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: GROUNDING THE TEACHING OF INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY: RATIONALE FOR AND OVERVIEW OF BEST PRACTICES
• I: BASIC ISSUES
• II: ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO TEACHING INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY
• III: ASSESSMENT
• IV: FOCUS ON STUDENT LEARNING
• V: LAST WORDS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS