Teaching of Psychology

Few publications deal with professional advancement for psychologists employed outside research institutions. We believe that many junior faculty who pursue careers at liberal arts colleges do not know how to ensure their success in or out of the classroom, and this article is an attempt to remedy the situation. We offer representative strategies from the four traditional areas of faculty performance and evaluation—teaching, scholarship, service, and working with students.

This study was designed to identify doctoral programs in psychology that produced the most mentors and to assess the quality of these programs as rated in past research. Mentor was defined as dissertation supervisor. Samples of doctoral recipients were selected from the 1970, 1980, and 1989–1991 Dissertation Abstracts International. We selected every 10th entry for a total of 875 recipients, for whom 851 dissertation supervisors were identified. The programs producing the supervisors and the supervisors’ years of graduation were also identified. The 25 programs producing the most supervisors accounted for almost 60% of the recipients. These programs tended to be among the oldest in American psychology and among the programs rated highest in quality in studies reported over many years and using various measures of quality. The proportion of women among mentors increased but not as rapidly as the proportion of women among doctoral recipients.

This is a report on the surge of undergraduate psychology majors since the early 1980s. The number of psychology faculty has remained relatively constant in the last decade, but the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in psychology has increased by 59% since 1985 almost entirely due to an increase in the number awarded to women, which has increased by 80%. Results of a survey indicate that psychology departments have dealt with increasing enrollments by some combination of (a) new admissions requirements, such as completion of required premajor courses; (b) more rigorous requirements for graduation; and (c) limiting advanced courses only to majors. Causes and long-range implications for academic psychology are discussed.

The American Psychological Association has charged its members with taking an active role in reducing the stigma attached to lesbian, gay, and bisexual identity in our society. One means of fulfilling this charge is for psychologists to undertake educational activities that present lesbian, gay, and bisexual experience in a thoughtful, scholarly, and informative manner. This article describes the development and conduct of a course titled The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, whose intent is to provide just such a substantive look at the psychological experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. Elements of the course may also be incorporated into other courses, such as social psychology, the psychology of women, the psychology of gender, or courses focusing on diversity.

A lesbian assistant professor of counseling psychology disclosed her sexual orientation during lectures to 2 sections of an undergraduate course and did not disclose in 2 comparable sections of the same course. Group differences in means and variances of teaching evaluations were examined for possible student bias. No evidence of sexual orientation bias was found.

If psychology is to accept responsibility for its own historiography, then it must instill within its students an interest in and love for history. We provide an argument for this assertion and describe a pedagogical assignment designed to achieve these objectives.

Many psychology students initially have difficulty with the philosophical character of the typical history of psychology course. One way to introduce students to psychology's philosophical roots is to survey their assumptions on the nature of mind, emotion, and behavior. This article describes and gives examples of a 50-item Likert-scale questionnaire concerning the positions of many philosophers, biologists, and psychologists that are typically covered in the class. This article also presents data from three history of psychology classes and suggestions for using the measure as a teaching tool.

Difficulties encountered teaching test standards and ethical principles in an undergraduate testing class are noted. A method of reorienting this complex material to be of increased relevance to students is suggested as a means of resolving some of these difficulties. The Test Taker's Bill of Rights that emerged from this reorganization is a novel and effective way of discussing, teaching, and selecting material for this course. This bill helps prepare students to read, understand, and evaluate this important information.

Two experimental conditions of note taking in lecture sections of Introductory Psychology were compared for their relative effectiveness as generative-learning activities. The summary group students took notes during a 21-min lecture and wrote three lecture summaries during 4-min pauses. The pause group students took notes during lecture but only reviewed their notes during the pauses. The control group students took notes without pauses. Immediately following the lecture, students took a posttest, 12 days later they responded to a free-recall question and took another posttest. Although the pause and control groups did not differ on any measure, the summary group scored significantly higher than the control group on the free-recall question and 12-day posttest, suggesting that summary writing during lecture results in more durable learning.

This article describes a project used in a sophomore-level psychological testing and measurement course. The project helps integrate the seemingly separate topics of item writing, reliability, and validity by having students work through the different phases of developing a test. Students have reported that this project was valuable in learning how to create and evaluate tests.

This article describes procedures used to establish, promote, and implement a culminating undergraduate research experience that included financial sponsorship by local businesses and government agencies. The sponsorship allowed small teams of seniors to apply their understanding of psychological theory and methods to problems of relevance outside of the academic community. Each team produced a report and gave formal presentations to the sponsor. The endeavor was evaluated highly by the students. Each sponsor agreed to cooperate in a second capstone project.

Computers have become an increasingly important tool for the teaching of psychology. With recent advances in computer technology, many claims of using the computer as an adjunct for teaching can now be realized. In this article, I call for increased scholarship on this medium.

This article reviews The Graphic Brain: Neurophysiology (Teyler, 1992), a computer program designed to introduce neurophysiology to medical students and beginning graduate and advanced undergraduate students in various fields. Users choose among 19 self-contained teaching modules that utilize text and visual representations to present various structures and concepts encountered in the study of neurophysiology. We offer general comments and suggestions for improvement and a discussion of this program's utility for students in psychology.

Many students believe that nonhuman animals are either irreconcilably different from humans or are comparable to humans in almost every way. It is important to identify and challenge these fallacious biases, particularly for classes in which animal behavior is discussed. A computerized (MS-DOS) laboratory exercise addressed this and other course goals. Student evaluations indicated that the activity is useful for augmenting textbook information, challenging these misconceived notions, and spawning classroom discussion about the existence and meaning of important species similarities and differences.

Gordon Hammerle (GH), a Professor of Psychology at Adrian College (Adrian, MI), conducted the first interview for The Generalist's Comer. He chose sexuality and gender issues as his focus and recruited Charlene Muehlenhard (CM) as our first research specialist. Dr. Muehlenhard is the President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. An Associate Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), she has written or coauthored numerous articles on sexual aggression and sexual communication patterns.