Teaching of Psychology

Little systematic data exist regarding the hiring process in academic psychology departments. In this study 98 chairs of search committees responded to a survey that examined the procedures used to hire faculty. Data revealed typical search processes, criteria used to rate candidates, and factors determining who was ultimately hired. Search committees emphasized fit between candidates' research and leaching experience and the needs of the department. Respondents also rated letters of recommendation as highly important in the evaluation of applicant materials. Applicants should heed these factors, practice their job talk before an on-campus interview, and he aware of how others may perceive their interpersonal skills.

In this article, I describe an undergraduate teaching assistant (TA.) program in which TAs engage in the complementary activities of course preparation, course instruction, and l-on-l tutorial assistance. Questionnaires completed by students enrolled in the beginning methodology course and from undergraduates serving as> TAs indicated that both groups viewed the program as a learning experience. Seventy-three percent of the TAs rated their work as an excellent learning experience. Over 91% of the students who worked with the teaching assistants rated the help they received as good to excellent.

In this article, we discuss procedures for coordinating the psychology human participant pool for research purposes. We describe our research retirement and the mechanics of how we recruit participants and report credit for research participation. We also provide an evaluation of the procedures from the viewpoints of experimenters, instructors, and students. Although we identify some problems, the procedures have worked well for us. We discuss areas needing improvement.

Self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) graduate faculty (N = 39) in psychology-related fields responded with multiple phrases to a phenomenological probe, asking “What it's like to be a gay/lesbian/bisexual faculty member.” A research team qualitatively reduced the responses to 61 representative items and returned them to respondents who (a) sorted items according to which ones went together and (b) rated items according to how well they described the respondent's own experience. The result was a 2-dimensional concept map, suggesting that the experience may be understood as having both positive and negative aspects and being both internally and externally mediated. Respondents typically indicated that the positive experiences associated with being a GLB faculty member were more salient for them than were the negative experiences.

This article describes an approach to enhancing the value of case study material in teaching professional ethics in psychology. The mock committee approach involves a series of hearings convened fry students who rotate membership on a class ethics committee. Members of the class participate randomly as psychologists accused of various ethical violations. While the class observes, formal complaint hearings occur that result in official rulings and the setting of appropriate penalties and remedial requirements. The larger class then joins in active feedback and exchange with the committee to highlight and discuss salient ethical issues. We present and discuss student evaluation data for this technique and comment on the potential advantages of this teaching approach.

When 2 tones occur together, a 3rd tone, with a pitch corresponding to the difference in their frequencies, is sometimes heard. This tone is referred to as the missing fundamental because the lister***er perceives this lower tone (fundamental) although there is no actual vibration at this frequency. This effect is discussed in many sensation and perception textbooks. The nonlinearities of recording arid playback equipment may actually restore the supposedly missing fundamental in recorded demonstrations of this effect. In this article, we describe an inexpensive and valid demonstration of the missing fundamental, using a British police whistle.

This demonstration illustrates principles of group dynamics and dynamic social impact and can be used in classes in social psychology or group dynamics. Students discuss their answers to multiple-choice questions with neighbors and answer them again. Discussion consistently leads to the consolidation (reduced diversity), clustering (spatial-self-organization), correlation (emergent linkages), and continuing diversity of responses. “Truth” does not necessarily win, showing that the social reality of the group may be more important than objective reality.

This article illustrates the use of an undergraduate psychology club to enhance and strengthen a psychology undergraduate program. Topics discussed include (a) forming a club, (b) club activities, (c) recruiting members, (d) structure of the club, and (e) fund raising.

In this article, I describe a special topics course in American popular psychology. Course objectives are to (a) trace the history of the popularization of psychology in America; (b) discuss the efforts of the “great popularizers,” including William James, G. Stanley Hall, Hugo Münsterberg, and J. B. Watson; and (c) evaluate the quality of various examples of popular psychology. I emphasize active learning throughout the course. Students read original sources, participate in a variety of exercises, and prepare historical papers or content analyses of popular psychology. I recommend that interested faculty offer such a course or incorporate some of the material on popular psychology into existing history of psychology courses.

The statistics instructor faces 4 major challenges unique to this course: motivating students to study material they think is uninteresting, handling math anxiety, dealing with performance extremes, and making the learning memorable. We discuss each challenge along with solutions offered in the literature.

Students can utilize content analysis techniques to examine societal trends of stereotyping in the media. In this article, I describe the steps in such a research methodology and indicate criteria instructors may use for evaluation. Students believed the project developed and adequately measured their analytic, research, and organizational skills and increased their knowledge of social psychology.

Questionnaire data suggest that students' preconceptions about hunger and eating are inconsistent with contemporary theories. In general, students adhere to a set-point model, whereas current research indicates that the feeding system prevents energy deficits rather than reacts to them. Instructors should explicitly describe students' preconceptions about hunger and eating, discuss the incompatibility of these preconceptions with the empirical evidence, and introduce contemporary theories as alternative conceptions. This approach is effective both in overcoming students' misconceptions about hunger and eating and in increasing student involvement.

Most introductory psychology textbooks describe Holmes and Rake's Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS; 1967) instrument, which generates stress scores as life change units. Although students seem willing to entertain the possibility that stressors can affect their health, the SRRS does not include many common events that act as stressors for college students and includes many items not meaningful to most college students. This article describes an instrument intended for use in classroom demonstrations, the College Undergraduate Stress Scale (CUSS), and reports a local set of norms for a population of traditional-age college students. The CUSS is useful in teaching concepts within health psychology that are associated with stress and its cumulative effects.

College students are often surprised to learn that a preoperational child can be misled by a Piagetian conservation task. A simple demonstration can show how the students themselves can be misled into assuming that deforming a circle into an ellipse with the same circumference does not change its area.

Students in a course on Social and Personality Development wrote term papers about 10 aspects of child and adolescent development depicted in an animated film of their choice. Film analysis required using theory and research from the course. The assignment received favorable ratings. The animated film assignment appears to improve students' understanding of course material and helps students evaluate the types of films that children frequently see.

In this article, we demonstrate how faculty can integrate World Wide Web projects into course assignments, We explore: (a) implementation of electronic term papers (ETP), (b) pedagogical objectives of the assignment, (c) educational benefits of the ETP, (d) an exemplar ETP, (e) grading of ETPs, (f) resource and copyright issues, and (g) student evaluations of the approach. Our goal is to demonstrate how students and faculty can join together to use new technologies in a collaborative fashion that results in student self-discovery and self-construction of knowledge.

The Digital Oscilloscope (Boer, 1996) program allows most Macintosh computers to dynamically display the waveform of any sound recorded by a microphone. I describe how the program can be used to graphically illustrate the concept of timbre as well as to reinforce concepts of frequency, amplitude, and wavelength. I also indicate how the program can be obtained at no charge.

In this article, I describe software that presents classic experiments in psycholinguistics. I use this software for my Research in the Psychology of Language course, but it also has applicability to methods courses or survey courses in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.

Susan Lederman (SL) is an invited member of the International Council of Research Fellows for the Braille Research Center and a Fellow of he Canadian Psychology Association. She was also an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Programme for 8 years. A Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Computing & Information Science at Queen's University at Kingston (Ontario, Canada), she has written and coauthored numerous articles on tactile psychophysics, haptic perception and cognition, motor control, and haptic applications in robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. She is currently the coorganizer of the Annual Symposium a Haptic Interfaces for Teleoperation and Virtual Environment Systems. René Verry (RV) is a psychology professor at Millikin University (Decatur, IL), where she teaches a variety of courses in the experimental core, including Sensation and Perception. She chose the often-subordinated somatic senses as the focus of her interview, and recruited Susan Lederman as our research specialist.