Teaching of Psychology

Scholarly writings provide guidance for delivery of an undergraduate program in psychology (e.g., APA, 2007; Halpern, 2010). Much of the emphasis in this literature has been on examination of the curriculum (e.g., McGovern, 1993; Stoloff et al., 2010), yet minimal research has been conducted to empirically link the overall undergraduate psychology major experience with outcomes. This article relates program characteristics (including curriculum, resources, and faculty engagement) to student success and satisfaction among students completing psychology major programs at 110 institutions in North America. It provides evidence that important factors that correlate with student success are an institutional focus on undergraduates, frequent experiential learning, and faculty engagement outside of the classroom. Students are more satisfied with programs in which they have more laboratory experiences and where they interact with faculty at student events. Adequate staffing of the psychology major program is important; beneficial activities may suffer when faculty are overwhelmed with too many students or competing obligations.

Internships play a vital role in the education of master’s and undergraduate-level industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology students, providing applied learning experiences in organizational settings under qualified supervision. This article presents results collected from surveys of organizational hosts and interns. It addresses locating sites for internships, ensuring an appropriate experience, and the responsibilities of organizational hosts. The authors describe the responsibilities of faculty and students, student competencies, and evaluation of student performance in providing a meaningful internship experience. They provide suggestions for yielding productive and useful internship experiences for master’s I/O students with particular attention on the development of an appropriate internship site and framing requirements with the organizational host. They recommend strategies and techniques for monitoring and evaluating the I/O intern.

This article presents an assessment of critical thinking skills and paranormal beliefs in students taking a research methods course. The course emphasized separating scientific claims from pseudoscientific assumptions and used real-world examples to teach students to think critically; however, the course did not use examples of the paranormal to teach about pseudoscience. There was a significant decrease in students’ paranormal beliefs at the end of the course and significant improvement in their abilities to evaluate psychological research; however, there was not a significant change in their general critical thinking abilities. In addition, all measures related to course performance, such that students who showed lower levels of paranormal beliefs and greater general critical thinking abilities at the outset of the course earned more total points. The author discusses how the course builds skills recommended for psychology majors and identifies areas for future research in scientific thinking and belief in pseudoscience.

The personal and societal devastations wrought by the genocidal actions of individuals remain confounding to psychologists. As instructors aim to increase students’ engagement in global concerns, courses that address the often confusing interplay among prejudice, mass persuasion, human aggression, and prosocial behavior seem to be well placed to reduce these ambiguities. With previous examples in the teaching literature scarce, this article describes a new course on the psychology of genocide through an interdisciplinary blend of historical and psychological evidence of the single worst episode of genocide in human history: the Holocaust. Course themes and topics, readings and assignments, and recommended audiovisual supports provide a useful framework for future application of this new course in the psychology of genocide.

Undergraduates in 3 introductory psychology courses participated in teaching interventions designed to reduce mental illness stigma. Expanding on previous research, the researchers tested the effects of education, video, and contact interventions. Results of the pretest and posttest scores on a social distance measure revealed a statistically significant reduction in social distancing for the contact intervention. The researchers emphasize the use of stigma-reducing pedagogies in teaching psychopathology to undergraduates.

The American Psychological Association has affirmed the importance of career planning and development in undergraduate psychology education. In an effort to improve instruction in this area, we developed a career planning intervention designed to reach a large number of prospective psychology majors early in their college careers. The presentation, based on career and college student development models, introduces students to four stages of career development: self-assessment, career exploration, gaining experience, and implementing a plan. Evaluations suggest that students found the presentation useful and that it generated interest in visiting with a career counselor.

One hundred and thirty-four undergraduate psychology majors completed a survey assessing their evaluative ratings of importance of factors related to the graduate school application process. Results revealed that students rated issues with research experience, letters of recommendation, and GPA as strongly important. These results support efforts to enhance the preparation of undergraduate psychology students who aspire to attend graduate school.

This study investigated the effect of a vicarious experience on the academic self-efficacy of graduate students enrolled in a statistics and research methods course. Participants (N = 39) completed a self-efficacy scale during the first two meetings of the course. Two weeks later, a portion of these students participated in a randomly assigned intervention to increase statistics self-efficacy. In the experimental condition, a former statistics student came to the class and explained her own math anxieties and outlined the behaviors that led to her personal success in the same course. Comparison students wrote about the characteristics of a successful student in the course without the experience of a peer model presentation. Analysis of pre- and postintervention academic self-efficacy indicated students in the peer model group showed a significant increase compared to the writing group. We discuss the potential of using live vicarious experience presentations to increase self-efficacy in psychology statistics courses.

An active learning exercise was carried out in an eyewitness psychology course in which students first built up a facial composite of a famous person using the FACES software. Then, the students had to name the person depicted in each composite. The results of this exercise were then described by the instructor during a theoretical lecture about facial composites. The students experienced for themselves how difficult it is to build and identify facial composites of familiar faces. Pre-post analyses showed that the exercise was effective in changing students’ initially optimistic beliefs about the utility of facial composites.

We present a cultural immersion experience as a pedagogical approach to integrate learning of psychological concepts and advancement of cultural competency. This course revolved around a one-week trip to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This experience, paired with cultural readings on Native Americans, offers a framework for studying psychology. The course format, topics, assignments, and special considerations are discussed.

Career planning and development for undergraduates is a goal for our field, yet the majority of psychology departments do not offer a course to meet this goal. This article examines an online psychology orientation course that requires relatively few instructional resources to achieve success. Outcomes for the course are measured by student work along four dimensions: knowledge of the major, planning for the future, career knowledge, and self-assessment of fit. The analysis shows very large gains in student performance for major knowledge and planning for the future and moderate gains in the other areas. This work suggests that the online model is one potentially powerful tool for preparing undergraduate psychology majors to succeed in the major and after graduation.

Psychologists have posited two types of motivation theories. Dualistic theories divide motivation into two types: intrinsic and extrinsic. Multifaceted theories, in contrast, recognize a number of genetically distinct motives. Intrinsic-extrinsic dualism fails on at least three counts: construct validity, measurement reliability, and experimental control. Many researchers have thus moved beyond the study of intrinsic-extrinsic motivation and validated multifaceted theories. When teaching students about the multifaceted nature of motivation, teachers can take several steps to improve their students’ understanding of this understudied area of psychology