Abstract
Introductory psychology courses are generally designed primarily for pre-professional training and organized like traditional textbooks, that is, topical (overviews of various sub-disciplines of psychological discourse without specific concern for ordering of material or forging connections between topics); ahistorical (insufficient attention to how past discoveries inform present theory and research), and insulated and isolated from other academic disciplines. Such courses are often unsuccessful in college settings, where professors must prepare prospective majors for future study and pre-professional training, while simultaneously engaging and informing other students with more general interests in the liberal arts. In this chapter I present an overview of my effort to transform introductory psychology from a topical, a-historical, academically insular venture to a “sequential hierarchy of multimodal interdisciplinary recursive experiences.”
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Notes
- 1.
I use different materials each semester. In Spring 2012, students read Shedler and Block (1990) and Cohen, Sullivan, Solomon, Greenberg, and Ogilvie (2011) to get a sense of how research is actually conducted (about questions that have traditionally been dismissed as not being amenable to empirical inquiry); Rice (1997) as an example of flawed research (where dubious findings and erroneous conclusions are subsequently magnified by Steven Pinker’s (2002) uncritical acceptance of them in The Blank Slate); and, Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid (1977) and Haselton and Gildersleeve (2011) as examples of fine research devoted to interesting areas of inquiry.
- 2.
Skidmore students, like those in most introductory psychology courses, are required to serve as participants in research projects. Although this requirement is primarily imposed to serve researchers’ interests, participating in experiments is a great way to get a first-hand glimpse of how research is actually conducted, and at Skidmore we insist that experimenters provide thorough debriefings so that (in addition to the ethical imperatives) introductory students learn something of substantive value from their experiences. Indeed, my own interest in experimental social psychology was gestated in part from participating in a study of self-serving biases as an undergraduate majoring in chemistry at the time.
- 3.
Ideally this kind of conceptual and historical framing should be provided in introductory psychology texts, but I find this lacking in most contemporary books. In my opinion, only the earliest (first and second editions) of Henry Gleitman’s classic Psychology (Norton, originally published in 1981) approximated what I believe should be standard fare in this regard. I currently use the 2nd edition of Psychology by Schacter, Gilbert, & Wegner (Worth, 2010) because it is fairly rigorous and student friendly (i.e., easy to read and peppered with contemporary examples from popular culture and humorous throughout).
- 4.
In a recursive fashion at timely moments in the course; for example, in the first part of the course students learn that continuous positive reinforcement is effective for rapid acquisition of a desired response that is however extinguished rapidly when rewards are discontinued. Then in anticipation of studying different approaches to psychotherapy, I ask students to ponder how token economies designed by behaviorists might work to reduce hoarding by OCD patients, and hope that they can extrapolate from what they learned earlier in the term to posit that token economies based on continuous reinforcement are effective in clinical settings as long as reinforcement persists, and recognize the benefits and pitfalls of this kind of clinical intervention.
- 5.
I offer the examples in this paragraph for illustrative purposes, rather than as an exhaustive account of materials that I have used over the years, or as prescriptions for other instructors.
- 6.
I use printed handouts rather than PowerPoint presentations because my sense is that students are conditioned by massive prior exposure to PowerPoint to pay attention only to bulleted information and doze otherwise.
- 7.
For example, in response to students’ suggestions: there are currently four exams during the semester rather than three in the original version of the course; I do not lecture for one or two class sessions per term to give students an opportunity for careful and thorough reading of the text and associated primary materials; and, students are encouraged to write to me after each exam to provide an intellectual justification for erroneous responses that I then consider and sometimes award credit for.
References
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Solomon, S. (2013). Creatively Teaching Introductory Psychology in Liberal Arts Institutions. In: Gregerson, M., Kaufman, J., Snyder, H. (eds) Teaching Creatively and Teaching Creativity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5185-3_5
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