Our Top 10 Blog Posts on Education and Psychology From 2018!

A list fascinating books for psychology teachers this summer which will have you prepared and excited for new students this fall. 

Asking the question “what can you do with a bachelor’s degree in psychology?” is a very relevant question to a lot of people. Allow me to assure you from the start that if someone tells you the answer to that question is “nothing,” that answer is patently false. The actual answer is much more complicated and nuanced, and it goes like this — the psychology bachelor’s degree qualifies a person for a large number of jobs, but the degree does not uniquely qualify a person for any particular job.

According to the American Federation of Teachers’ 2017 Educator Quality of Work Life Survey, 61 percent of teachers indicated that their jobs were always or often stressful. Just as alarming, if not more so, 58 percent of respondents cited poor mental health as a result of that stress. Although articles on educator burnout vary in their approach, they tend to focus on the causes of burnout, how to assess the signs of burnout, strategies to prevent burnout, and/or next steps for administrators and teachers. The one key element most, if not all, articles have missed is the true nature of what it means to be burned-out.

Kevin sits at his desk doodling while the other students are eagerly writing their biographical essays. Time has almost run out and it is clear he will have nothing to hand in. You want to light a fire under him and get him motivated, but how?

Insecurely attached children have parents who are not or are inconsistently responsive or empathetic, and have a much harder time taking risks, handling negative emotions, and interacting with others in prosocial ways. The key difference between the parents of securely and insecurely attached children is the degree to which the parents are sensitive to their children’s needs. This combination of sensitivity and responsiveness comprise the two main characteristics of positive parent-child relationships, according to attachment theory.

Teachers struggle to figure out what works and what doesn’t, some quickly adopt any new strategy while others are stuck on worn out ideas that long ago ceased to work. Our students don’t recognize the buzzwords, but they’ve been subjected to numerous educational innovations in various classrooms leaving them with no uniform understanding of how their learning actually works. We certainly don’t know everything, but we can start by making sure that all teachers and students understand the basic processes behind encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. 

Three industrial-organizational psychologists have brought a whole new field to psychology—Dr. Harold Goldstein, Dr. Kenneth Yusko, and Dr. Charles Scherbaum have given the National Football League (NFL) an innovative and evidence-based tool for selecting players during the draft using their extensive research and experience in personnel selection and industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology.

Did you know that an estimated 3.4 million individuals in the United States hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology and that younger psychologists are more racially/ethnically diverse than older ones? The APA Center for Workforce Studies maintains a series of interactive data tools to answer these and other questions about the psychology workforce and education pipeline.

Earlier this year, the APA Council of Representatives approved the Guidelines on Core Learning Goals for Master’s Degree Graduates in Psychology. These guidelines are ground-breaking in many ways: They are the first official guidelines that address core learning competencies in psychology at the master’s level, they come at a time when the number of master’s programs and graduates within the United States continues to grow and they apply to any subfield of psychology, be it neuroscience, cognitive, Industrial/Organizational, or health service psychology.

Today, more than ever, early childhood educators are being asked to provide young children with access to a nurturing, enriched, high-quality environment that will support positive growth, learning, and developmental outcomes for all children. This blog specifically addresses psychological well-being.