As psychology educators, we often have our favorite topics or specialties that we love to teach, but also have areas where we find it more challenging to build student engagement or interest. If you are looking for some new ideas, the Books for Psychology Class blog can help you find new inspiration or a fresh approach for difficult to teach topics.
Think about someone you know who really loves their job. Now think about someone you know who is frequently stressed about their job and dreads going to work. Have you noticed that some jobs appear to be more stressful than others? Perhaps it’s due to working too many hours, a supervisor that’s hard to work for, or a lack of balance between work and life outside of work.
Most enter a career in school psychology to work with youth and families in school settings; address complex challenges; and support student learning and mental and behavioral health. Many school psychologists would agree, however, that the benefits of a career in school psychology extend beyond their reasons for initially becoming a school psychologist.
We continue our exploration of the field of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s Division 14. If you’ve read our recent blogs, you already know that I-O Psychology is the study of behavior in the workplace. I-O Psychologists frequently help businesses better hire, motivate, and retain employees, but they can apply their skills in many other ways.
In this second blog of a new series, we continue interviewing I-O Psychologists about their passion projects to show you how these individuals are applying their training to make a difference in human or animal lives. The first post explored how an I-O psychologist helped the animal fostering program.
Our devices track our behavior in ways that create unimaginable amounts of information, information that can be useful for understanding human behavior. Not surprisingly, the widespread availability of these data parallels an increasing interest in data science and related topics (see Figure 1). Social scientists are increasingly using “big data” to examine theoretically-grounded research questions. Yet, few social scientists, especially psychologists, have the skills and training experiences needed to engage with this rapidly growing area of expertise called “data science.”
Industrial-Organizational Psychology has become the fastest growing field in psychology. Yet, chances are your Introductory Psychology course doesn’t cover it. While there are a multitude of reasons I-O isn’t typically covered in Introductory Psychology courses (not in textbook/curriculum, lack of time, etc.), one big reason is that instructors don’t necessarily consider it a “foundational component” of general psychology.
Much like a crock pot used to cook large meals with minimal effort, data science can be used to improve efficiency, quality, and edibility of your products. Automation, simple algorithms, and machine learning (i.e. using data to create predictive models) are all tools that can be utilized to increase efficiency and accuracy and reduce costs, while visualization techniques help to communicate your analyses clearly and in an easy to digest way.
Although the vast majority of students who declare majors in psychology claim that they aspire to continue their education in graduate school, the reality is that most psychology graduates will instead enter the workforce. The Center for Workforce Studies of the American Psychological Association estimates that approximately 73 percent of psychology majors will end up using the knowledge and skills they acquired in some kind of workforce job after graduation (Lin & Stamm, 2018).
Imagine that you are one of the 125,000 individuals who just earned your bachelor’s degree in psychology. Congratulations. Now what?