Retooling psych 101

More than 1 million students take introductory psychology each year, making the course a prime opportunity to showcase the value of psychology as a science and draw in future psychologists. Now, a team of psychology educators is working to make better use of this key entry point.

“Intro psych is a spokesperson for our field,” says Bridgette Martin Hard, PhD, who develops the course’s curriculum at Duke University. “For most college students, intro psych is the first and often the only point of contact they have with psychology. It’s so important to get this class right.”

Hard and 21 other teachers are addressing this challenge as members of APA’s Introductory Psychology Initiative. They are creating guidance on how the thousands of introductory psychology instructors in the United States—whether high school or college level—can most effectively teach the class. The team will summarize the latest research, conduct new analyses on effective teaching practices and provide evidence-based recommendations in four areas:

• What students should learn in introductory psychology and how to best assess whether they have learned it.
• How to design a course that engages students and maximizes their learning.
• Training and professional development resources for teaching introductory psychology.
• Which methods most effectively help students study introductory psychology and how the course could lead to improved outcomes, such as student retention.

The APA initiative also seeks to ensure that psych 101 reflects the range of psychology—science, applied domains and more.

“By necessity, intro psychology has to be a broad class because we want to showcase that psychology can answer so many different questions about human behavior,” says Hard. “But that can make the course feel overwhelming, like a bunch of disparate topics that aren’t connected to each other.”

Instructors can avoid that problem by using engaging teaching methods, presenting content in thematic groups and helping students create connections with their own lives, says Oregon State University psychologist Regan A.R. Gurung, PhD, who teaches introductory psychology and co-chairs the APA initiative with Garth Neufeld of Cascadia College in Bothell, Washington.

“My goal is to make every psychology class so exciting that students want to share information with someone they know,” says Gurung.

Creative alternatives

Psychologists working on the initiative say there are many ways to better highlight the breadth and scientific basis of the field.

“We are uniquely positioned as a science to speak to so many things our students will face in the world,” says initiative member Katherine Wickes, PhD, of Blinn College District in Bryan, Texas.

At The Ohio State University, for example, up to 70% of introductory psychology students are in their first year of college, making the intro course an ideal time to introduce effective study skills, says initiative member Melissa Beers, PhD, who directs Ohio State’s introductory psychology program. Each year, more than 3,000 Ohio State students take the course, which covers many traditional intro topics but also includes how students can apply what they are learning to their lives. Students also participate in research studies to get a firsthand understanding of the scientific process, she notes.

Similarly, initiative member Jennifer Thompson, PhD, who teaches online courses for working adults at the University of Maryland Global Campus, includes concepts students can apply at work, such as managing teams and understanding relationship dynamics. To design her course, Thompson outlined what students should take away from the material each week, then chose media and assignments to support those learning outcomes.

At Duke University, Hard broadens students’ ideas about psychology by using a thematic approach. One such theme is “the mind constructs reality,” in which students learn concepts from perception, memory, social cognition and clinical psychology. For example, it’s through this lens that students learn about memory misattribution—the attribution of memories to incorrect sources or believing that you have seen or heard something you haven’t.

A flexible framework

When the initiative’s guidance is released at APA 2020 in Washington, D.C., it will offer a flexible framework that creates a common baseline but gives departments and instructors leeway to design a course that works best for their context. Intro courses, initiative members note, vary in class size and format, the typical learning goals and skills of students, and instructors’ background and expertise.

“There’s not going to be one right answer,” says Wickes, “but many good answers.”

To develop the framework, the group will build on existing work and conduct three new studies: a survey of more than 1,000 intro instructors, a correlational analysis of their students’ outcomes and an experimental study with volunteer instructors using its draft framework.

The group plans to publish journal articles on the three studies, a book to summarize best practices and professional development resources for instructors that will include concrete examples. For example, they’ll post sample assessments to the APA Project Assessment website at http://pass.apa.org. The resources are a key component, notes Beers, because there are few teacher training and professional development opportunities, especially for adjunct faculty and graduate students.

“We have many wonderful tenure track, adjunct lecturers and grad students out there teaching the course,” says Gurung, “but they need support from their departments to teach this very important course well.” The initiative’s aim is to galvanize the discipline to provide that support and to produce the resources instructors need.