An introduction to the special issues on teaching the introductory psychology course.

Abstract

aaa John Cacioppo once said that teaching introductory psychology is fundamentally different from teaching other courses. In other courses, teachers shape people's careers: In introductory psychology, teachers change people's lives. That is a heavy responsibility.To fulfill that responsibility, the American Psychological Association's (APA) Board of Educational Affairs has, over the last decade, commissioned working groups to set a national agenda for introductory psychology. Through the APA's Introductory Psychology Initiative, experts produced the first comprehensive guidance on course design, instructor training, and student success . These special sections of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology represent a continuation of the effort to ensure that introductory psychology reaches its life-changing potential.The first special section, published in the current issue of the journal, includes four articles that provide a broad overview of the Introductory Psychology course as it currently stands and as it might be envision based on the APA's Introductory Psychology Initiative. Another special section will be published in the next issue of the journal. The second special section consists of five empirical studies of instructional methods used in the course.The nine articles in the special sections on teaching the Introductory Psychology course represent a wide-ranging sample of scholarship on the teaching of psychology, but several themes stand out. The first theme, succinctly stated by Altman et al. (2021), is that "teaching introductory psychology is hard to do." Despite the course's long "roster of contemporary problems" (Halonen et al., 2021;Richmond et al., 2021), a second theme in this special issue is the wealth of resources available to teachers. Instructors seeking to overcome the challenges of introductory psychology will find pedagogical experts, textbook materials, guidebooks, websites, social media, and professional conferences dedicated to the course (Altman et al., 2021;Grewe et al., 2021;Halonen et al., 2021). And of course, each article in the special sections represents yet another resource.Another key theme in special sections is the importance of engaging students. Engagement predicts introductory psychology students' performance in the course and their interest in the field (Yust et al., 2021), so it is worthwhile to increase engagement by using a variety of teaching methods (Richmond et al., 2021), giving students opportunities to interact (Cavazos et al., 2021), organizing the course around important themes (Halonen et al., 2021), and assigning creative and rewarding work (Altman et al., 2021;Prevatt et al., 2021). In short, to boost performance and interest in psychology, design engagement into the course.Students who feel like outsiders may not be engaged by introductory psychology, so another theme is to foster students' sense of belonging. Like engagement, belonging predicts course performance (Yust et al., 2021), but students vary in how much they connect with their classm...

Not Quite on the Same Page: Comparing Key Terms in Introductory Psychology Textbooks

“…For many undergraduates, IP is the only psychology course they will ever take. For many instructors, it is the course with the power to change lives (Cacioppo paraphrased in Boysen & Becker-Blease, 2021). Given that textbooks shape the content and structure of IP (Griggs & Christopher, 2016; Richmond et al, 2021), picking the right one seems a critical choice.…”