Teaching Tips
Understanding Psychology Deeply
Through Thinking, Doing, Writing
By Michael L. Stoloff and Sheena Rogers
James Madison University
"Teaching is an enactment of the teacher's understanding of what it means to know the field deeply-and how that understanding develops" (Hutchings, 2000, pp. 2-3).
Teachers and students alike achieve a deep understand-ing of psychology in the same way-through doing psychology. We "do" psychology each time we think and write about issues and ideas in our field and each time we act as a psychologist in the laboratory, in schools, in clinical settings, or in the work place. Thus, college teaching, while focusing on central issues in psychology, should give students an ". . . opportunity to engage in the intellectual work of the discipline" (Shulman, 2000, p. 26) alongside their teachers. This column attempts to describe what it means to know a field deeply, and what engaging in the intellectual work of the discipline means for the teaching of psychology. We will argue that our students should be doing psychology and not simply "learning" about it. When they begin to think, behave, and write as psychologists, they will begin to understand psychology deeply.
What Does It Mean to Understand Psychology Deeply?
We doubt that all the readers of this column will agree on what it means to understand a topic in psychology in depth, but that's OK. People who understand a topic in depth think about what is being said as they read and formulate their own opinions about the subject matter. That's exactly what we would like our students to do as they explore the popular press, read textbooks or journal articles, write essays, listen to our lectures and participate in our seminars. We will argue here, however, that as teachers of psychology we should aim for more than active learning for its own sake. Active learning has many goals. We recommend that opportunities for active learning should be explicitly structured with the aim of helping students think like psychologists. In our conceptual model of understanding psychology deeply, students should embrace certain fundamental assumptions and we should raise and return to these themes in the courses we teach.
- Behavior is not random, but occurs in patterns. Students must be able to recognize patterns of behavior in themselves and in others.
- Behavior is predictable if we can identify its causes.
- Many behaviors can be controlled.
- The predictions, causes and controls for behavior may not be known, but they are knowable.
- The ability (or inability) to predict and control behavior raises ethical concerns.
Additionally, to help our students to think, act, and write as psychologists we must assist them in learning how to:
- Formulate questions in a manner that allows them to be answered.
- Draw upon their knowledge of theoretical frameworks, systematic methods, and logic to address their questions.
- Generate and defend the logic of their own theories regarding the causes, prediction, and control of behavior.
- Make connections among things that are experienced independently, like the facts learned in different courses, or between classroom learning and "real life."
- Develop their thinking through writing, and write using the conventions of the discipline.
The fundamental question for college teachers is how do we get them to do this?
Promoting Deep Understanding Through the Curriculum
Scholars of the curriculum have been reluctant to identify specific content areas that must be included in the undergraduate psychology major, but all agree on the importance of developing an in-depth understanding. Quality undergraduate programs develop students who think critically and scientifically about behavior, producing graduates who can evaluate the facts of psychology using scientific methodology. They can see relationships among what they know, write with precision about their ideas, and are prepared to make logically sound and ethical decisions. They can do these things because they have practiced them throughout their undergraduate program.
The Capstone May Be Too Little Too Late
Like many undergraduate psychology programs, we restructured our curriculum following the St. Mary's Model (Brewer et al., 1993). Our sequenced curriculum begins with a general introductory course and a methods core, followed by area courses and electives to provide breadth. We had hoped that in-depth understanding would be promoted in a required capstone experience - the culmination of the major. Looking back, we now realize that for most students, the capstone experience is too little, too late. Students who have rarely explored topics in depth prior to their capstone course have little facility with the process, and graduate before they recognize the limits of our understanding of psychology (not just their understanding of what we taught them). Many graduate having barely begun to think, write and act as psychologists do. The capstone experience would be a better culmination if students already knew how to ask good questions when they started the course, and then spent a semester focusing their intellectual and creative energy, using well-practiced skills, on their capstone topic.
We should note that delegating in-depth understanding to the capstone experience alone was never the intention of the St. Mary's Conference attendees. While they said that psychology majors should study at least one topic in depth (hence the capstone concept), they also recommended developing in-depth understanding throughout the curriculum. They suggested covering less in order to study selected topics in more depth. Therefore, what we will say here is not new, but our recommendations go beyond organizing the sequence of courses that defines the curriculum. We advocate changing the way we teach individual courses within the curriculum.
Building Deep Understanding Within Our Courses
Typical students do not begin a class expecting to develop a deep understanding of the subject matter. They do not expect to learn to think like a psychologist; they expect to learn facts and to memorize key terminology and information. They often feel most comfortable with a class when they can take many notes, and they consider class meetings in which they do not take many notes to be less important. Our textbooks and our lectures encourage this focus on content mastery and over time, the volume and complexity of the content requiring mastery in our discipline has increased dramatically.
But should we let textbook coverage define the content of our courses? We tend to think that we do our students a disservice when we do not include this or that important topic in our survey of the field. How many of us have been heard to echo the apocryphal professor who complained, "If we take time to discuss what it all means, we will never get to X by Christmas", where "X" is the topic of Chapter 15 in the book. If we allow the textbook coverage to define the content of our courses, then we must race through the semester to cover as many topics as possible. We will have little time to promote engagement in the intellectual work of the discipline and to work on the development of our students' deep understanding of the subject matter. There will be no time for students to learn how to generate their own questions, to develop strategies for finding answers, to think hard and deeply about the important issues in the field, to write and rewrite thoughtful and well-developed essays, or to make connections across and among disciplines, between the classroom and other experiences of life.
Teaching Tips: How to Promote Deep Understanding
Change the Course Goals
Abandon the goal of covering the breadth of subject matter now included in the course and drop some topics to allow time to explore those remaining. Be bold! Don't discuss all of the topics in class that you used to, and don't require students to read every chapter in your textbook, or have them read some chapters on their own, that you will not cover in class. Be even bolder. Consider replacing or supplementing portions of the textbook with original sources.
Use Class Time to Promote In-Depth Understanding
Find ways to engage students in active learning during class. Have the class engage in the process of discovery: simulating or conducting research. Have students define critical terms using their own words. Explain the logic of the research that led to findings they will memorize, have students consider the validity of findings, and explore the relationship between one area of study and another. Include informal writing in class.
Technology can help. When you use multimedia technology simply to prepare colorful versions of text transparencies students describe the result as "mind numbing." Used well, however, technology can promote active learning and critical thinking. In my (Stoloff's) large-group Biopsychology class, I explain the theory and procedures of lie detection with materials a former student, Hilary Kissel, helped me develop. Using presentation software and video of a subject in a previously-recorded lie detection session, I present a series of trials during which the subject is either telling the truth or lying. The presentation shows the subject responding to questions, along with a record of their physiological responses. Students decide whether the subject is truthful or not, and report the rationale for their interpretation. While I could more efficiently tell students about lie detection in a straight lecture format, I believe they have a much deeper understanding of the procedures and limitations of the process when they have to think like a psychophysiologist. It is so difficult to distinguish between "truthful" and "lying" trials, students themselves initiate a discussion of the use of lie detection findings in legal proceedings.
Add Out-Of-Classroom Activities that Promote In-Depth Understanding
Require students to participate in activities that challenge them to think outside the classroom and consider group activities that inspire discussion of an issue. Require a long-term project. When they write papers, require multiple drafts and revisions. Demand that students go beyond the standard discussion phrase, "more research is needed" to explain the next logical steps that need to be taken to gain a better understanding of the issue addressed in their paper.
A semester-long project. In Stoloff's Biopsychology class, students act as psychologists in a semester-long group project applying knowledge about behavior to a "real world" problem. Projects typically are designed to inform a non-technical audience. For example, groups have developed web sites, videotaped news magazine reports, illustrated booklets, and written children's storybooks explaining a mental disorder and its treatment. The project has five components:
- Students explore the web and discover current news stories; post a short synopsis and link to the site on a class web discussion board where classmates can respond; see the place of psychology in the world; and generate project ideas.
- Working collaboratively, students formulate the project. Each group member chooses a side of a controversial issue and the group plans a creative project to present and evaluate the controversy. Each group establishes group and individual goals that guide the project through the semester. I ultimately grade students on how well they achieve their own goals.
- Students read primary source materials and write a brief literature review on their topic.
- Students evaluate each other's literature review. (I grade the papers after they are revised and rewritten.)
- Finally, the group develops a single creative product that draws upon the expertise individuals developed during earlier stages of this project.
This project model should work for virtually any psychology course.
Take Time to Build the Skills Students Will Need for In-Depth Understanding
Teach the thinking, writing and other skills you want students to be able to demonstrate by the end of the course. Don't throw students in at the deep end, begin with less complex cases and assignments and raise the challenge level of in-class and homework activities as the course progresses.
The short essay. Rogers has students write, and receive feedback on, a sequence of increasingly challenging short essays in each of her classes. Many of the papers are limited to one page, a constraint that requires careful planning, deep thinking about content, and judicious editing and rewriting - exactly the skills we wish to develop.
- The first essay may require only a careful and precise description of a mechanism or process. The essay is low demand because the student need only understand and report what they have learned.
- Later they will compare and contrast two processes, two experiences or two ideas. This requires that students go beyond the facts learned and think about how the targets are similar and how they are different, make inferences, and draw conclusions.
- The next, more demanding task requires analysis and evaluation as they write a critique of a theory or idea.
- A research proposal follows, in which students must generate new ideas on a topic they have studied and read about, and formulate hypotheses.
- Ultimately, students write a short position paper using all of the thinking and writing skills they have practiced during the semester: thesis development, selection and use of evidence and counterevidence, analysis and evaluation of evidence, synthesis of ideas, drafting, organizing, editing and rewriting.
By the end of the semester, students are very good at this, despite the increasing difficulty of the essays. Have your students save their first essay or paper and their last, comparing and critiquing the two.
Structure Your Evaluation of Student Performance to Reward In-Depth Thinking
Show how much you value in-depth understanding by including graded activities that require more than simple memorization and regurgitation of facts. Expand your grading scheme beyond the multiple-choice format. Short written answers on tests, one paragraph or one-page papers, and web discussion board postings are great! Reward students for explaining complex ideas in their own words, forming connections, and being creative. Flag these events in student writing and explain why you value them. Even within a multiple-choice evaluation you can reward in-depth understanding by asking questions that require students to apply what they know to a new situation. For example, after studying neuroanatomy in Biopsychology I use multiple-choice questions to ask students to predict the behavioral consequences of trauma to a particular part of the brain. Consider having students predict the outcome of an experiment that was not discussed in class but which does have a predictable outcome from the information that was discussed.
Promote These Conceptual Changes Throughout the Psychology Curriculum
To have a powerful impact on student development, we need to instill these attitudes in as many courses as we can. Skills in thinking, acting and writing should be cultivated from the beginning of the program until the student graduates, thinking like a psychologist and like a scientist.
We were going to suggest that faculty select a topic that can be explored from many theoretical perspectives across courses. However, we are rewriting this paper one week after the events of September 11, 2001. Clearly the psychology curriculum at JMU was affected by the events of that day. With a focus on the events of September 11, faculty teaching Personality, Social and Abnormal Psychology began discussing why people behave as they do. Counseling, Clinical and Community Psychology courses focused on people's response to trauma, stress and grief. Developmental Psychology faculty discussed how children perceive traumatic events, and how to help children deal with the events of the day. Perhaps we can teach our students to think like psychologists by exploring significant world events with them, as they unfold. They will learn to think like psychologists as they explore new ground with us.
Summary
When you institute the changes we advocate here, one measure of your success in promoting in-depth learning will be a change in student attitudes. Fact learning and note taking will no longer be their primary expectation of our classes. Students will come to class with questions that are challenging because these will be the same questions researchers in the field are grappling with. Ideally, we will so excite students about the content we teach, that content and its implications will be discussed among students during their "free time." By engaging in the intellectual work of our discipline, in thinking, acting, and writing as psychologists, our students will begin to understand psychology deeply and they will have begun the process of becoming psychologists.
Recommended Readings
Activities Handbook for the Teaching of Psychology (Volumes 1-4). (Various Editors, 1981-1999).
Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Brewer, C. L., Hopkins, J. R., Kimble, G. A., Matlin, M. W., McCann, L. I., McNeil, O. V., Nodine, B. F.,
Quinn, V. N., & Saundra. (1993). Curriculum. In T. V. McGovern (Ed.), Handbook for enhancing
undergraduate education in psychology (pp. 161-182). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Halonen, J., & Gray, C. (2001). The critical thinking companion for introductory psychology (2nd ed).
New York: Worth Publishers.
Hutchings, P. (2000). Promoting a culture of teaching and learning. In D. DeZure (Ed.), Learning
from Change: Landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education from Change Magazine,
1969-1999 (pp. 1-4). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing LLC.
Miserandino, M. (1998). Those who can do: Implementing active learning. APS Observer, 11(5),
24-26.
Perlman, B., McCann, L. I., & McFadden, S. H. (1999). Lessons learned: Practical advice for the
teaching of psychology. Washington, DC: Association for Psychological Science, 1999.
Schulman, L.H. (2000). Teaching as community property: Putting and end to pedagogical solitude.
In D. DeZure (Ed.), Learning from Change: Landmarks in teaching and learning in higher
education from Change Magazine, 1969-1999 (pp. 24-26). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing LLC.
MICHAEL L. STOLOFF earned a PhD in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and taught at Towson State University and Northern Michigan University before arriving at James Madison University in 1981. He currently is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Undergraduate Psychology Program at JMU. Over the years his scholarship has included writing in the areas of biopsychology, forensic psychology, computer use in psychology, and innovations in college instruction and assessment.
SHEENA ROGERS is Associate Professor of Psychology and Coordinator of the MA program in Psychological Sciences at James Madison University. Her PhD is from the Royal College of Art, London. She did post-doctoral work in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and previously taught psychology at St. John's College, Oxford; the University of Nottingham; the University of Sussex; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the editor (with William Epstein) of Perception of Space and Motion (Academic Press) and a winner of the Wisconsin Power and Light Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award.
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TEACHING TIPS provides the latest in practical advice on the teaching of psychology and is aimed at current and future faculty of two- and four-year colleges and universities. Teaching Tips informs teachers about the content, methods, and profession of teaching. Send article ideas or draft submissions directly to Baron Perlman, Teaching Tips Editor, Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI 54901-8601; 920-424-2300; Fax:920-424-1204; or perlman@uwosh.edu.
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