Psych Gripes 2: Three Teaching Problems

This may be the most subjective set of gripes in the series, because colleges and universities have such wide latitude in this area. Here’s the introductory post for this series.

My focus is primarily on Introductory Psychology, because it’s a foundational course required by a wide variety of majors and programs. And rightly so—it’s important to understand the essentials of human functioning, including our malfunctions and dysfunctions, plus the many factors that can contribute to them. My first experience teaching Intro Psych was during grad school at Ohio State (OSU); since then I’ve taught it at community colleges (CCs 1 & 2) and a private, Catholic university (CU). I’ll include my own undegrad experience (MU) with the course in my comparisons:

• MU: four-credit course over one semester (15 weeks); course met for 50 minutes four days/week; participation in 4 hours of experiments required.
• OSU: five-credit course over one quarter (10 weeks); course met for 50 minutes five days/week; participation in experiments required.
• CC1: two three-credit courses over two terms (I think they were quarters); each course met for 50 minutes three days/week; no experiment participation requirement.
• CU: three-credit course over one semester; course met for 75 minutes twice a week; no experiment participation requirement (that I recall; I could be wrong).
• CC2: three-credit course over one semester; course met for 75 minutes twice a week; no experiment participation requirement.

With the exception of CC2, all of these schedules allowed me to cover all the chapters in the textbook. At OSU and CC2, instructors were not permitted to choose their textbook. At CC2, instructors were required to follow a general Intro Psych course syllabus that dictated which chapters from the required text were to be covered in the course. The chapters on consciousness; sex, gender, and sexuality; and sensation and perception were not taught. So with this background, let’s dive in.

Inadequate Course Time

Only CC1’s schedule gave me enough time to present each topic adequately. It had drawbacks, though: students weren’t always able to take the second course with the same instructor they’d had for the first; and instructors had to deal with issues arising from new second-course students not having been taught first-course material the way they preferred. (The primary issue I remember is not as much focus on research methods and ethics by other instructors, at least according to their students’ reports.)

I expect course time is an issue for many intro-level courses. When one’s surveying an entire field of study, some degree of juggling has to happen to fit everything in. When the course covers the whole of human functioning, those decisions are especially agonizing, because they mean that some students aren’t going to get information that’s particularly important or relevant to their area of study. For example: a lack of focus on philosophical theories and assumptions in Intro Psych might not provide humanities students enough context to develop their analytical skills or see connections across fields and eras of human history.

Relatedly, developmental psychology seems to be a victim of compression. MU covered the life span over three three-credit courses; CC2 dashes through it all in one three-credit course.¹ In some ways, teaching Dev Psych was rougher than teaching Intro Psych for me. Many of my students were planning to work in health care or education; they need a more thorough treatment of the area than was possible in a 15-week course.

As a relatively young discipline, psychology is still growing. In my undergrad program, courses on human sexuality and “sexual deviance” (as it was termed back then) were in the sociology department; my abnormal psychology course didn’t address them in depth. I don’t think forensic psychology existed; or if so, it wasn’t a common subject. Neuroscience and artificial intelligence have expanded significantly as technology has allowed us real-time, detailed access to brain activities. Today, cyberpsychology or internet psychology is a rapidly growing area in the subfield of social psychology.

As human functioning changes, so does psychology. Every time a new subfield reaches critical mass, that means it needs to be squeezed in to existing course structures and schedules, and in to textbooks that also have constraints on what they can cover. We’re running out of room to do this.

Scattershot Textbooks

While in grad school and later teaching at CU, I enjoyed being able to peruse many different textbooks. At OSU, I developed a short list of topics that were my quality indicators for a text. It included: discussing theories/assumptions where appropriate; the presentation of a few landmark studies; and whether certain psychologists were listed in the references. Too many dings and the text was off my candidate list. If all my criteria were met, I had to evaluate whether the text was suitable for my average student. If not, I’d select a more approachable text and use the more rigorous one as a resource for updating my course materials.

Even back in the 1980s, many Intro Psych textbooks were turning to an “infotainment” model rather than maintaining academic rigor. For a few topics², it got so bad that I crawled OSU’s libraries for the original research papers, so that I could present the work accurately. That remained a problem through my last teaching job, which I left in 2021. Being a research and data nerd since my teen years, I know I’m in the long tail of the distribution here; but still, there’s no need to sensationalize landmark research.

A larger problem is the bias for including the latest research findings in textbooks. How is a student who may have just learned about the existence of operant conditioning supposed to understand and critically evaluate a series of experiments completed a few years ago? Ping-ponging between foundational research and the latest work doesn’t provide students enough information to contextualize them. Plus there’s the pesky issue of replication of psychology research. That latest provocative study may turn out to be unsupported by subsequent research. And that leads to my final gripe here.

Lack of Theoretical/Research Grounding

Overall, the first chapter of most Intro Psych texts quickly cover three topics: a history of the field, which usually focuses on major names and theoretical perspectives; types of psychologists and what they generally do; and psychology’s research methods and ethics. It’s too much disparate material thrown at students too shallowly—especially when instructors default to exam questions that focus on names and dates, rather than more substantive topics.

Some texts do return to theories again when taking up a specific topic, but generally not with sufficient detail to satisfy me. Is it really of value to have students memorize the definitions of functionalism and structuralism, while ignoring the ongoing battles between rationalism and empiricism? It matters not just academically, but also in terms of developing testable hypotheses within a theoretical framework, and evaluating research findings across different frameworks. Part of this stems from the differing meanings of the word “theory,” which the lack of time to dive in to in Intro Psych compounds.

Similarly, throwing out a list of the types of studies psychologists rely on for their research without providing any context for thinking about their relative strengths and weaknesses is problematic. Judging by the way the phrase “randomized controlled trials” is tossed about in nonscientific writing, I’d be surprised if a plurality of laypeople know how rare they are in psychological research, much less why.³ Based on my limited interactions with fellow OSU psych grad students in areas that aren’t heavy in quantitative research, a nontrivial number of them didn’t understand this either. No surprise that some faculty in those areas shy away from getting into research methods very deeply in their courses.

Conclusion

Like most survey courses, Intro Psych has too much to cover in the time allotted. Due to the nature of the topic, however, shortcomings in this course may have deeper repercussions for students than other intro courses—especially since Intro Psych is the only psychology course many students will take.

Instructors have a difficult balancing act with the course. Teaching straight from the textbook is easier and may yield better grades for students and better evals for the prof, but even the best text can’t cover everything well; and this approach gives instructors little space to share their expertise. Trying to go beyond the text may confuse some students, and it may anger those who want to put in the least amount of work possible to get the grade they want or need (e.g., to get accepted into a program or to keep financial aid).

To top all this off, many Intro Psych instructors are adjunct faculty, who tend to be more overworked and vastly underpaid compared to their full-time faculty colleagues. They may not feel as invested in the school’s mission or very supported and included, which can influence the quality of their teaching. That said, I know firsthand of many highly dedicated, principled adjunct faculty whose first priority is their students’ learning, despite the additional challenges they face. I used to be one of them.

According to statistics I found (but did not bookmark, alas) when I started teaching at CC2, intro psych is the second on the list of most often failed college courses, after the introductory English course. I think my gripes above partly address why that is, and I think they can be summarized in one phrase: lack of adequate context. To be understood, psychology needs to be taught as the dynamic, interrelated young field it is, rather than as a hodgepodge of facts and ideas.

1: Community colleges do have constraints that universities don’t, chief among them being that their course credits need to transfer to a four-year school to be of maximal value to many students. Many CC students have time and/or financial constraints that may not be as severe for uni students; so a CC has to balance these factors. It’s sad that academic rigor is getting sacrificed in that process. (back to the paragraph)

2: the case study of Phineas Gage; presenting Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning research; presenting Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority; and Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, among others (back to the paragraph)

3: Here’s a good starting point for any reader having problems with this: how can a psychologist randomly assign research participants to groups such as sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status? (back to the paragraph)