PSY8110 prepares students to teach psychology effectively at the college and university level — a skill set distinct from general pedagogy because psychology content presents unique instructional challenges, including students' tendency to confuse psychological science with pop-psychology intuition, the need to teach research methods and statistics alongside content, and the importance of modeling scientific thinking and critical evaluation of evidence. Students develop course design competencies, explore evidence-based instructional methods specific to psychology education, learn to assess student learning validly, and engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as a framework for evidence-based, reflective teaching practice.
Course design, pedagogy, and assessment for psychology instruction
Core topics
- Backward course design: Designing psychology courses starting from desired learning outcomes (Wiggins and McTighe's backward design model) — aligning the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major with course-level learning objectives, then designing assessments and instructional activities that support those objectives, rather than starting from content coverage
- Active learning and engagement strategies: Evidence-based instructional methods that outperform traditional lecture for psychology content — think-pair-share, case-based learning, demonstration experiments (illustrating perception, memory, conditioning concepts experientially), problem-based learning, and the research on retrieval practice and spaced learning as applied to psychology curricula
- Teaching research methods and statistics: The pedagogical challenges specific to teaching psychology's quantitative and methodological content — addressing math anxiety, using real datasets and replication exercises to build statistical literacy, and helping students develop the scientific reasoning skills (distinguishing correlation from causation, evaluating evidence quality) that are central learning outcomes across the psychology curriculum
- Addressing misconceptions: Psychology students enter courses with substantial pre-existing (often incorrect) beliefs about psychological phenomena — popular myths about learning styles, "left brain/right brain" claims, multitasking effectiveness. Refutation-based instructional techniques that explicitly confront and correct these misconceptions are more effective than simply presenting correct information alongside them
- Assessment of student learning: Designing valid assessments aligned with learning objectives — multiple-choice item writing for higher-order thinking (not just recall), rubric design for written work, performance assessments for applied skills, and using assessment data formatively to adjust instruction. Avoiding common assessment validity threats in psychology courses
- Scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL): Treating teaching as a scholarly, evidence-based practice — conducting classroom-based research on instructional effectiveness, engaging with the SoTL literature in psychology (journals such as Teaching of Psychology), and developing a reflective teaching practice that is responsive to evidence about what works
PSY8110 assignments include course design projects, syllabus development, and teaching philosophy statements
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Frequently asked questions
Psychology occupies an unusual position: it is a science whose subject matter — human thought, feeling, and behavior — is something every student already has intuitions and lived experience about, often shaped by pop-psychology media rather than empirical research. Students arrive in introductory psychology courses with strong pre-existing (and often wrong) beliefs about how memory works, what causes mental illness, whether personality tests like the MBTI are scientifically valid, and how learning happens — beliefs that are more deeply held and harder to dislodge than misconceptions in disciplines students have no intuitive stake in, like organic chemistry. Effective psychology instruction must therefore explicitly identify and refute common misconceptions, not just present correct content. Psychology instruction must also simultaneously teach two intertwined things: substantive content (what we know about behavior and mental processes) and scientific methodology (how we know it) — students who only learn findings without understanding methods are vulnerable to accepting unsupported psychological claims throughout their lives. PSY8110 trains future psychology instructors to address both of these discipline-specific pedagogical challenges with evidence-based methods.