What should an Intro Textbook do?

The last post highlighted points from a 2008 article in which I suggested several things were wrong with introductory psychology courses, at least as they are commonly taught in the US. The context of the article was an issue of Journal für Psychologie, dedicated to discussing curriculum and 'paradigm' in psychology, with some emphasis (I was told) on pushing back against the broad trends towards Americanization of the European educational system. Hence, the mostly negative tone of the article.

I am not saying that everyone in the US teaches a bad intro psych class; I have seen some very good intro-psych instructors, and I have seen some adventurous teaching ideas that I suspect lead to very good classes. On the other hand, I am willing to say that there are no great textbooks for intro psych, at least not in the current US market, and that most instructors here follow the textbook. Sure, some of the textbooks are better than others, but frankly even the better ones do not, in my opinion, do a very good job. We tend to think that lower level classes need not be fussed over as much as upper level classes, and this attitude is understandable based on the way our profession prioritizes, and the reward structures we set up. However, as was pointed out, a single semester of Introductory Psychology is the only exposure most students will ever get to our field, and an amazing percentage of US students receive that brief exposure. Graham asked if I could say something more about what I would like to see in an introductory textbook, and I have received similar inquiries from others. I'm not sure I can answer that, exactly, but I can say a bit about what I think the responsibilities the author should be. Hopefully others will join in.

Eight things wrong with Introductory Psychology

While hopping a bit from one blog to another, I ended up on Graham Davey's blog, reading a nice post titled "What ever happened to learning theory." I commented that, learning theory's disapearance from the curriculum in psychology, struck me as one of many problems started by poorly thought out Intro Psych classes, and mentioned my paper "Eight Things Wrong with Introductory Psychology Courses in America: A Warning to My European Colleagues". Graham emailed me in thanks, and asked if I had any more thoughts on Intro Psych and how to fix it. I think I can add a little more, but first I thought I would summarize the article's points here, and for some help from my readers.

As context, before we can analyze the effectiveness of Into Psych, we must have an idea what the class is for. And in determining the courses purpose, we must take into consideration that the course serves as the only controllable exposure most people will have to academic psychology. Unlike other sciences, US institutions do not typically have separate introductory courses 'for majors' vs. 'for non-majors'. We probably should have two separate courses, but in the meantime, so long as the course serves two audiences, I believe it must serves two purposes:

Eco Psych Textbook Project Update 11/2011

Two years ago, I attended the Ecological Psychology meeting in the city of Normal, Illinois. It was hosted by Jeff Wagman, who does solid empirical research as well as solid theoretical work, including two fun papers with David Miller focusing on the similarities between Ecological Psychology and Developmental Psychobiology (see also, the mission statement of this blog). Anyway, at that meeting Bill Mace, long time editor of the journal Ecological Psychology, gave a talk titled "Ecological Psychology Today." His intent was to imagine what one might put in a chapter for the Annual Review of Psychology or a book length reference for the current state of the field. He had some good ideas about the broad topics that would need to be covered (more on that if I can find my notes, or if he will share his slides), but the two main messages I saw in the talk were:

1. The field has grown tremendously since the last big treatments of the field (Gibson, 1979 and Claudia and Carello 1981), and no one is quite sure what the best format for such a treatment would be today.

2. Even if we can determine the format, it is quite possible that no one is qualified to write such a treatment by themselves (the field has simply grown to large). 

That night, I started working on a project. Why not have the whole field write a textbook?

What are Concepts? (Part 1)

Amongst my many pet peeves about Intro Psych textbooks is how they handle 'concepts.' It is not so much that they use the term particularly badly, it is that they do not provide any context (i.e., this is a problem even if we put aside the need to redesign Intro Psych more broadly). In particular, I don't see how 'concepts' make any sense without at least some discussion of 'percepts' - the two ideas are intimately intertwined.

Percepts are the things given by perception / taken in the act of perceiving.

Concepts are the things added to perception / things with the taken.

Traditional and Mainstream Contemporary Views
Most of modern psychology grows out of the tradition of "British Empiricism", at least in the sense that most psychologists assumed that perception gives some sort of atomistic units that must be put together and made sense of through some mental process. They assume that percepts - what is gotten from the world - are, as Gibson would somewhat mockingly say, a "scintillation of sensations", an inherently meaningless array of color points, pressure measures, scent elements, etc. Sometimes psychologists more generously start from something like the stationary retinal image, in which case percepts are a disconnected patchwork of colored shapes, sounds, touches, smells, etc.