This books lays the foundation for prospective teachers to learn about various teaching methodologies and covers material typically found in many teacher training programs. Chapters in the text can be assigned either from beginning to end, as with a conventional printed book, or they can be selected in some other sequence to meet the needs of particular students or classes. In general the first half of the book focuses on broader questions and principles taken from psychology per se, and the second half focuses on somewhat more practical issues of teaching. But the division between “theory” and “practice” is only approximate; all parts of the book draw on research, theory, and practical wisdom wherever appropriate. Chapter 2 is about learning theory, and Chapter 3 is about development; but as we point out, these topics overlap with each other as well as with the concerns of daily teaching. Chapter 4 is about several forms of student diversity (what might be called individual differences in another context), and Chapter 5 is about one form of diversity that has become prominent in schools recently—students with disabilities. Chapter 6 is about motivation, a topic that is heavily studied by psychological researchers, but that also poses perennial challenges to classroom teachers.

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY (3-3-0) Prerequisites: C or better in PSYC 2120 or 2060. The application of psychology to teaching and learning. Emphasis is on practical application in the school setting. Ten hours in field experience required. Designed primarily for education majors. Others admitted at the discretion of the instructor.

People have a deep intuition about what has been called the “nature–nurture question.” Some aspects of our behavior feel as though they originate in our genetic makeup, while others feel like the result of our upbringing or our own hard work. The scientific field of behavior genetics attempts to study these differences empirically, either by examining similarities among family members with different degrees of genetic relatedness, or, more recently, by studying differences in the DNA of people with different behavioral traits. The scientific methods that have been developed are ingenious, but often inconclusive. Many of the difficulties encountered in the empirical science of behavior genetics turn out to be conceptual, and our intuitions about nature and nurture get more complicated the harder we think about them. In the end, it is an oversimplification to ask how “genetic” some particular behavior is. Genes and environments always combine to produce behavior, and the real science is in the discovery of how they combine for a given behavior.

This module provides a basic overview to the assessment of personality. It discusses objective personality tests (based on both self-report and informant ratings), projective and implicit tests, and behavioral/performance measures. It describes the basic features of each method, as well as reviewing the strengths, weaknesses, and overall validity of each approach.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Understand educational requirements for careers in academic settings
Understand the demands of a career in an academic setting
Understand career options outside of academic settings

This textbook is an adaptation of one written by [unnamed original author] and adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee. The original text is available here: http://www.saylor.org/site/textbooks/

This fourth edition (published in 2019) was co-authored by Rajiv S. Jhangiani (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Carrie Cuttler (Washington State University), and Dana C. Leighton (Texas A&M University—Texarkana) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Revisions throughout the current edition include changing the chapter and section numbering system to better accommodate adaptions that remove or reorder chapters; continued reversion from the Canadian edition; general grammatical edits; replacement of “he/she” to “they” and “his/her” to “their”; removal or update of dead links; embedded videos that were not embedded; moved key takeaways and exercises from the end of each chapter section to the end of each chapter; a new cover design. In addition, the following revisions were made to specific chapters:
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology
Chapter 2: Overview of the Scientific Method
Chapter 3: Research Ethics
Chapter 4: Psychological Measurement
Chapter 5: Experimental Research
Chapter 6: Nonexperimental Research
Chapter 7: Survey Research
Chapter 8: Quasi-Experimental Research
Chapter 9: Factorial Designs
Chapter 10: Single-Subject Research
Chapter 11: Presenting Your Research
Chapter 12: Descriptive Statistics
Chapter 13: Inferential Statistics

Reviews available here: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/research-methods-in-psychology-3rd-american-edition