About the 2024 Book Publishing Plan for Teachers:
When you teach an "Introductory Course" on Psychology, do you find it difficult — much harder than it should be especially when compared to teaching classes in statistics or research methods?
Do you easily give a lecture on the sympathetic nervous system, a lecture on Piaget, and a lecture on social cognition, but struggle with linking these topics together for the selfie distracted student?
That was my struggle when I first began lecturing on psychology whereas I found other topics like sociology much easier. How did it feel for you when you found yourself in front presenting a laundry list of research findings rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge?
Have you wondered how to ensure your course is usefully relevant to your students? Honestly?
I have and my struggle to provide an interesting yet, provocative introduction to the topic led me to create my own approach and hence this textbook and website in development (that I now offer to you). Psychology 101 has been in the works (in mind anyway) since the early 2000s and utilizes the dual theme of behavior and empiricism to make psychology relevant to intro students.
Using your feedback, teaching method and practical experience and insight we can round out a combined effort that brings together a new comprehensive learning portal on psychology and mental health complete with lecture videos, self-tests and other highly useful resource materials.
As a social scientist and author-in-chief for this text I've consulted 1:1 with over thirty-five experts and researchers in all aspects of brain and mind, we brainstormed and purposely contributed to this book to help students clearly organize current thinking about psychology at a conceptual level.
Five or ten years from now, I do not expect students to remember all the details of most of what my fellow contributors and teachers will have offered them. However, we all hope that our learners will remember that psychology matters because it helps us understand our own behavior and that of others. In this realization appreciate our knowledge of psychology is based on empirical study.
This book is designed to facilitate real practical learning outcomes, and this effort has used three techniques to help focus students on understanding our distinctive human perspective and behavior:
Chapter Openers: Each chapter will open up student's minds by showcasing interesting real world example(s) of people who deal with behavioral questions and who can use psychology to help them answer them. The opener is designed to draw the student into the chapter and create an interesting in learning about the topic.
Psychology 101 takes the approach of applying the principals of psychology and mental health in everyday life: Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in design for newly written Chapter 7 focuses on Development, ”What makes good parents“ applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini-handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 3 is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world. I relate personally to this because I am a parent of two teenagers who like their Mom are all lefthanded (I'm not!).
Research Foci: Introduction to Psychology emphasizes empiricism throughout, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents two close-ups on research — well articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias), and also help students understand how research really works.
The goal in writing this is to focus on behavior and empiricism and I feel it has produced, a fair and balanced introduction to Psychology 101, a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. Praise the effort!
Now, you don't have to believe me. Check the book out in detail as I present revisions online chapter by chapter or order your desk copy when it is ready in it's final version for publishing.
Thanks again for your interest and support. Michael D. Ratner, PhD
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