Our book, Research Stories for Introductory Psychology, might be used either as a standard text or as a supplement, but we do neither.  We do something different.

We have been teaching Introductory Psychology for a combined total of over 50 years.  Until we wrote this book, we were never fully satisfied with the course.  Prior to Research Stories, classes often seemed different at first, but after a few weeks the honeymoon was over and we would begin to had the same old problems.  Students were inattentive, not engaged by the material, and class cutting became epidemic.  Students did poorly on exams.  We tried everything to remedy this situation including different textbooks, big exams, small exams, attendance policies, group projects, demonstrations, films, in-class written feedback, and small discussion sections.  We now believe that, in spite of bells and whistles, we were doing the same old thing.  Whatever we tried, the students would sit passively, waiting for us to get done with the show.

We also experienced another persistent problem.  Students in our upper-level classes who we previously taught seemed to know almost nothing about Introductory Psychology.

We decided to move away from our past strategies of teaching Introductory Psychology.  We now have three primary goals for our students:

1)      to be actively involved with the material in the classroom

2)      to think critically when confronted with assertions about cognition and behavior

3)      to learn basics that will be used in other classes and in reading professional literature

Our students now meet these goals and here is how we do it:

We tell the students to know every single thing in the book.  The class meets three days a week and we assign a chapter for each class meeting.  We have written the book at a level of detail that makes this a reasonable assignment.  The majority of our students do, indeed, know the book thoroughly.  Is there less in the book than in a standard book?  Yes, much less.  Do our students learn more than in a standard course?  Yes, much more.  They have less reading, but they know this material, and they know it really well.

Our teaching strategy is not the usual lecture approach.  Instead, we call on students by name to answer questions from the Teach Outlines included in this manual.  We also ask any other related questions about the material that we think of while teaching.  Sometimes many questions occur to us, sometimes few.  Frequently, one student’s answer suggests another question.  Occasionally, we “lecture” for a few minutes to give other examples, but we quickly return to asking questions and getting student answers.  While students are permitted to use notes to answer questions, they are not allowed to have their books open or to read from their notes.  We want to know what is in their heads, not what is in their books.  One of our reviewers accused us of exaggerating our claim that large numbers of students come prepared and eager to answer questions even at 8 AM classes.  The students are prepared and they are active.  This never happened until we changed our teaching strategy.

A direct result has been a dramatic transformation in learning.  Grades are much higher.  Students are attentive.  They talk about the material with friends and ask good questions in class and outside of class.  For the first time in our teaching experience, our students are actively engaged and excited about introductory psychology.  Colleagues in our departments say that they can “feel” the presence of our students when, later, they appear in upper level classes.  The difference is that our students know what they have been taught in their introductory course.  Our experience has been replicated by colleagues at our college and at two other universities where the book has been used for several years.  Our goals of active learning, critical thinking, and detailed learning of concepts have been fulfilled.

The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching by Questioning:

Students are issued a 6 x 8 index card folded lengthwise.  A felt marker is passed around so that they can make a tent sign showing their last name.  They must bring this sign every day and put it on the desk in front of them.  In this way, they are no longer anonymous.  We carry spare cards and a marker every day because signs get lost.

We teach in a large theatre and want our students to sit near the front where we can see them and others can hear them when they answer questions.  We designate an artificial “back row” in the theatre and tell them that for every day they sit behind that designed row, 1% will be deducted from their final grade.  Starting at the second class meeting, all students sit near the front and we have never had to deduct points for seating.

On the first day of class, we ask the students to print their last and first name on a 3 x 5 index card along with the correct pronunciation of their name if necessary.  We collect these cards and use them for the remainder of the course.  In class, we ask a question and then pick a card from the deck and call the name of the student on the card to answer the question.  We score their answer, on the spot, as correct or incorrect by marking a plus or minus on the card.  If a student is absent when called, the score is a minus.  Students who do not know the answers to questions are instructed to say “I don’t know.”  We respond professionally and neutrally, calling on someone else and marking the card with a minus.  We shuffle the deck at intervals.  While choosing names is effectively random, we occasionally stack the deck to keep the number of asked questions approximately the same for all students.  At the end of the semester, this participation score is calculated as a percent correct and counts for 15% of the student’s final grade.  We believe that social pressure to answer correctly is a more important motivator than the 15%, but we have no good evidence for this belief.  In a typical class meeting, we will call on between 30 and 60 students.

Often we begin the class by asking the students to identify the research method and to explain why they have made this choice.  We give them a simplified list from which to choose that includes:  Experiment, Quasi-experiment, Correlational study, Longitudinal study, Cross-sectional study, Survey, Interview, Case study, and Naturalistic observation.

The notes that we call the “Teach Outlines” are the questions we use as a basis in questioning the students.  If you want to try to teach the class using our strategy, the Teach Outlines will be sufficient to get started.  Because the students are genuinely engaged and active, it is not always possible or desirable to plan to strictly follow the Teach Outlines.  In a way, this is the fun and the challenge for instructors.  Most days we do not get through the entire outline, so we end up skipping questions in order to ask about the most important topics before the class is over.  We often run out of time in class because the students ask us quite a number of questions.  Because questioning is the order of the day, they feel more free to engage us.

In the outlines, the boldfaced portions are our questions.  They are followed by a summary, in normal type, of the answer according to the book.  Students will often give correct answers that are not in the book.  We give those credit and ask the question again to someone else.  Where the question requires an overhead of a figure, it is indicated as “OH--Fig 1.3” or “(Figure 1)” (or whatever the number is) on the outline.  Overheads or Powerpoint presentations can easily be made from a clean copy of the text.  Sometimes we use the overheads of the figures and tables as questions (“Can you interpret these data?”) and sometimes we put them up after a student has described the findings, to reinforce the answer.  Questions in parentheses ask about material not found in the book, but are things students should be able to figure out from the reading.

For particularly difficult questions, we ask the question then--rather than calling a name--we ask for volunteers to answer.  We usually get a forest of hands when we do this, even though we do not give any course credit for volunteer answers.  They know the material and they like to show what they know.  This strategy permits us to ask even detailed, difficult, or speculative questions.

A Less Directive Approach to Teaching Psychology by Asking Questions

We have found that sometimes more mature students do not need to be asked quesitons by name. About the only difference between the description above and the tactics we use in teaching more mature students is that in the less directive approach we ask the questions and wait for volunteers to answer. We mark successful participants on a copy of the attendance sheet. After class we transfer each student's frequency of participation for that class onto the course spreadsheet. In order to avoid a highly competitive atmosphere in the classroom, for calculating final participation grades I award 100% of the points available for participation to students who achieve the class mean or above. Theoretically, if all the scores in the class are tightly clustered around the mean, all students could get nearly 100% for participation. The less-directive approach works well with class sizes up to about 60 students and it is the instructor’s responsibility to ensure that individual volunteers are given a chance to answer at about equal frequencies. We have been doing this with some classes for years. Surprisingly, one or two students usually choose to say little or nothing and, in so doing, forgo the 20% of their grade that participation can give them.

The Primary Pitfall

As experienced instructors, the most difficult part of the change has been to lecture much less and ask more.  Many things that we might otherwise tell them can instead be asked.

We would be happy to share experiences of this type of teaching with anyone who is interested. We can be reached at:

Joshua Duntley Email: joshua.duntley@stockton.edu

Instructors: If you would like to receive jpeg files of the figures and tables in the textbook, email me and I will send them to you.