Honors College Thesis
 

What's Really Important in Introductory Psychology?

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  • Is there a core set of concepts in psychology? Early work identified keywords in psychology by asking textbook authors what concepts were most important to them to understand what was essential for college students' psychological literacy (Boneau, 1990). Much of the early work showed there is little consistency in the key terms used in most textbooks, a finding holding to this day (Slade, Byers, & Gurung, 2023). If there is little consistency, what are the most important terms for students to know? In one of the most ambitious studies, raters performed a content analysis of six general psychology textbooks, taking keywords from each chapter and faculty rated those terms to select the most important (Landrum, 1993). My goal was to put together a list of the most essential terms for psychological literacy and replicate and extend Landrum (1993). I asked college students “How important is it to teach each of these terms or concepts in an Introductory Psychology course?” and to rate terms from textbooks based on the importance of each item from 1 being ‘not important at all to 5 being ‘extremely important.’ I used a set of key terms in psychology from Slade and Gurung (2022) to develop this survey. Results provide a key set of important terms to students, from each chapter of Introductory Psychology.
  • Keywords: Introductory Psychology, learning, teaching
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