An Analysis of Learning Objectives and Content Coverage in Introductory Psychology Syllabi

Abstract

Introductory psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate courses and often serves as the gateway to choosing psychology as an academic major. However, little research has examined the typical structure of introductory psychology courses. The current study examined student learning objectives (SLOs) and course content in introductory psychology syllabi (N ¼ 158). SLOs were mapped to the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major. Content analysis was based on the principles for quality undergraduate education promulgated by the American Psychological Association. Over 50% of the syllabi contained objectives specific to the science and application of psychology (knowledge base, research methods, and application). Analysis of content coverage revealed instructors spent significantly more time on topics related to physiological and cognitive psychology and spent significantly less time on topics related to the history and scope of psychology, research methods, and developmental psychology. The current study also explored the influence of instructor specialty area on content coverage.

A National Survey of Teaching and Learning Research Methods: Important Concepts and Faculty and Student Perspectives

“…In Health Psychology and Introductory Psychology, the cumulative research highlights the variety and inconsistency of topics, leading to the conclusion that students in different institutions, sometimes even within the same institution, may not be exposed to the same content (Homa et al, 2013; Panjwani et al, 2017). In contrast, our survey findings suggest there is high consistency in what is seen as important in the RM course.…”

The Cognitive Costs of Context: The Effects of Concreteness and Immersiveness in Instructional Examples

“…The material covered is quite broad, class sizes tend to be especially large, and the typical student is close to the beginning of his or her college career. However, despite the course’s breadth of content, it is traditional for instructors to emphasize experimental research methods, and this material is usually presented early in the course to enable students to understand and interpret the empirical studies that form the basis for the remaining class ( Homa et al, 2013 ).…”

An automatic method for assessing the teaching impact of books from online academic syllabi

“…Although many studies of academic course syllabi have assessed pedagogical aspects of courses (e.g., Crittenden & Wilson, ; Homa et al., ; Mishra, Day, Littles, & Vandewalker, ; Pieterse, Evans, Risner‐Butner, Collins, & Mason, ), only one has used syllabi for impact assessment of the cited publications. It gathered citations from online course syllabi for over 70,000 Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now Thomson Reuters)‐indexed articles published in 2003 across 12 science and social science disciplines (Kousha & Thelwall, ).…”