Toward a scientist-educator model of teaching psychology.

Abstract

At some point in the distant past, teaching undergraduate psychology was straightforward. A college professor with a doctorate in psychology gave lectures to a group of young people whose main occupation was being a student. Today, psychologists' vision of what it means to be a quality instructor of psychology has expanded as the contexts in which psychology is taught have become more varied and complex (see chaps. 4 and 5, this volume). The instructor's level of expertise in the discipline, knowledge of and preparation for effective teaching, past experience in teaching roles, personal and cultural identity, and institutional context all combine to complicate the picture. Instructors face different challenges, have different strengths and weaknesses, have access to different resources, and require different forms of support to perform well in their role.Graduate programs in psychology will serve their students well by preparing them for this complex educational environment with an academic background in teaching per se and professionally supervised teaching experiences. There is much more to being a successful teacher than knowing more 29

Psychological literacy: proceed with caution, construction ahead

“…There has been a call for a “scientist-educator” model of teaching mirroring the scientist-practitioner model for professional psychology. 64 – 66 A search of the PsycINFO database obtained 2,375 hits for the term “scientist practitioner”, whereas “scientist educator” obtained 11. While there are attempts to identify evidenced-based learning (EBL) and evidence-based teaching (EBT), 67 these efforts seem to lag far behind the empirically validated treatment movement.…”

Advancing Scholarly Research on Teaching and Learning

“…Given that documenting teaching using SoTL is also a major improvement over the exclusive use of student evaluations, more departments favor faculty formalizing their assessments using SoTL (Bernstein et al 2009;Hutchings, Huber, and Ciccone 2011). This volume will likely be a good resource for department chairs who want to foster SoTL but who do not have the resources and the training to do so.…”

Benchmarks for scholarly investigations of teaching and learning

“…Similarly, there is now a growing body of literature integrating different variables into a picture of learning. Most recently, Bernstein et al (2010) and Chew et al (2010) provide comprehensive pictures of what is known about the processes surrounding teaching and learning and provide general models that can guide future pedagogical research. Similarly, Shell, Brooks, Trainin, Wilson, Kauffman, and Herr (2010 take concepts from the cognitive, motivation, and neurobiological sciences and use them to set out a unique theory of learning.…”