Introductory Psychology - interactive learning in a large lecture class

This course is the most popular non-required course on campus. Due to this high demand, we offer three sections of the course, two in the fall and one in the spring. The enrollment ranges from 80-110 per section in the fall and 60-90 in the spring, making it the largest class on campus. While colleagues have expressed concern about the class size, we have developed a technique for teaching the course that provides exciting interactive learning in spite of the large class size.

In reevaluating our goals for the psychology curriculum, we realized that what we wanted students to get out of the Intro Psych course was to learn how to think -- like a psychologist. So we revised the course to emphasize critical thinking and communication skills.

We developed a series of class exercise forms which pose questions for students to answer. The students discuss their answers in groups of four, while the instructor wanders around the room chatting with various groups. Every student is thinking, writing, and discussing. After 10-15 minutes in small groups, the instructor leads a class discussion of their answers in which everyone is prepared to participate.

For example, on the first day of class the students are told to introduce themselves to three other students, and discuss the causes of violence. The instructor then calls for and lists their answers on the blackboard, in five columns. The instructor then labels the columns to reflect different theoretical perspectives in psychology (neurobiological, social, cognitive, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological). The instructor uses the students' examples to illustrate key concepts for each of the perspectives.

In a similar manner, many other lectures in the course build on class exercise forms. Other forms focus on study design, a video about the brain, person perception, blood alcohol content, personal needs, AIDS, the Rubin Love Scale, intelligence, type A/B personality, abnormal behavior, treatment methods, and a film on the Milgram experiment on obedience.

The first time that a class exercise form was used, there was so much excitement in the classroom that the instructor was ecstatic. That excitement has continued for both the instructor and the students throughout the past five years that the technique has been used. Course evaluations consistently rate the course as outstanding.