Analysis: As instructor of record, I had a lot of control over what material I would cover in my classes. My starting point was the course description. After that, I had free reign to choose whatever learning objectives I thought would be important for my students. I started with how to best fulfill these learning objectives. Understanding psychology as a discipline was most important, but I wanted to make sure every presentation had the opportunity to incorporate scientific skills, personal growth, and diversity awareness.

Going into my first semester teaching, I was guessing what my audience (the students) would look like and what they would be be expecting to learn in my class. (I couldn’t do a “test run,” after all!) I quickly figured out that the most efficient way to determine what would keep my students engaged was to ask them. After we covered a broad overview of material in week 1, I posed the question: What are you excited to learn about this semester?

Design: I chose to follow a traditional tell-and-test format for this class, as students had access to outside resources (the textbook, online learning platform, and tutoring) for other avenues of learning. We would focus on “soft skills,” like finding and critiquing research articles. I expected other science classes, including upper-level psychology classes, to focus more on the “hard skills.”

Development: I tried to balance interesting content and information that was essential to understand about psychology. Some PSY 101 content can be especially boring or confusing, and the study of intelligence and cognition is no exception. Following my learning objectives, I decided to include particular slides dedicated just to diversity awareness. In some lessons, I also included scientific skills and personal growth as separate slides. However, for this lesson’s material, I decided to keep it integrated with the informational slides as these learning objectives meshed well with the content itself.

I sourced information included in these slides from the textbook and/or peer-reviewed journal articles about the subject. 

Implementation: As both the designer of the course materials and the instructor herself, I had the opportunity to personally see the implementation phase of my slides. I had multiple moments across my teaching career where I pulled up a slide and immediately went, “Wait – what material am I supposed to be talking about here? What is this bullet point supposed to mean?” This first-hand experience on which slides were unclear gave me excellent feedback on updating my slides in the evaluation phase.

Evaluation: The slides you see here are the updated result after teaching three semesters (2-3 classes every semester) of PSY 101. My first semester, I had designed the first few weeks worth of slides myself, but soon (under a full-time grad school workload) reverted to using slides provided by the textbook publisher. In my course evaluations, I heard loud and clear: “I liked the earlier presentations better! They were easier to follow and specified important keywords.” The publisher-provided slides were just as educational, but some students found them confusing as they were more generic and less stylized. Got it! I can do stylized.

Throughout these slides, I did my best to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means 150% line height, with an additional gap between “paragraphs.” An individual instructor, with better knowledge of their students’ needs, might chose to remove the extra line spacing and replace it with a larger font size. Every slide has a unique slide name and every image has an image description (including graphs!).

Slides should be high contrast (so students with visual issues can easily read them), but not too much contrast (as some individuals find high contrast distracting and uncomfortable to look at). Thus, I chose to use black text on a light gray background for the majority of slides. I used a white background on a few slides due to the inclusion of graphs or images with a white background. This was for aesthetic reasons; as these slides are only occasional, they shouldn’t be too grating.

I regularly included slides that “alternate” the contrast between the text and the background. Since the majority of my slides use black text, I occasionally create a slide with white text. This is to avoid afterimages or discomfort caused by retinal fatigue and give everyone’s eyes a break.

Finally, when including decorative photos or clip art in slides, I intentionally use images that visibly represent a wide variety of social and ethnic backgrounds. As I was teaching at a very racially and ethnically diverse university, I wanted my students to see themselves represented on my slides. Research has well established that representation provides psychological benefits, which would only help my students learn.

In these slides, I cover the history of the studying intelligence in the field of psychology. This presentation was part of a larger course which, itself, was part of a much larger institution. The vast majority of my students would not be taking my course in isolation. Instead, they would have a wider context of other courses that covered much of the material I was not covering. Because of this, I assumed my students would already be familiar with basic concepts like what a ‘mean’ is, how to interpret basic graphs, and how IQ scores are a measure of intelligence.

IQ scores are an important part of this history and are still a useful tool today. However, IQ tests have many flaws, some of which negatively impact particular sociocultural groups. I took this opportunity to integrate one of my learning objectives, diversity awareness, into a presentation mostly absent of that topic. Once I decided to cover how members of certain racial and ethnic groups score lower on IQ tests on average (and, most importantly, why they score lower), I worked backwards.

First, I wanted my students to understand the magnitude of scoring “15 points lower” on an IQ test. (i.e., What does that 15 points represent?) This gave me the chance to explain normal distributions and standard deviations, which are essential to comprehending IQ scores. I didn’t expect my students to come away from my course with an excellent understanding of introductory statistics. Instead, I set a foundation for other courses that would cover these topics in more depth. I just needed my students to understand statistics well enough to understand IQ scores. This meant I could focus on statistical concepts instead of the math.

On slide #30, for example, I used 4 different ways of conceptualizing a standard deviation. This includes a technical definition, a numerical description, a visual aid, and a description of standard deviations “in action.” Like many areas of statistics, standard deviations aren’t necessarily intuitive, and I’ve found that some students don’t “get it” without multiple types of explanations. In college, I was one of these students; it took me multiple classes to actually get what a standard deviation represents.

In a different strategy, for the graphs I used to explain IQ scores, I tried to start with the simplest ones first (i.e., “this is the shape of a normal distribution”), and work up to more complex visual aids. Some of the graphs I used repeatedly; I didn’t expect my students to memorize or understand them immediately. I also included arrows labelling different parts of the graphs as we progressed through the presentation.

Out of this entire presentation, I would say this section of slides required the most trial-and-error. I needed to explain statistical concepts in enough detail for students to understand them without taking up an excessive amount of time in a course that was not about statistics. I received some feedback during course evaluations about my slides, but the majority came from students themselves, asking clarifying questions during class or over email. Seeing what questions my students had helped me figure out exactly what information and types of explanations I needed to include in my slides.

As I followed a traditional lecture format for this class, I knew even the most interesting educational content wouldn’t keep most students focused for over an hour straight. I like to include participation activities in the back 50-90% of a lecture, to help draw bored students back into the material and provide a break from listening-and-learning. I also mark when participation activities will be occurring on each slide. This lets students know they’re about to get a “thinking break” while also reminding me, the instructor, when to include them.

The majority of my students were teenagers, so I liked to include some content that’s “silly” while still being educational. Topical memes and slang are an excellent way to approach this for teenagers. However, memes and slang can very quickly become out of date in the age of the internet, changing from silly to “cringy.” Because of this, I regularly swap out any memes or examples of slang to stay up to date. For example, on slide #14, the example slang of “eepy” and “sus” used to be “we stan” and “tf.” Another example of keeping a presentation topical is the participation activity on slide #27, where students are presented with an AI-generated image; something they are more and more likely to encounter.

Some slides have questions that students may answer that are not labelled as participation activities, like the Flaws in Reasoning slides. This is because I intend participation activities as a moment to stop the class and work on each activity individually or in small groups. Singular questions included on a slide are rhetorical or can be answered by 1-2 student before moving on.

This is a combination of learning objectives suggested by my university and ones I personally developed.

1. To develop an understanding of the discipline of psychology. This includes knowledge of: (a) its origins and important contributors, (b) basic terminology and concepts, (c) major problems and research findings.

2. To develop scientific values and skills. This includes: (a) an understanding of research methods, (b) acquisition of a critical attitude, (c) stimulation of intellectual curiosity about behavior, (d) use of library resources to find and evaluate psychological information.

3. To foster personal growth. This goal is impossible to assess and often difficult to perceive, but you should be able to: (a) sharpen your self-awareness and self-understanding, and (b) increase your understanding and tolerance of others’ behavior.

4. To enhance diversity awareness. This includes recognizing, understanding, and respecting the complexity of: (a) sociocultural differences, (b) international diversity, (c) the experiences of underprivileged groups.

Developing scientific values and skills. In these slides, I chose multiple avenues to help my students develop a critical and analytical attitude. The Language Acquisition slides, for example, describe the major competing theories that existed in the 1950s and how evidence eventually bore out one of them to be more accurate. (Other lectures from this same class cover how sometimes both theories end up being correct.) In the Intelligence section of the slides, students have the opportunity to engage directly in this critical analysis, following along the process where the field of psychology figured out that IQ score isn’t determined by race.

Fostering personal growth. Slide #14 discusses code switching (a topic entirely absent from the textbook) which is relevant to many students. For students who code switch  between home and school/work, they might be unaware they do so, and this slide might cue them onto the term for this phenomenon. For students who don’t code switch as much, this slide will alert them to the fact that code switching exists and other folks engage in it.

Enhancing diversity awareness. Another example of content not present in the textbook is slide #6, which covers sign languages. The primary purpose of this slide is so explain that ASL (and most other sign languages) aren’t word-for-word copies of a spoken language. They have their own unique grammar and structure. Learning information like this – something that is universal and obvious to members of the Deaf community – prevents cultural misunderstandings and broadens students’ awareness of underprivileged groups.  I further expand on this topic in slide #10, where I mention how not teaching Deaf children language early on can have permanent neurological and cognitive effects. Many folks without a connection to the Deaf community aren’t aware of this fact.

“Introduction to psychology, including introductory treatment of sensation-perception-cognition, physiological psychology, learning, personality, development, social psychology, assessment, and history.” This was provided by my university.