Essentials Of Psychology Concepts And Applications

PREFACE
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Welcome to the fourth edition of Essentials of Psychology:
Concepts and Applications. I set out to accomplish three
major purposes in writing this text: 1. To make the study of psychology accessible and en
gaging to beginning students in psychology
2. To provide students with a solid grounding in the
knowledge base in psychology 3. To help students succeed in the course
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The IDEA Model of Course Assessment: Mapping Acquired Skills to APA Learning Goals
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The APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychol ogy Major identify ten major learning goals and sug gested learning outcomes for undergraduate majors in psychology. The learning objectives in this text are mapped onto APA learning goals to ensure that begin ning students in psychology are exposed to core con cepts in the field.
This text offers a unique pedagogical framework, called the IDEA Model of course assessment, which is grounded in the widely used taxonomy of educational objectives developed by renowned educational researcher Benjamin Bloom. Each chapter begins with a listing of learning objectives expressed in the form of action verbs tied to measurable learning outcomes. The action verbs represent four key acquired skills paralleling those in Bloom's taxonomy. The action verbs identify and define or describe represent basic cognitive skills in Bloom's tax onomy (knowledge and comprehension, or remembering and understanding in the revised taxonomy). The action verb apply represents an intermediate level of skills devel opment needed to apply knowledge to real-life situations and examples, and the action verbs explain and evaluate represent the highest or most complex level of skills ac quisition needed to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate in formation (or analyzing, evaluating, and creating in the revised taxonomy).
These action verbs spell out the simple acronym IDEA: Identify... key figures in the history of psychology, parts of nervous system, and so on.
Define or Describe... key concepts and features of major psychological theories.
ychology:
ish three
Evaluate or Explain...underlying processes and
mechanisms of behavior and mental processes.
Apply... psychological concepts to real-world examples. The IDEA model is integrated with the test-item file so that instructors can select items measuring these partic ular outcomes to identify, define or describe, evaluate or
explain, and apply knowledge of psychology. To help students accomplish these objectives, the text adopts a learning-centric approach to help students encode and retain key concepts in psychology. The key stones of this approach include the following concept
based pedagogical tools: ■ Concept Signaling Key concepts, not just key terms, are identified and highlighted in the margins to help
students encode and retain core concepts. ■ Concept Charts These built-in study charts are "see at-a-glance" capsulized summaries of key concepts to
reinforce new knowledge.
■ Concept Links This feature highlights connections between key concepts across chapters. Concept links are integrated with the key concepts in the margins, so that students can see how core concepts are ap plied across different areas of psychology.
Concept Maps for Psychology This online visual learning tool helps students visualize connections between key concepts in the text. Concept maps are available through Cengage Learning's MindTap. Concept maps are schematic diagrams comprising key concepts that are represented in boxed shapes called nodes, which are connected by links that typically take the form of verbs or conjunctions. Unlike other study charts, concept maps can be read either across or down the page to express a coherent knowledge structure. To encourage active learning, concept maps are presented in an incomplete (fill-in-the-blanks) form to engage students in the process of completing these knowledge structures. The answers are also available online.
What's New?
The fourth edition of Essentials of Psychology includes many new features and updates, including the following:
New! Chapter opening author podcasts called Study Cast Previews bring the author's own voice into the