Students majoring in psychology are often required or encouraged to have hands-on experience in the field. One way to gain experience is through an independent research experience (IRE); however, little is known about what IREs actually entail. In an effort to learn about students' IREs, we recruited 117 undergraduates from a Research I university…

Historically, psychology education about disability focused narrowly on psychiatric and cognitive disabilities. Furthermore, disability tends to be viewed from the medical model, rather than the social model endorsed by disability scholars, which describes disability as primarily socially constructed. Course offerings for the psychology…

Classic personality theories, although intriguing, are outdated. The five-factor model of personality traits reinvigorated personality research, and the resulting findings spurred a new generation of personality theories. These theories assign a central place to traits and acknowledge the crucial role of evolved biology in shaping human…

In response to the need to offer undergraduates research experience, the National Science Foundation created the Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program. The number of psychology sites has fluctuated in the Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences between 8 and 12 over the last several years. To increase the number of sites in…

Requiring less planning time and aimed at educating all students and the public, this model emphasizes the conference's student recruiting function, de-emphasizes research papers by scheduling paper sessions for only about 20 percent of the total conference hours, and makes a featured speaker, presentations, dinner, and films the main conference…

Cites the lack of uniform teaching approaches of graduate programs in clinical psychology. Offers a model in which graduate training is designed from empirical data on employer needs and a unified theory of the field. (Author/AV)

A course for teaching an advanced undergraduate course on the psychology of adult development and aging is described and evaluated. Course goals, content, and format are discussed. Students generally viewed the course favorably. (RM)

An experiential model of learning used in a graduate level psychology counseling course to help students develop group leadership skills is described. Students view a videotape depicting scenes that require an intervention. The scenes describe events leading to a choice point, and some kind of leader action is required. (RM)

Research on minimal groups demonstrates that arbitrarily creating 2 groups leads to the development of in-group favoritism. Experiments using the minimal groups paradigm show students how easily in-group biases can be created simply by categorizing others. This article describes an in-class activity that demonstrates the power of categorization.…