I've been teaching biopsych at our local university for the last 8 years or
so. Here are a couple of thoughts off the top of my head (it's near the end
of our semester so some of this is fresh in my mind).
The biopsych class here is small - it's not required for psych majors but is
one of 3 upper level classes they can choose from for a major (the others
being cognitive psychology and I believe, learning). I usually have no more
than 20 students/class.
1. If students interested in biology are aware of the class, you may have
biology majors in the class as well. Unfortunately, this sometimes puts the
psych students at a disadvantage as some of the initial material is already
familiar to biology students (descriptions of neurons and glial cells;
in-depth lecturec on the action potential; the idea of receptors and
neurotransmitter release; receptors; steroid hormones, etc). In addition,
the biology students typically have the type of study skills necessary for
doing well, at least in my class. I try to inform students that this class
involves a lot of new terminology and while there are theories and/or
hypotheses to learn, there are a lot of hard facts involving new, sometimes
frighteningly long, terms.
2. I try to reassure the psych students that there is a foundation of
information that they must learn at the beginning of the class before we can
more on to material that is likely to be much more interesting to them.
They must understand the idea of agonists/antagonists before they can
understand how the drugs for schizophrenia work. They must understand the
idea of neurotransmitter release before they can understand drug abuse.
They must understand basic information about steroid hormones before they
can understand sexual differentiation and so forth.
3. I try to use a lot of visual aids since the class is lecture only. I
even use corny things like a small bottle filled with water to indicate how
much cerebrospinal fluid humans have (I put in a drop of red food coloring
and joke about how difficult it was to draw this out of someone). I use my
own analogy of a cat vomiting to illustrate the differences between spatial
and temporal summation (if you're really interested, I'll describe this!).
I use a styrofoam wig head with big red lips drawn on to indicate
directional terms (ventral, dorsal, etc.). I ask questions in class in the
middle of lectures, typically fact questions and then just wait for answers
(Do sodium ions move into or out of the neuron at the beginning of an action
potential? ) - I do this a lot at the beginning of the semester and then
students become accustomed to it and it becomes a review.
I'm definitely interested in hearing others' responses. By the way, I use
Kalat's text, Biological Psychology. I'm familiar with Pinel's and I
believe both of these are about the same difficulty level.
Oh yeah, one other thing - I try to work up special lectures on topics
students are interested in (I ask for notecards with this information at the
beginning of the semester). This semester, after the sole male student in
the class withdrew, I spent an much longer than usual time on sexual
differentiation and gave new lectures on premenstrual syndrome and hormone
replacement therapy after menopause - all because the students really were
interested in these topics.
Sherry Ferguson, Ph.D
Research Psychologist
National Center for Toxicological Research/FDA
3900 NCTR Road
Jefferson, AR 72079
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