One unusual book I would recommend is "Fables for Developing Skeptical and Critical Thinking in Psychology" by John Marton.

 

This slim volume consists of a series of 10 fictional but completely realistic vignettes which are geared to chapters of most intro psych texts. For example, chapter 1 involves critical thinking (a vignette about a student seeing a psychic-the episode is then deconstructed by another  student applying hindsight bias, illusory correlation, confirmation bias, probability, etc) to the experience of the student who saw the psychic and initially felt the readings were useful predictions.

 

Subsequent chapters are vignettes about consciousness, sensation, perception, learning, memory, etc. Each vignette is quite attention grabbing for students in that the vignettes (fables) involve typical situations that students might encounter (seeing the psychic, seeing an alternate health practitioner, male-female communication confusions, memory errors, typical attributions. In the learning chapter, students are asked to consider and deal with a tantrumming child through the window of operant conditioning and a phobic child through classical conditioning; in the personality chapter students read about and consider how dating and relationships of young couples with various configurations of the big 5 personality traits might work out and what issues might arise, there are also chapters about emotions, psychological conditions etc.

 

What I really like and find useful about the book is that abstract concepts that some students often have real difficulty using are applied to typical, student-relevant and identifiable experiences. Each chapter is followed by a series of questions that closely follow the learning objectives of most intro psych courses for example, Myers' Psychology.

 

I have used this book whenever I had classes of 35 and fewer students for the last 4 years and have been pleased with the increased level of energy, involvement, and general liveliness and improved questioning/discussion in the classes.

 

There has been so much more active learning. Students who are struggling have concepts clarified; the star students can stretch their understanding to new areas. I have used the book both as a basis for discussion and as a basis for brief written exercises to check comprehension (and to motivate students to keep up with the material-if they don't read the text and vignettes they are left out of an engaging discussion).

 

Dennis Ueyama

 

 It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. -Mark Twain

 

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