Introductory Psychology is a survey course. Although a lot of the material students cover may seem quite detailed and overwhelming to them at first, they are actually just going to touch the surface of ten different areas in the field of psychology. What they are going to find out as this course progresses is that experimental and research psychologists study people. That's one of the reasons that so many programs strongly recommend, or even require, that students take an introductory psychology class. Think about this. When someone buys a car, or a computer, or a TV, or whatever, they probably spend at least some time looking through the owner's manual, finding out how the darn thing works and what to do if something goes wrong. Your introductory textbook, and this course, are like an owner's manual for people. Students are going to find out how they work and how things can go wrong. Psychology is a search to understand what makes normal, everyday people behave the way they do. Most people go through life on auto-pilot; they seldom stop to reflect on their own behavior, or the behavior of others, unless that behavior is strange or out of the ordinary.
UW Colleges Catalog Course Description for PSY 201: Introductory Psychology - 4 credits. Survey of major content areas in psychology. Topics include research methodology, learning, memory, cognition, biological psychology, sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, development, personality, psychopathology and social psychology. Students may not receive credit for both PSY 201 and PSY 202. This course fulfills the UWC requirement for Social Sciences (SS).
Students will start this course by covering the basics of how psychologists study behavior and mental processes. And then they'll look at how their nervous system and brain work, and the ways they take in information from the environment, and process that information in their brain. This will take the first third of the semester.
Once students have an understanding of the internal workings of their body and their brain, they are going to look at how these processes allow them to remember, learn and interact with other people. This material will all be covered in the middle third of the semester. In the final third of the semester, students will look at some individual differences in behavior, and how those differences might emerge.
The students in this course are going to cover a lot of different areas in psychology, and they will only cover a little over half their text. This is why introductory psychology is considered a survey course. It is designed to expose students to a number of different areas within the larger field of psychology.
Successful completion of this course will enhance students' ability to
By completing this course, students will
It does not matter which one; the ability to create and save *.rtf or *.txt files. All word processing packages can do this; if you don't know how to do it with your package, you can contact the helpdesk by sending an email to uwconlinesupport@uwc.edu, or by calling 877-449-1877.
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William Elmhorst
Kathy Phillipi-Immel
