Professor Ross Roehl

Course Description

This three credit course meets four times each week for twelve weeks during the first semester. In this course, the students discover, from the presented mass of research data, psychological principles pertinent especially to facilitating learning in elementary and secondary students. These psychological principles will be regularly scrutinized and compared to Scriptural principles of learning. This approach will help students completing this course to have a sound Christian foundation in the ways in which students in the classroom learn. When these students become classroom teachers themselves, they should be able to assist a variety of students in the elementary and secondary classroom to reach their educational potential.

Materials

Textbook - Psychology Applied to Teaching, Seventh Edition, Biehler and Snowman, 1993

Access to a computer with word-processing capability

Procedures

Each chapter will be presented by the instructor and discussed with the class. This will allow the student to become familiar with the psychological findings and principles related to the field of education. Studies regarding social, emotional, and cognitive development will be analyzed. Theories of intelligence, computer-assisted learning, classroom measurement and evaluation, and classroom management will be discussed in the light of psychological data presented in the text.

Continual effort will be made to critique all psychological studies and their application to learning from a Scriptural viewpoint. Students can certainly gain valuable knowledge from psychological studies of the scientific community, but they must ever be aware that no human study can supersede the perfect knowledge regarding education as presented in the Scriptures.

Tests will generally be administered following every two chapters. The tests will cover reading in the text, information from selected readings, information from online video segments, items from chapter study material, and notes taken during classroom discussion.

Several class activities will be completed by the student.

Each student will also prepare a major research paper on a topic chosen by the student and approved by the instructor. The format will be that suitable for a presentation at the CLC Teachers' Conference.

Content of Course by Chapter 

1. Applying Psychology to Teaching

2. Stage Theories of Development

3. Age-Level Characteristics

4. Assessing Pupil Variability

5. Dealing with Pupil Variability

6. Understanding Cultural Diversity

7. Devising and Using Objectives

8. Behavioral Learning Theories

9. Information Processing Theory

10. Cognitive Leaning Theories and Problem Solving

11. Humanistic Approaches to Education

12. Motivation

13. Measurement and Evaluation of Classroom Learning

14. Classroom Management

15. Become a Better Teacher

    

Grading

The course grade will be based on the following and weighted as indicated:

Chapter Tests 60%

Research Paper 20%

Class Activities 20%

The following percentages will be used to compute the semester course grade:

05/25/2006