Department Learning Goals

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Educational Objectives in the Psychology Major

The 21st Century world features themes of limited resources, rapid technological changes, and an increasingly cosmopolitan social environment.  Rather than attempting to assimilate encyclopedic knowledge, applicable at best to only a narrow range of circumstances, students need to cultivate habits of lifelong learning in response to the world’s changing demands and goals.  In psychology, these habits include the development of disciplinary competence as reflected in the acquisition, interpretation, expression, and application of scientific knowledge and skills. 

Our Community Values:

  • We value the richness of the human experience, recognizing the imperative to include individuals from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, identities, and heritages to create the most productive learning environment.
  • We value a scholarly environment that fosters collaboration among colleagues and between faculty and students.
  • We value investing time, energy, and resources to support students’ future career goals
  • We value actions to reduce systemic barriers that have historically limited access to education and careers in Psychology.
  • We value both basic and applied forms of research.
  • We value deep appreciation for the ethical treatment of human participants and non-human subjects and recognize the history of unethical treatment of participants that is embedded in the foundations of our field.
  • We value making research data and resources more transparent, reproducible, and accessible, when appropriate and/or possible.
  • We value the inclusion of contributions from scholars of different backgrounds and perspectives.

Our Departmental Learning Goals:

  1. Acquire and use multiple perspectives to understand mental processes and behavior. 
  2. Apply the scientific method to answer psychological questions following ethical standards of treatment for human participants and non-human subjects. 
  3. Communicate psychological information to scientific and lay audiences following American Psychological Association guidelines. 
  4. Demonstrate critical awareness of how systemic and individual biases – including our own – influence psychological science and practice.