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|  | by Jared Keeley
William Buskist
Auburn University
Auburn, Alabama
Marcia Rossi
Tuskegee University
Tuskegee, Alabama
Introduction
What do students remember when they leave our classes? You may remember from your own academic experience that a year after taking a class, you were lucky if you could remember the name of the subject, much less anything that you discussed. We demand so much of our students, and attempt to cram so much information into their brains, that it is no small wonder that all of that information interferes with remembering who Ivan Pavlov was, or what the serial position curve is. In fact, the original memory research by Ebbinghaus (1885) demonstrated that we forget much of what we learn almost immediately. Might students have trouble remembering material from previous courses or semesters years later? A small body of literature suggests that taking a high school psychology course does not seem to improve a student's performance in a later college-level psychology course when compared to students who did not take high school psychology (e.g., Dambrot and Popplestone, 1975; Griggs and Jackson, 1988; Griggs, Jackson, and Meyer, 1989).
This is a sad tale for dedicated high school psychology teachers. If students who took high school psychology show no enhanced performance in college, then what benefits do these students gain? Do these students remember anything at all?
Past research has examined what is commonly taught in the high school psychology course, and so we would expect to find that students would be most likely to remember these sorts of things. Engle (1967) noted that high school psychology textbooks devoted more room to topics such as personality and development rather than to issues such as research methodology and the brain. A more recent study (Ragland, 1992) indicates that the high school course still focuses on development, personality, and mental health issues. Therefore, we should expect high school students to remember more about issues such as development and personality and less about "hard" science areas such as neuroscience and research methods. Although Engle and Ragland found evidence to suggest that the high school course emphasized popular topics, we wanted to survey students about content that was remembered after they enrolled in college.
Methods and Results
On the first day of class, we surveyed 473 undergraduate students taking an Introductory Psychology course at two southeastern universities. Of those who took the survey, 125 students had taken a high school psychology course. We asked these students to report three concepts or terms that they remembered from their high school psychology course. Forty-one students did not respond to this question.
From the remaining 84 students, we received 233 responses. We grouped those responses into common categories. We chose the categories based on common themes that arose within the responses, centered around what would be considered broad topics covered in an introductory psychology class, such as major theories/movements in psychology (e.g., behaviorism) or major historical figures in the field (e.g., Freud).
Over a third of the responses related either to psychological disorders (20%) or Freud and Freudian theory (16%). It could be that these issues are highly interesting to students, and so they remember them better. Beyond these two concepts, the most common single topics students remembered were dreams/sleep (8%) and development (7%). Responses in the dreams/sleep category ranged from mentioning the stages of sleep, especially REM, to dream analysis. Responses that we placed in the development category ranged from prenatal development to childhood stages and adolescence. These concepts are likely to be of interest to high school students as they are just completing these stages, therefore these theories are highly applicable to their lives.
Information about the brain and nervous system (6%), behavioral topics (6%), and Pavlov (5%) were commonly mentioned, and together account for 11% of the responses. Engle (1967) and Ragland (1992) found that these topics were not commonly addressed in high school courses, therefore this finding potentially represents a shift in emphasis on topics.
Perception and personality (other than Freudian theory) accounted for 3% of the responses. One would expect personality to be more frequently cited, because this subject is presumably very interesting for students (Engle, 1967; Ragland, 1992).
References to cognitive psychology, research methods, the nature vs. nurture debate, and emotions each occurred 2% of the time. Similarly Jung, social psychology, drugs, Maslow, and the history of psychology occurred in 1% or fewer of the responses.
Five percent of the answers were miscellaneous references that could not be categorized. These answers generally referred to specific activities or demonstrations that had been done in class. For example, several students mentioned field trips, such as visiting a mental hospital when studying abnormal psychology. It is encouraging, but not particularly surprising, that these sort of "out-of-the-ordinary" activities would be remembered well.
Conclusions
Based on these findings, it seems that the focus of the high school psychology class may have shifted its emphasis from what was found in previous assessments. Reforms (c.f., Ernst and Petrossian, 1996; Hakala, 1999) may have shifted the curriculum of the high school course to more closely match that of the college course, in that some "harder" science topics are being remembered well and core concepts are well represented. This research did not directly assess high school curricula, therefore conclusions about what is being taught are tenuous. However, we believe that these results reflect students' recollections of information presented in class an interest in these topical areas.
References
Dambrot, F. H., and J. A. Popplestone. 1975. "High School Psychology Revisited: Student Performance in a College-Level Course." Journal of School Psychology 13:129-133.
Ebbinghaus, H. Uber das gedachtnis [On memory]. 1885. Leipzig, Germany: Duncker and Humblot.
Engle, T. L. 1967. "Teaching Psychology at the Secondary School Level: Past, Present,
and Possible Future." Journal of School Psychology 5:168-176.
Ernst, R., and P. Petrossian. 1996. "Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools
(TOPSS): Aiming for Excellence in High School Instruction." American Psychologist 51: 256-258.
Griggs, R. A., and S. L. Jackson. 1998. "A Reexamination of the Relationship of High School
Psychology and Natural Sciences Courses to Performance in a College Level
Introductory Psychology Course." Teaching of Psychology 15:142-144.
Griggs, R. A., S. L. Jackson, and M. E. Meyer. 1989. "High School and College
Psychology: Two Different Worlds." Teaching of Psychology 16:118-120.
Hakala, C. M. 1999. "Some Observations About the Current State of High School
Psychology." Teaching of Psychology 26:122-123.
Ragland, R. G. 1992. "Teachers and Teacher Education in High School Psychology: A
National Survey." Teaching of Psychology 19:73-78.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2003 issue of the Psychology Teacher Network newsletter, published by the American Psychological Association. It is reprinted on AP Central through a collaboration agreement between the College Board and the APA.
 APA's Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools
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