Geoffrey Keppel
University of California, Berkeley
I wish to thank all of you for attending what for me is perhaps my most stressful and trying public presentation. I mean, how would you feel standing up here, about to deliver an address on the art of teaching? Many of you are seasoned teachers yourselves; all of you have some idea of what constitutes successful teaching. What can I tell you that you don't know already? You are experts, and if you are not yet experts, you are sophisticated consumers of numerous classes from kindergarten through graduate training. The best that I can do is to share some of my experiences as a teacher and some of the wisdom expressed by other distinguished teachers with the hope that these comments will foster new ideas, and if not new ideas, at least rekindled ideas about the art of teaching.
This award was a complete surprise to me. I did not know that five of my former teaching assistants - William Lamb, David Schultz, Mark Spranca, Todd Horowitz, and Conrad Amba, together with Professor Sheldon Zedeck (the then-chair of my department) - initiated the process by soliciting letters from colleagues, as well as from current and former students at Berkeley, and by writing what must have been a convincing letter to the Education and Training Awards Committee of APA! I am greatly indebted to all those who participated in this process. It is an honor to be joining a decade of distinguished educators and teachers who have received this award.
The Recognition of Teaching Excellence
I believe we need to provide more tangible incentives that will foster and encourage teaching excellence. The APA awards for distinguished contributions to education and training and the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching are a good start. But there should be more such awards, perhaps through the divisions of APA and the regional associations. With 52 divisions and 7 regional associations, nearly sixty psychologists could be professionally recognized annually for their contributions to education and training.
Probably more important than these professional awards is the recognition and emphasis given by the colleges and universities where academic psychologists are employed. Many institutions have established distinguished teacher awards, which at Berkeley, at least, are highly coveted and prestigious. The Berkeley award program was established in 1959 and honors an average of five faculty yearly. The Distinguished Teaching Award acknowledges the efforts of faculty members who have successfully united excellence in teaching with excellence in creative and scholarly work. All candidates are judged on the following criteria: command of the subject; continuous growth in the field of study; ability to organize course material and to present it cogently; effective design and redesign of courses; ability to inspire in students independent and original thinking; ability to encourage intellectual interests in beginning students and to stimulate advanced students to creative work; enthusiasm and vitality in learning and teaching; guidance of student research projects; participation in advising students; participation in guiding and supervising graduate teaching assistants; and ability to respond to a diverse student body.
The evaluation is conducted in two stages, the first without the knowledge of the candidate, which helps to insure confidentiality and to minimize disappointments if a nomination is not successful. In addition to a nominating letter, separate summaries of the faculty member's teaching evaluations for all courses taught during the preceding eight semesters of residence and the raw data of student evaluations from two of the most recently offered courses are required. The committee usually chooses ten candidates from this first stage for a more intensive evaluation. At this point the candidate is notified that he or she is a finalist and is asked to submit a statement of his or her teaching philosophy and a curriculum vitae. The department must then provide up to 15 letters obtained from colleagues, off-campus colleagues, current students, and former students, the raw data of student evaluations from two additional courses taught in the last two years, and supporting materials such as syllabi, tests, and teaching aids. From this list, the award recipients are chosen. Campus-wide announcements are published in the student paper and the faculty/staff paper.
The awards are given in a public ceremony, followed by an elaborate catered reception. At the award ceremony, a professional tape and slide show is presented that captures the essence of each recipient's teaching personality and style. Recipients receive a substantial cash award and a gift from the Alumni Association. This year there was a banquet honoring the current and past recipients. Quite a big deal, particularly for a university that is often characterized as a research institution!
Teaching excellence at Berkeley is also receiving increasing emphasis in faculty appointments and for promotions to associate professor and to full professor and for advancements within each academic rank. This means that every two or three years, all faculty are evaluated on three criteria: research, teaching, and service to the university and elsewhere. Excellence in research is most important, of course, but a faculty member's performance as a teacher is important as well, since it can either retard or accelerate one's advancement up the faculty ladder. Teaching responsibilities are spread equally within departments. In Psychology, for example, all faculty carry the same teaching load (calculated by a complicated point system), with equal representation in the undergraduate and graduate programs. We are proud of our teaching program, with nine faculty members receiving the distinguished teaching award since its inception. This number exceeds the combined total of the other social-science departments with whom we are grouped.
My Experience with Teaching
While preparing for this talk, I found myself reflecting on my different experiences with teaching - my own teaching and my experiences with the great teachers who have influenced me over the years.
As an Undergraduate at Berkeley
I received my undergraduate education at Berkeley. In recalling my undergraduate instructors, I am struck by the realization that my most influential teachers were not entertainers, nor well-choreographed showpersons. In fact, I am pleased to report that I received excellent instruction in the Psychology Department. For example, the late Mason Haire, an industrial psychologist, taught my introductory psychology class of five hundred or so students. He was not a dynamic nor an evocative teacher, but he showed interest in the individual student, seeking out those who did well in the course, hoping to draw them into the major. I enrolled in several of his courses on organizational psychology and struck up a warm friendship while he enjoyed his pre-class cigarette outside the lecture hall. Mason and his wife, Vivian, attended our wedding and were our first nonfamily guests for dinner. Another influential teacher was Leo Postman, an experimental psychologist interested in human learning and memory, who was the epitome of clarity and organization, which extended to his thoughtful answers to questions from the students. Then there was Al Riley, also an experimental psychologist who, even in retirement is actively pursuing his research interests. In those years, Al and Leo co-taught the yearlong course on experimental psychology required of psychology majors. Al's life-long commitment to understanding behavior and his enthusiasm for science was communicated to his students, which was the reason I asked him to direct my senior honor's thesis - an experience that was one of the high points of my undergraduate years at Berkeley. (I want you to know that my glowing tribute to Al is true and sincerely felt, and has no connection with the fact that he is the father of the man my daughter would eventually marry and now is a co-grandparent of Laurel Ann and Amelia Riley!). As a senior I worked as a research assistant on a joint project of Leo's and Al's, earning a footnote in their 1959 monograph; this experience helped to reaffirm my decision to continue my studies in psychology. Another influential teacher was Mark Rosenzweig, a biological psychologist, who presented his view of the blossoming field of physiological psychology with highly organized and articulate lectures to a rapt group of undergraduates. And finally, there was the late John McKee, a child psychologist, who, as my concerned advisor, verbally bludgeoned me into taking significant and important courses outside of my major - for example, history of western art, dramatic arts, and most importantly for me, the Symphonies of Beethoven.
But, not all of my psychology instructors were of this caliber. A dynamic, dramatic, evocative lecturer of a large class, whom I will not identify, completely failed to provide individual instruction in a small laboratory class in experimental psychology, leaving this "dirty" work to his graduate teaching assistant. Another was a boring, disinterested professor who taught a course on the principles of science, using a book that he co-authored with another colleague. Finally, there was a distinguished professor who literally read his lecture notes, which were available through a local publishing service, and advised the students to underline these notes in pencil, if he read it twice, and to underline in red ink if he read a sentence three times. Needless to say, there was a high probability that the exam questions would be drawn from the penciled and red-inked parts of his "lectures" (or should I say "readings?").
As I recall those undergraduate days, I can see some early indications of my developing interest in teaching, particularly in teaching research design and data analysis. In my introductory statistics class with the late Rheem Jarrett, for example, I accepted a tutoring assignment with a disadvantaged classmate of mine, who actually made it through the course! Also, as a senior in an advanced statistics course taught by a visiting professor, I tutored one of the many graduate students who were also taking the course. Looking back a little more carefully, I see that there was at least a hint that I was not cut out for teaching. For example, I can remember my awkwardness and fear of giving speeches in high school and later in an undergraduate rhetoric class. I also recall my successful avoidance of giving a sample lecture in the Army's artillery school by developing itchy blisters on my hands, which excused me from that assignment.
As a Graduate Student at Northwestern University
In 1959, my wife Sheila and I reversed the migratory flow to California by moving to the Chicago area so that I could attend graduate school at Northwestern University. My reason for leaving Berkeley, where I could have continued my graduate training, was to accept an offer to work with the late Benton J. Underwood as his research assistant. While I was attracted to his approach to the study of human learning and memory, I was unprepared to be smitten by his talents as a teacher. His most important course turned into a book, Psychological Research (Underwood, 1957), which even forty years later, is still being assigned to first-year graduate students in psychology and other fields. All graduate students at Northwestern were required to take this course in the Fall Quarter of their first year. The course served as an introduction to the logic of scientific investigation, providing a solid basis for our subsequent research. A classmate of mine, David L. Krantz, now a professor at Lake Forest College, told me this summer that his mentor at Northwestern, the late Donald Campbell, agreed to become his dissertation advisor only after determining that Krantz had received an A in Underwood's course! And my colleague, Stephen Glickman, who received his master's from Northwestern and later was a faculty member there before going on to Berkeley, has told me that Underwood's course was the most important course he ever took in graduate school.
In any case, our primary task in this course was to detect errors of research design, first from a syllabus of fictional studies based on the psychological literature and later from actual studies with design flaws discovered by the students in the class, and to attempt to remedy any flaw with a revised design. Underwood's syllabus contained mainly examples of design flaws, but there were some "acceptable" studies included to keep us all honest. Underwood created an interactive forum in the classroom, where lines of argument were encouraged, and then demolished as we begin to detect the error he embedded in a prepared synopsis or created by the students in attempting to redesign the study.
From Underwood, I learned the importance of one-on-one teaching, and excitement and value of this sort of teaching when students would search me out with research problems, several years after their formal classes with me. Let me give you an example. My most influential empirical paper was an article with Underwood on the buildup of interference in short-term memory (Keppel and Underwood, 1962). Lloyd and Peggy Peterson of Indiana University had reported rapid forgetting of single nonsense syllables over 18 seconds, which they attributed largely to the decay of the memory trace (Peterson and Peterson, 19590). They thought it highly unlikely that interference processes could be responsible for the amount of forgetting over such a short time frame. I devised a series of experiments in which we could study the buildup of interference item-by-item and demonstrated that forgetting-even over these shore intervals-depends strongly on the number of nonsense syllables subjects have previously received. Because this design was my idea, I prepared the first draft for publication, but put Underwood as the first author, of course. He immediately reversed the order of the authorships and then completely reconceptualized the trust of the paper. His most brilliant contribution to the paper was a reanalysis of the original data reported by the Peterson, with which he was able to demonstrate the presence of interference in their study.
I learned a great deal from this "educational exercise," knowing what I was able to do on my own as a third-year graduate student and then seeing vividly what a master researcher could do. What an educational revelation, which I am sure many of you have also experienced during your early years as blossoming researchers.
As a Teacher at Berkeley
Becoming a Interactive Teacher. My first teaching assignment when I returned Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1963 was the very undergraduate class that nearly resulted in my dropping out of psychology and switching my major to economics, It was a lower-divisions course on the philosophy of science. The course enrolled over two hundred students, to whom I lectured twice a week, while graduate-student instructors led small discussion sections once a week. I wore a suit and tie, of course, to gain authority-a trick I learned in the military-and to stand out from the students and particularly from the teaching assistants, several of whom were older than I. (Berkeley graduate students in the 1960's often measured their time in graduate school in decades rather than in years.) I was terrified of fielding questions from the enormous class, but I still valued the interactive and spontaneous quality of questions from students. So I adopted a technique once used by Steve Glickman when he was teaching a Northwestern, to ask students to write out their questions and deposit them in a envelope tacked to a wall of the lecture hall, which would then be read and commented on at the beginning of the next lecture. My wimpy explanation for using this procedure was my fear that questions asked during my lecture in such a large class would disrupt the flow of information from me them. I didn't reveal the main reason, my fear of not being prepared for the spontaneous questions! A year later, in another large class, I experimented with answering "live questions and was exhilarated with the experience.
From that time on, interactions with the students in my classes helped to vitalize an otherwise stuffy curriculum (stuffy to the students, of course, not to me). I also discovered that knowing the students' first names facilitated productive interactions. But, how do you do this if you don't possess a particularly retentive memory for linking faces and names together? I found that if I solicited the name from each student asking a question, I could memorize their names since relatively few students ask questions in class. Within a week or two, I would be addressing all students asking questions by their first names. That this was important to students was revealed on a teaching evaluation form where one student's reaction to the class was: "The professor learned my name!"
But how does an instructor engage a small class or seminar in a discussion? I have already mentioned that my mentor Ben Underwood was a master at eliciting energetic discussion on matter of experimental design and interpretation of results. I observed him on numerous occasions in an undergraduate class generating a productive class discussion with different examples of research problems and designs. He was brilliant at encouraging students to stretch their newly acquired knowledge to the next step in the design process, by drawing out an incorrect answer to the point that the student and the class would recognize the mistake, and then helping a student with a promising answer to gloriously reach the desired goal. In my last year at Northwestern, I was allowed tot each a section of this class and soon found that Underwood's style was simply not easy to duplicate. A design problem that in Underwood's hands produced a 30-40 minute discussion, in mine, produced a 5-minute, near -monologue. I learned that I had to carefully plan these sessions and to develop all kinds of interactive ploys to keep the discussion alive and to the point. I discovered that to be able to use Underwood's design problems effectively, I had to plan or at least think about the different avenues and tangents that the students' analyses and suggestions might take so that I would be prepared to take advantage of these choices when they were generated in class.
Some Problems in Creating a New Course
The second course I taught at Berkeley was a lecture-laboratory class on human learning and memory. The previous instructor helpfully supplied me with a comprehensive set of laboratory materials-a collection of 12 experiments based on the recent research literature, which the students conducted on themselves in section and wrote up the results in a lab report. Armed with these materials, I began preparing the course, developing handouts to assist the students in conducting the statistical analyses, and, writing a manual for preparing the reports in grand APA style. The students needed over two weeks to turn in their first report. By that time, they had already started analyzing the second experiment. After four experiments, we were halfway through the semester, with eight more experiments to conduct if we sere to keep up with the previous instructor's pace. I was starting to question my ability to teach, to organize a laboratory course, to motivate or at least to shepherd the students through the research process. As I was discussing the sixth experiment in class, a student raised her hand and asked me exactly what was the purpose of this new assignment. I began to present again an outline of the logic behind the study, but she interrupted me with a clarification: "I don't mean the purpose of this experiment, I mean the purpose of another experiment. Haven't we done enough experiment? Why do we have to do any more?" I mumbled something about the "contract" they entered into when they registered for the course-I had provided them full disclosure about the nature and quantity of the assignments. I also expressed my belief that curriculum is established by the professor, not by the students, and that mutiny in the classroom is punishable by grades of F, and so on. This was, after all, Berkeley in the sixties, and I feared my academic life!
That night after a lecture on campus, I apprehensively approached the previous instructor and asked him how he was able to complete the entire set of experiments in fifteen weeks, and he replied, "Oh, it really was quite simple, the teaching assistant analyzed the data after the first lab session of the and presented the summary information to the students, during the second session. They then handed in a one-page report summarizing the experiment." Think of what I had loaded on my students: They had to score the protocols, analyze the data, perform the many statistical analyses I thought were relevant in each study, and, then finally, they had to prepare a full and complete write-up, one worthy of submission to one of the academic journals. No wonder it took the class two expecting too much. I spent the next lecture sharing with my students the struggles I was experiencing as a new teacher and then apologized for not being sufficiently sensitive to realize I was over-working them. The students were forgiving, as they always are when you level with them and acquired an appreciation of the problems a new instructor faces in designing a major course.
Creating Restructuring of the Curriculum. After several years of teaching what amounted to graduate learning course, edited downward for undergraduates, I decided to experiment with the science works and to understand how one can study memory processes, I began to realize that I could trust the books and reading to present the course content and that I could offer what was unique to me: clarification of design or theory, the expression of a viewpoint that was different from the text, the presentation of illustrative examples, of supplemental materials. In short, I could bring life to the subject matter of the course. By choosing the appropriate reading materials for the course, I was literally free to offer my own special, unique contribution to the course. I was liberated!
I remember the exhilaration I experienced when I started introducing tiny experimental demonstrations of various memory phenomena in class, how they motivated the students to ask questions and to become involved with the subject matter. My first demonstration was the memory span, which I engineered by reading increasingly longer strings of randomly generated number sequences to the students, who then attempted to reproduce each string. The students scored their own attempts and I summarized the data in class by asking the students to indicate the longest string they could correctly recall. I started with "9," a number at the upper limit of the average adult memory students who achieved that level of performance. The class produced the classic memory-span function, with an average span of about "8" and a tapering off of students with spans progressively lower or classmates were able to recall sequences of 12 or 13 numbers in length. They discovered from this exercise that there is a limit to the number of elements one can repeat back in order, that the average length of the span for class was somewhere between 7 and 9, and that there were marked individual difference, even in such a highly selected student environment. I asked the student with the longest span how she accomplished this memory feat and she replied that she worked in a bank and had learned to divide long strings of digits in half and that this strategy of patching together two "chunks," if you will, was responsible for her superior memory span? I suggested that perhaps she was particularly gifted or that it was her practice with long number sequence in the bank, and that these were the reasons for her superior performance, not her dividing the strings into two parts. With the help of her and other students, we designed in class a series of simple experiments that wold help distinguish among these and other alternatives. The class had come alive with the desire to learn more about the memory span.
I experience similar reactions from the students with demonstration of proactive inhibition in short-term memory and the clustering of related words in free recall. What I had planned would take a lecture or two instead took five or six, but the students were primed their individual research projects that they developed in the laboratory sections with the help of their classmates and the graduate teaching assistants. This was a successful course, with the lectures serving as the motivating catalyst which was missing when I first offered the same class at the beginning of my teaching career. I've applied this principle of creating lectures that supplement the reading materials that motivate and stimulate students, in all undergraduate classes I taught since that experience.
A few years after this revelation, I began teaching a large upper-division course required of all psychology majors, entitled "Research and Data Analysis in Psychology." [Yes, a statistics course cleverly obscured with a different title!] When I applied the principle of designing a course in which the lectures would provide a unique contribution to the course, I was in dilemma for the simple reason that I was using a book I had just written for use in exactly this sort of class! Rather than choosing a different text (perish the thought!), I focused on generating interest and excitement for learning statistics, by selecting four talented and enthusiastic teaching assistants, who would be responsible for the laboratory sections, and developing examples and laboratory materials that hopefully would interest the students. I approached the teaching of statistics and methodology in this course by drawing the students into the puzzles and challenges of experimental research, providing them with sufficient tools to be creative in designing and analyzing a substantial research topic of their own. I did not present statistics as an arbitrary set of procedures, but as a means for revealing the answers to the fundamental issues that spark excitement in our discipline. I gave the graduate student instructors full responsibility in the design of their sections. I met with them for two hours each week, supplying pizza and soft drinks to keep them alive and nourished, and we discussed the progress of the sections, suggestions for dealing with problems the students were experiencing in class or in the sections and to exchange ideas. A great deal of the success of this course is due to the efforts of my teaching assistants, and they blossomed as teachers by being given a meaningful and responsible teaching assignment.
My Books on Design and Analysis
The award citation mentions my texts on statistical design and data analysis and states that they have shaped the way researchers think about analyzing planned comparisons. These books reflect the lessons I learned a Northwestern as Underwood's research assistant. In this position, I was centrally involved in the crafting of experiments. Although the direction and thrust of the research was his Underwood used me as a sounding board for ideas and research design. Summers at Northwestern were devoted to the heavy-duty analysis of the data we had collected during the school year. Since this was a joint effort, I could observe how Underwood would extract information from a response protocol-he was continually on the lookout for unique patterns of responses, which often suggested a new analysis or line of investigation. The value of these fine-grain analyses is usually lost when researchers relegate data reduction and data manipulation to the computer or to a low-level assistant. Underwood certainly appreciated the link between research design and statistical analysis, which is a central thrust of my books.
How did I get into the business of writing books? Long ago, I was once asked what kind of book I might write if I ever decided to do so. After first considering mystery books and gourmet cookbooks, I thought of writing a primer on research design that would emphasize the analysis side of statistics rather than raw statistical derivations and proofs. I remember Al Riley Prophesizing that this sort of book would be warmly welcomed by researchers and graduate students alike, that it would change my professional life and interest, and that it would make me rich. I am pleased to say that two of his prophecies were right on target!
My first book, Design and Analysis (Keppel, 1973) benefited greatly by being "field tested" in two informal graduate classes. The main class was crowded with nearly all the graduate students in the program. I immediately discovered that the students were heterogeneous in ability and background, which presented a serious problem in finding the appropriate level at which to teach the special seminar for them in which we were able to move faster through the material and we were able to discuss problems with the draft and to explore other topics in a flexible atmosphere. This was a stimulating group of students and the book benefited greatly from this give an take exchange. The uniqueness of Design and Analysis is its emphasis on the use of analytical comparison the detailed analysis of the results of experiments. I abhor the use of "canned" or "standard" analyses that substitute convenience for knowledge and thought on the part of researcher.
It has given me a great deal of personal satisfaction to have contributed to the training of several generations of graduate students through this book, whose origins reflect my own early research training with Ben Underwood. It still pleases me when a few of them takes the time to seek me out at a convention or to reach me by e-mail to thank me for my contribution to their graduate education. At the risk of seeming immodest, I would like to read a recent e-mail from a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota; She wrote, "I wanted to let you know what a tremendous difference your book has made in my understanding of experimentation. I feel as if I've spent the previous two years frustrated by this and even considered not continuing with my graduate program. However, as I read your book I could almost her the pieces falling into place! You explain things clearly and demonstrate how concepts are related. I cannot thank you enough."
I co-authored Introduction to Design and Analysis with another graduate-school colleague, William Saufley, and a former graduate student teaching assistant, Howard Tokunaga. In theses two editions of the book (Keppel and Saufley, 1980: Keppel, Saufley, and Tokunaga, 1992), we introduce the undergraduate to the analysis of experiments, making it possible for these neophyte researchers to design and analyze their independent studies and senior theses in a rigorous and thoughtful way.
My other advanced text, Data Analysis for Research Designs, was the result of a productive collaboration between Sheldon Zedeck and myself (Keppel and Zedeck, 1989. Before even considering a distinguishing feature of this book is our equal treatment of analysis of variance and multiple regression and correlation (MRC) in our discussions of the analysis of designs in which the variables are interest are intercorrelated rather than manipulated, such as one finds in non-experimental and correlational research, the students are able to quickly apply multiple correlation to the analysis of these sorts of designs.
Reflections on the Art of Teaching
In 1994, Stephen Tollefson and Barbara Gross Davis published a collection for 83 statements prepared by recipients of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Awards, which I described earlier in this talk. These short "essays" represent fascinating attempts by teachers recognized for their outstanding teaching to describe the values, beliefs, and practices that have contributed to their success as teacher. As you might anticipate, these statements are remarkably diverse, some taking a more philosophical approach to discussing the pleasures and challenges of teaching, while others offering a pragmatic assessment of activities that constitute effective teaching. I was charmed by one suggestion: "Provide a good example both in and out of the classroom (i.e., refrain from the use of tobacco, alcohol vulgarities, and so on)." Still, there is surprising agreement and convergence from these individuals. For example, the need for not just adequate preparation, but an in-depth study and restudy of the material each time the course is given; the importance of an intense love of the subject, matter and its explication through teaching; the convergence and interplay of research and teaching the one feeding and enriching the other; the need to open the minds of students; the respect for students and their ideas; and finally, the need for self-evaluation as a teacher. These themes are mentioned for large classes as well as for seminars, and even for one-on-one thesis or dissertation advising, for new classes as well as for previously taught ones. A surprising number of faculty supply their students with copies of their class notes, as a way of transforming a straight lecture class into forum for asking questions and discussing ideas.
I can think of no better way to reflect on the art of teaching than by sharing with you statements made by four members of the Berkeley Psychology Department who have received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Unfortunately, time doesn't allow either longer quotes or comments from all of the recipients.
Philip Cowan (1983): "I do not fell that I am a charismatic teacher, bolding students spellbound by the eloquence of my words. What students get when they take a class with me, I involved and invested. In return, with their attentive comments and questions, students stimulate me to reach beyond my current level of understanding, to arrive at new and exciting ways of conceptualizing a problem, or dong research that, someday, may help change the lives of people like those who participate in the studies."
Christine Maslach (1987): "An ongoing theme in my work has been the creative interplay of teaching and research. Because I am so fascinated with social psychology, and so invested in it as a researcher, teaching is an inherently interesting and pleasurable activity. Moreover, I find that teaching plays an important role in the development of my research and in my professional growth. Sometimes my research has lead to the development of new classes; sometimes my courses and interactions with students have led to the development of new hypotheses and research designs. I learn a great deal from my students, just as I hope they learn a great deal from me, and it is this reciprocal enrichment that makes teaching such a continual joy for me."
Aronal Lieman (1990): "In education, there must be excitement, intrigue, vitality, and a sprinkle of magic. Part of what I do best is weaving through mountains of findings to find the study that promotes an understanding of the brain-the area I know best. My goal is to accomplish this task with clarity, organization, and exuberance. I want my students to walk out of class feeling that they not only collected facts and ideas by also sensed the excitement of discovery."
Ronda Weinstein (1996): "...I am relentless in setting the highest expectations for what each student can accomplish. I specifically gear my teaching toward the development of the best in each student, rather than the selection of 'the best' students. I have seen too many of the casualties of lowered educational expectations-often women, certain ethnic-minorities immigrants, and individuals with special needs and from lower socio-economic backgrounds. As I have discovered in my own research, positive self-fulfilling prophecies begin with beliefs about the capacity for each to learn."
Closing Comments
I have come to the conclusion that the real purpose of this address and this award is to honor the fine art of teaching and to recognize its importance to research and the training of our students. I suspect that may of the experiences I have shared with you today, and the comments I have quoted as well, are familiar to most of you. I believe that the vast majority of academic psychologists take their teaching obligations seriously and passionately. I also believe that there should be more distinguished teaching awards. There are many more candidates out there who also deserve the award I am receiving today. I am here in part because of a group of thoughtful graduate students and generous departmental chair. I view my award as a symbol of the value we place on our teaching responsibilities and I accept the honor for all those who distinguish themselves in teaching.
References
Keppel, G. (1973). Design and analysis: a researcher's handbook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Keppel, G., & Saufley, W. H., Jr., (1980). Introduction to design and analysis: A students handbook New York: W. H. Freeman.
Keppel, G., Saufley, W. H. Jr., & Tokunaga, H. (1992). Introduction to design and analysis: A students handbook (2nd ed.) New York: Freeman.
Keppel, G., & Underwood, B.J. (1962). Proactive inhibition in short-term retention of single items. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1, 153-161.
Keppel, G., & Zedeck, S. (1989). Data analysis for research designs: Analysis of variance and multiple regression/correlation approaches. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Peterson, L. R., & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal units. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193-198.
Tollefson, S. K., & Davis, B. G. (Eds.). (1994). What good teachers say about teaching. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, Office of Educational Development.
Underwood, B. J. (1957). Psychological Research. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
