APA approves Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major: Version 3.0

At its August 2023 meeting, the APA Council of Representatives approved the revised APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major: Version 3.0. Guidelines 3.0 (PDF, 1MB)opens in new window captures a set of optimal expectations for performance by undergraduates engaged in the study of psychological science. Guidelines 3.0 specifies five broad educational goals and corresponding student learning outcomes that outline reasonable program expectations for the undergraduate psychology major across educational contexts. Indicators of progress on student learning outcomes represent two levels of development. “Foundation” indicators roughly represent progress that students may be expected to make midway through the major. As such, the outcomes may be helpful for psychological science programs at the two-year level or the psychology minor in a four-year program. “Baccalaureate” indicators represent an appropriate endpoint for the completion of the major. The progression describes expectations for how a student would undertake the journey of a novice in the discipline to the status of a reasonably informed and skilled undergraduate student on the completion of a four-year program.

Given that psychology programs face unprecedented demands in higher education today for accountability data to document high-quality educational programming, Guidelines 3.0 provides a solid foundation on which psychology educators may engage in effective curricular and assessment planning.

In this iteration of the guidelines, the task force maintained the five-goal structure that was present in Guidelines 2.0, with some fine-tuning of the titles of these goals, and updated the outcomes and indicators accordingly. A high-level overview describing some of the updates follows below.

Changes in structure

• Goal 1 has been retitled “Content Knowledge and Applications,” and expanded to include a focus on the applications of psychological science.
• Goal 2 addresses “Scientific Inquiry and Critical Thinking” with expanded attention to statistical reasoning.
• Goal 3 has been retitled as “Values in Psychological Science” to address the importance of building and using psychological knowledge and skills to develop interpersonal and intercultural competence and acknowledging the important contributions of psychology in addressing community, national, and global issues.
• The scope of Goal 4 has changed as reflected in the title, “Communication, Psychological Literacy, and Technology Skills” with the additional focus on managing technology as well as selecting and processing information.
• Goal 5 addresses “Personal and Professional Development” and has been expanded to focus on improving the preparation of students who either head into the workforce after graduation or move into graduate or professional studies.

Changes in emphases

• Clarification of “psychological science” vs. “psychology.” This iteration of the guidelines uses the designation of psychological science throughout to reflect emerging contemporary practice. Guidelines 3.0 uses the term “psychology” when speaking more generally to the discipline of psychology.
• Workforce preparation. Guidelines 3.0 advocates for strengthening students’ understanding about how a degree in psychology will help them to be well prepared to assume a psychology-related future, whether that future involves joining the workforce or acquiring additional education in graduate or professional schools.
• EDI matters. Guidelines 3.0 includes an expanded focus on EDI in Goal 3 and infused throughout the guidelines as a deeply held and fundamental value in psychology.
• Global considerations. Guidelines 3.0 was revised in a manner to increase its applicability more broadly to apply more easily across international boundaries.
• Ethical prominence. This iteration of Guidelines 3.0 expanded the focus of ethics to include research, practice, and academic contexts. This emphasis is intended to help students to appreciate the practical value of having codes that govern professional behavior in addition to the role that ethical behavior plays in building and maintaining interpersonal relationships.
• Statistical updating and methods elaboration. Guidelines 3.0 strengthens the attention given to methods and statistics in psychology.
• Thematic adoption.  Guidelines 3.0 also incorporates the seven themes that characterize the discipline of psychology that were developed by APA’s Introductory Psychology Initiative (IPI).