Psychology: Making Connections by Erika L. Rosenberg
Connect with science. Connect with students. Connect with Feist and Rosenberg's Psychology. In Psychology: Making Connections, Greg Feist and Erika Rosenberg provide the tools for students to make meaningful connections with the material encompassed in Introductory Psychology while still presenting psychology as a scientific endeavor. With its focus on connections, Feist helps your students to understand both the discipline and concepts of psychology as well as psychology’s relevance to their lives. Feist provides you with the science you are seeking while bringing it alive for your students in an accessible way. By challenging students to make connections between what they are reading and learning about in class and the world around them outside the classroom, Psychology: Making Connections fosters students' critical thinking skills. At the same time, the authors consistently reinforce the idea that science is a process and not just a collection of resulting outcomes to be memorized. In doing so, they bring to life the names and experiments on the page and vividly illustrate the human element in the scientific method.
The transparencies on the brain and action potentials is extremely useful and helpful. The read is interesting and the examples given for the terms are good. I really like this text book, which is odd for a student to say, but I definitely recommend it.
I have been using this textbook and complementary online tools for two years at the university level and have had great success. The students consistently report that authors report on research and use many examples that are relevant to their lives which ensures that the text very interesting to them. The language of the book is accessible to my ESL students while remaining very appealing to even my brightest students. The layout of the entire book and each individual chapter is outstanding, particularly Chapter 3: The Biology of Behavior, which uses layered translucent diagrams to illustrate the 3D nature of the brain and other biological systems.
The complementary online package, Connect, is the other amazing half of this package. Students get the benefits of tools like LearnSmart, a dynamic artificially intelligent study coach, and personalized study plans. On the instructor side, you get automatically graded assignments/test and in-depth reports about the progress of the class and each individual student.
