LibGuides: OER Subject Guides: Psychology

Psychology OER

The peer-reviewed textbook below also provides ancillary resources such as PowerPoint slides, test banks, sample syllabus, etc.

P sychology

Psychology is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for the single-semester introduction to psychology course. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of core concepts, grounded in both classic studies and current and emerging research. The text also includes coverage of the DSM-5 in examinations of psychological disorders. Psychology incorporates discussions that reflect the diversity within the discipline, as well as the diversity of cultures and communities across the globe.

Introduction to Psychology

Introduction to Psychology utilizes the dual theme of behavior and empiricism to make psychology relevant to intro students. The author wrote this book to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level.

Psychology as a Biological Science
by Peter Lindberg
This textbook provides standard introduction to psychology course content with a specific emphasis on biological aspects of psychology. This includes more content related to neuroscience methods, the brain and the nervous system. This book can be modified: feel free to add or remove modules to better suit your specific needs.Please note that the publisher requires you to login to access and download the textbooks.
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License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
Answering Questions with Data: Introductory Statistics for Psychology Students
Authors: Matthew Crump; Chapters 2 and 4 adapted from Navarro, D.; Videos: Jeffrey Suzuki
Description: This is a free introductory statistics textbook for undergraduates in Psychology. It is being developed as an Open Educational Resource @ Brooklyn College. It is pitched at the concepts behind statistics, and often uses simulation in R to convey foundational ideas. The writing style is sometimes a bit unconventional, and informal. It is for students who don’t want to like statistics.
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licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Answering Questions with Data: The Lab Manual
Description: This is the companion lab manual to our free stats book. It contains lab activities for learning how to conduct statistical tests in R, Excel, SPSS, and JAMOVI. We use open data, often from psychology papers, and show step-by-step how to solve data-analysis problems in each software package.
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This lab manual is released under a creative commons licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Open Stats Lab (OSL)
Open Stats Lab (OSL) is a website created by Kevin P. McIntyre, Ph.D., that uses open data sets from articles published in Psychological Science to help teach introductory statistics. For each OSL lab, I've identified studies with open data badges, and then prepared activities that guide students through the analyses needed to reproduce the results reported in the original articles.

Mind, Body, World: Foundations of Cognitive Science

Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.

Research Methods in Psychology
A comprehensive textbook for research methods classes. A peer-reviewed inter-institutional project.

Principles of Social Psychology

This textbook is based on a critical thinking approach, and its aim is to get students thinking actively and conceptually – with a greater focus on the forest than the trees. Yes, there are right and wrong answers, but the answers are not the only thing. What is perhaps even more important is how students get to the answers – the thinking process itself. To help students better grasp the big picture of social psychology, and to provide you with a theme that you can use to organize your lectures, this text has a consistent pedagogy across the chapters.

For faculty reviews of this textbook, click here.

Noba is a platform that provides high-quality textbooks and other educational materials. Instructor resources include manuals, PowerPoint presentations, test banks, teaching topic essays, quizzes, etc.

What sets Noba apart is the fact that their textbooks can be easily customized through their platform. Adding or removing modules to best suit your course is very intuitive.You might even customize your own textbook from scratch, but if you need a place to start, Noba has a collection of ready-made textbooks to make things easier for you. Use them as they are or edit them to your liking.

Click on the images to access these open textbooks.

Noba's resources are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License. Users may reuse, redistribute, and remix the content.

Go Cognitive
OER goes beyond open textbooks. Go Cognitive is an example: this platform offers a range of educational materials on cognitive neuroscience., including demos and interviews with leading scholars.
Functional Neuroanatomy
If you teach biopsychology, Neuroanatomy can be a great resource. It includes video tutorials, learning modules, and interactive slices.
YouTube Videos
You can limit your YouTube search by Creative Commons licensed-videos.
Adding "Khan Academy" as a search term will help you find more authoritative sources.
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Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. They have also partnered with institutions like NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT to offer specialized content.

Behavior Analysis OER

Instruction in Functional Assessment (Open SUNY)
From the site: "Instruction in Functional Assessment introduces learners to functional assessment (FA), which includes a variety of assessment approaches (indirect, observational, and experimental) for identifying the cause of an individual’s challenging behavior for the purpose of designing effective treatments. FA is mandated by federal law and is a recognized empirically based approach to treatment of individuals with challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive, self-injurious, and aggressive behaviors). Instruction in FA is essential for students who will one day enter professions as educators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or mental health professionals.
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The purpose of this textbook is to provide instruction in FA skills for pre-professionals in the fields of education and psychology. This supplemental resource provides the context, background, and knowledge to facilitate students’ acquisition of the methods, decision-making, and skills involved in conducting FA. Each chapter begins with focus questions designed to promote reflective thinking and ends with discussion questions. To promote application of FA in diverse situations and teach important lessons, case studies of individuals with challenging behaviors, interactive activities, and opportunities for practice are embedded in the chapters. Moreover, the text includes the ingredients to facilitate students’ role play and rehearsal of appropriate FA skills while working in cooperative groups and using performance-based training."
Comprehensive Individualized Curriculum and Instructional Design
From the site: "This online textbook addresses the population of individuals with disabilities that experience complex lifelong needs across multiple areas in their lives. Drs. Sennott and Loman drafted this book (along with the help from some friends) with the hope of providing pertinent, practical, and current resources to future special educators who plan to serve individuals with complex disabilities."
PsychCore Videos
From the site: "We are here for one thing. To entertain and to inform you. We know our stuff (applied behavior analysis, experimental analysis of behavior) and we feel that the world will benefit from understanding this content too. We will have everything from SUPER BRIEF definitions (Pennypacker's Pedants) to short lectures (Behavior Beasts) on every topic in the field and also, on occasion full blown lectures (Ryan's Rants). We love what we do - and we will keep doing it. Join us, learn something, have some fun for a change." These videos are CC licensed.

Abnormal Psychology OER

Abnormal Psychology - Delta College
From the Delta College eLearning Office. CC-BY-SA
Abnormal Psychology - WSU
Abnormal Psychology is an Open Education Resource written by Alexis Bridley, Ph.D. and Lee W. Daffin Jr., Ph.D. through Washington State University which tackles the difficult topic of mental disorders in 15 modules. After the first three foundational modules, a discussion of mental disorders ensues to include depressive, anxiety, personality, schizophrenic, eating, and obsessive-compulsive to name a few.

Child Psychology OER

Child Growth and Development
This text is a presentation of how and why children grow, develop, and learn. We will look at how we change physically over time from conception through adolescence. We examine cognitive change, or how our ability to think and remember changes over the first 20 years or so of life. And we will look at how our emotions, psychological state, and social relationships change throughout childhood and adolescence.
Introduction to Child Psychology
From the site: "Although this is classified as a course, it could also be used as a textbook, because it is text-based...
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Within this study unit, you will be introduced briefly to the discipline of child psychology and to theories and approaches that have been developed to help us understand and support children’s lives. By focusing on the individual child, psychologists can assess changes in the child’s abilities over time, including their physical, cognitive, social and emotional development. There is also an emphasis on describing how development is shaped through internal and external influences, such as the role of the child’s immediate environment and the role of culture in influencing and shaping development. You will also learn about the role of child psychologists in applied settings and how they can work with other professionals to support the lives of children and young people.Within this study unit, you will be introduced briefly to the discipline of child psychology and to theories and approaches that have been developed to help us understand and support children’s lives. By focusing on the individual child, psychologists can assess changes in the child’s abilities over time, including their physical, cognitive, social and emotional development. There is also an emphasis on describing how development is shaped through internal and external influences, such as the role of the child’s immediate environment and the role of culture in influencing and shaping development. You will also learn about the role of child psychologists in applied settings and how they can work with other professionals to support the lives of children and young people."
Social and Personality Development in Childhood (Noba)
From the site: "Childhood social and personality development emerges through the interaction of social influences, biological maturation, and the child’s representations of the social world and the self. This interaction is illustrated in a discussion of the influence of significant relationships, the development of social understanding, the growth of personality, and the development of social and emotional competence in childhood."

Developmental Psychology OER

Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective (2nd ed.)
This text is authored by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French and was funded by a grant from the College of Lake County Foundation and supported by the Business and Social Sciences Division.
Developmental Psychology (SUNY)
From the site: "This course is designed to provide an engaging and personally relevant overview of the discipline of Developmental Psychology. In this course you will examine the cultural, social, psychological, and physiological influences which imp[act human development from conception to death. You - the student - will provide much of the substantive content and teaching presence in this course. The content in this course was curated by Professor Bill Pelz at Herkimer College / SUNY and is provided under a Creative Commons license."
Developmental Psychology (Psych 172)
Published by College of the Canyons, 2017; edited by Neil Walker and Frederick Bobola
Cognitive Development in Childhood (Noba)
From the site: "This module examines what cognitive development is, major theories about how it occurs, the roles of nature and nurture, whether it is continuous or discontinuous, and how research in the area is being used to improve education."
Research Methods in Developmental Psychology (Noba)
From the site: "What do infants know about the world in which they live – and how do they grow and change with age? These are the kinds of questions answered by developmental scientists. This module describes different research techniques that are used to study psychological phenomena in infants and children, research designs that are used to examine age-related changes in development, and unique challenges and special issues associated with conducting research with infants and children. Child development is a fascinating field of study, and many interesting questions remain to be examined by future generations of developmental scientists – maybe you will be among them!"