Introduction to Psychology: The Full Noba Collection
Extremely comprehensive. The text covered all the topics I would expect for a basic introduction to psychology course, and there were many additional units that would allow an instructor to go in greater depth or customize a course (see item 6 in review). Each unit provided a nice blend of introducing a topic, discussing relevant research, and providing examples and applications.
The scale of this work could make it a little trickier for students to navigate. However, there’s a glossary that appears to update to reflect the contents that you include in your customized text, and there’s a search bar in the online edition of your text that seems to do a good job of bringing up units and locations for any search terms. Finding a particular topic or term might be more difficult for students who prefer to print the text and use a hard copy.
Most units also include a Cerego adaptive quiz for students to review, outside resources, a glossary of important vocabulary, discussion questions, and references. Many also include instructor resources like an instructor manual, powerpoint slides, and a test bank.
I did not notice any inaccuracies, nor were there any typos that stuck out to me. It generally feels well edited.
A small quibble is that some facts are presented without sufficient context, to the point that I think it could create some misconceptions. For example, in the first unit, “Why Science,” the author is making points about science-driven progress and states things like “80% of all households have television” and “life expectancy is 79 years old.” As best I can tell, the first fact applies to global households and the second applies to the United States, but this context isn’t provided and could be confusing to a student trying to understand this information.
The text covers a number of foundational topics, but especially given the young nature of the field, psychology texts generally need to be updated at least every five years or so to reflect the most recent discoveries and understanding of the field. Right now everything feels very fresh and is consistent with my current understanding of the different areas of research without being done in a way that seems likely to become outdated quickly. Units could be individually updated by their authors to reflect new information, though I could imagine some difficulty with this given the large number of authors contributing to different units. This could lead to some units being updated regularly and others not, or at least not without intervention from a new author. Major changes in the field could easily be accommodated by the introduction of new units, given the nice modularity of this text. I see there have already been some new units added since the original creation of this book.
I mention this elsewhere, but I enjoyed reading so many units written by some of the leading experts on that topic. Their expertise and excitement for the topics generally came through in the readings. At its best, this book captures the voices of some of the people who know each topic best, where the field has been, where it's going, and why those ideas matter.
Each section is very clearly organized, with a clear introduction at the top of each unit and a guide with key section headings within each unit. The writing clarity varies with the different authors. Some units are extremely well-written and there’s nothing I would change about them. Others sometimes don’t express ideas quite as clearly as I would like or introduce ideas without the level of explanation that I think is necessary for introductory-level students. For example, in the nature and nurture unit, the author introduces the topic by discussing the mind–body problem, the free will problem, and the nature–nurture problem as “the three great questions about humans’ relationship with the natural world.” The author states that everyone understands these problems and has opinions even with relatively little background, yet he doesn’t actually provide enough of a basic explanation that someone who has never heard of these problems would necessarily know that they are. It’s not critical for a student reading this unit to come away with an understanding of the mind-body and free will problems, and the unit does provide a nice explanation of the nature-nurture issue, but I would prefer that the author either take a few more sentences to provide enough context for novice readers to know what the other “problems” are referring to or not mention them at all.
Different authors for different units can introduce some inconsistencies in tone and writing style – nothing too jarring, but worth noting that it lacks the level of consistency and conceptual coherence of a book written entirely by the same authors. There are small organizational differences, too. For example, the “Why Science” unit is divided into 7 sections, each about 5 paragraphs long, and you can navigate among the sections using the content navigation on the right-hand side. The “Nature and Nurture” section, written by a different author, has just two sections that are both about 10 paragraphs long and rather uninformatively titled “Introduction” and “What have we learned about nature and nurture?” This isn’t a huge problem from a comprehension perspective, but each unit feels very much like it was written by a different author, and some students may find the variations in writing style a little less than ideal. The trade-off is that you get a very nice selection of units, many of which are written by leaders in the field when it comes to that topic.
This, in my mind, is one of the book’s greatest strengths. This book includes the complete collection of units created by NOBA, which provides a tremendous amount of flexibility in choosing which units to include for your text. For ideas, there are some texts that have already been created, both by the editors (see the NOBA “Discover Psychology: A Brief Introductory Text”) and by other users. I teach a course with a slightly different focus than a traditional intro to psych course, and I found that this modularity could help me create a set of readings much more well aligned with my course than a traditional intro to psych text, of which I usually end up assigning only some sections.
Compared to chapters in a typical textbook, I think three or four of these units would comprise a typical chapter. That means you can choose more precisely which topics you want to discuss within a given area. However, within the unit, there isn’t as much flexibility for customization. You could customize the text further if you were creating a pdf, but you can’t cut or edit the text within a unit in the online version, at least not in a way that I’ve been able to figure out after a week of reading and playing around with it.
Since this text contains all the units available, it’s pretty overwhelming, though thematically organized. When deciding which units I thought I would want to include for my course, I used the NOBA “Discover psychology” text as a reference. It contains the exact same units here, but only a small portion of them designed to give an overview of the discipline within the constraints of a semester. I liked having the additional units available to me for topics where I wanted to go deeper than a standard introductory text, but it would have taken me a lot longer to figure out which units I wanted to include without the “Discover psychology” version as a reference.
The major problem with flow is what I mentioned earlier in regards to the different authors and somewhat different styles of each unit. You certainly don't forget that different units are written by different people, and for students still developing their skills of reading scientific textbooks, I could imagine that constantly switching "voices' might disrupt the flow or make it harder for them to get used to the book.
The online interface is very easy to navigate, with a nice search function and a lot of useful links. Cerego is seamlessly integrated into the end of each unit, allowing students to test and review their understanding without having to log in somewhere else. The pictures all display well, although the text is not particularly heavy on images and I noticed very few charts or diagrams embedded in the text. Once you have selected the units you want to include in your text, you can create a PDF of the text. It looks clean and sharp, with the title of your course and your name on the front page. All the images, captions, and formatting look good in the PDF, and it includes the unit glossaries, discussion questions, and outside resources. The PDF version also generates a table of contents based on your arrangement and an index at the end. It certainly doesn’t look quite as professional as a traditional textbook, but I think it would be easy to read and navigate for a student.
No problems that I noticed.
Nothing stood out as insensitive or offensive. Images in the book reflect a variety of cultures, races, and ethnicities. The authors on the whole don’t seem to go out of their way to include examples from different cultures or to reflect a wider variety of backgrounds than what I would expect in an average text, but they also don’t fall below my expectations based on an average text.