GIT Blog

How to Find an I-O Psychologist to Speak to Your Class

Most people will spend more of their waking hours working than doing anything else, so the psychology of work and organizations should be a part of every introductory psychology course. The Getting I-O into Intro Textbooks (GIT SIOP) Task Force is making progress in our mission to have I-O psych addressed in psych textbooks and we even have a sample chapter and a free standalone mini-course to help fill the gap.  Sometimes, however, a text just isn't enough. Sometimes you need a real person to talk to your students. Reading about I-O psychology is one thing, but having an actual I-O talk about their research or their applied work can make the subject real in ways that a textbook can't. Fortunately, dozens of speakers are waiting to hear from you and finding them is dead simple. Read This Part if You're an Instructor To find an I-O psychologist to speak with your class, just go to the SIOP Advocacy Registry and conduct a search. There you'll find ...

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The Missing Chapter of Your Intro Psych Textbook is Right Here

It's true. Your introductory psychology textbook is missing a chapter. The one about work. If you're like most people, you'll spend more of your waking hours working than doing anything else. So the psychology of work and organizations should be in every intro psych textbook, right? But it's not. The Getting I-O into Intro Textbooks (GIT SIOP) Task Force is making progress on this, but the fact remains that most intro psych textbooks lack content on industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. Fortunately, you've found the missing chapter. It's right here. It's free. It's Creative Commons licensed. It's ready to go. Read This Part If You're a Psych Instructor The Industrial-Organizational Psychology chapter is available in three formats: an illustrated and formatted standalone PDF, a text-only PDF, and a text-only Word document. The Creative Commons license means you can use it as-is, use parts of it, or even adapt it, as long as you give credit and link to ...

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Success as a Psychology Major

David Copeland, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Principal Investigator at UNLV's Reasoning and Memory Lab. Dr. Copeland was inspired to co-author the book Success as a Psychology Major after "seeing how some students were reaching graduation and they weren’t prepared for their future. They didn’t know about options. They didn’t know the variety of areas they could pursue as psychology students and they didn’t take advantage of opportunity to prepare while in college." As the Undergraduate Director for psychology majors, Dr. Copeland also teaches a course called Introduction to the Psychology Major, which all UNLV psych majors take immediately after completing their Introduction to Psychology course. Dr. Copeland hopes similar courses will be offered at other colleges and universities. "You get a program like engineering or nursing, you know what the students going to ...

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If Only I Had Known Back Then!

I recently had a chance to speak with Sherif al-Qallawi, a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and Ph.D. candidate in I-O at Florida Tech. In the last ten years, Sherif has been a recruiter, an HR Generalist, a startup co-founder, and even worked in HR for the United Nations. As I listened to his story, it occured to me that he had been searching for something. When I asked him about this, here's what he had to say: "If I had known about I-O psychology as an undergraduate, I would have started studying it back then. I knew I was interested in developing employees and organizations—I just wasn't sure about the best way to go about that. I-O psychology provides a clear answer to that question. The problem is that most of us don't know about it." "This is where most of the mismatch happens," he continued. "We don't really know that there are such options out there. If we did, we might like them more than the options we know about now." When I asked She ...

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What's in a Name?

GIT SIOP has made the Educators' Resource Page easier to find, easier to remember, and easier to share. To reach the page, just go to www.teachiopsych.com. Please share the new URL in-person and in your social media channels.

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Two Years of GIT!

We are now at the two-year anniversary of the Getting I-O into Intro Textbooks (GIT) task force.  As you may know, at the 2018 SIOP Conference then SIOP President, Talya Bauer, launched this effort with the charge to work toward increasing coverage of I-O content in Intro to Psychology textbooks and awareness of I-O among early psychology learners. Many SIOPers know this has been an issue many have tried to tackle for many years. This includes efforts to present at conferences, encouraging membership to give talks at local high schools and community colleges, many efforts to build resources and share them, and so on. GIT built upon on this previous work while directing concentrated effort on the issue through a variety of means, including all the original tasks/goals from President Bauer, and new ones encouraged by now SIOP President, Georgia Chao. Last year, we published a TIP article chronicling what we accomplished in our first year. Given that President Chao renewed the task force charter for one mor ...

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I-O in Intro: Online vs. Face-to-Face

It's clear: academia is now teaching completely virtually for the rest of the semester (and possibly beyond).  In last month's blog post, I wrote about resources available for quickly transitioning your class online.  In this post, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the question "What's the difference between teaching I-O in Intro online versus in face-to-face classes?" To answer this question, I spoke (socially distanced, of course!) with two Intro Psych instructors: Caitlin Lapine and Tom DePatie.  Caitlin is an Instructor at Touro College as well as an adjunct at other institutions and Tom is a PhD student at Hofstra University where he adjunct teaches Intro Psych.  Both have taught Intro in-person and interestingly, both have been forced (this semester) to teach the I-O component of their Intro classes online.  Therefore, I thought they could offer me a unique perspective about the challenges and opportunities associated with teaching I-O ...

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Transitioning to Teaching Online

While the world is in the grips of the terrible coronavirus pandemic, you might not be thinking much about "how can I incorporate more I-O into Intro Psych?"  However, we are all in this together, and can all contribute to a solution.  So in addition to hand-washing and social distancing, members of the SIOP community got together and asked ourselves "how else can we help?"   With many colleges and universities moving their face-to-face classes online, many of us are in the predicament of having to quickly transition our courses to an online format. In response to this need, SIOP’s Education and Training Committee is spearheading a cross-committee effort to share tips and recommendations to help our colleagues quickly transition their courses online.  This information will be available in a few ways: Virtual Office Hours will be Offered Do you have quick questions (or longer thoughts) on how to transition your classes so quickly to an online set ...

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Resource: I-O Psychology Mini-Course

Here at GIT, our primary goal is to get I-O into Intro Psych textbooks.  More broadly, though, we want to expose I-O Psych to students.  How else can we do this? Check out this resource created by Ben Butina from the Department 12 website.  It is a free online mini-course on I-O Psychology that can be assigned to Intro Psych students (or anyone interested in the topic): https://department12.com/introduction-to-industrial-organizational-psychology-mini-course/ Learners can take the course, learn about the topic, answer learning assurance questions, and even get a certificate of completion.  This can be a great way for Intro Psych instructors to expose their students to I-O even if they don't know it themselves. The idea for this mini-course started when Ben interviewed me (Nick Salter) for his podcast about how to put more I-O into Intro.  One suggestion I made was for guest I-O speakers to come into classes and talk about the topic.  Later, Ben said ...

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How are We Doing? Update on GIT’s Progress

In three months (April 2020) we will hit the two-year anniversary of GIT-SIOP.  Therefore, now is a good time to ask ourselves “how are we doing?” As constant readers of this blog will note, GIT has been involved with lots of different efforts.  So much has been accomplished!  But the main goal of GIT is to get I-O into Intro Psych textbooks.  After spending a lot of time creating and collating resources to help make this happen, a letter was sent to Intro Psych textbook authors last fall detailing the resources available to them – and to encourage them to add more I-O to their textbooks.  The response was exciting!   Many Are Excited: We received responses from authors of over a dozen Intro textbooks, and all the responses were positive.  Many of them agreed that I-O is an under-represented topic within Intro textbooks (one authors said it was a “shortcoming of the books that are out and around”).  Some of the responses ...

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