Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 CONNECTION TO APA STUDENT COMPETENCIES
Conforming to recommen-
dations of an American Psychological Association (APA) task force report on 
undergraduate student competencies (Board of Educational Aff airs, 2002),
every
component of the text and its package is tied to specifi c psychological concepts 
and their application in everyday life. A chart indicating how the features of the 
textbook directly address the APA student competencies is provided in Figure 1 
on page xxvi. Equally important, every one of the thousands of test items in the 
Test Banks available to instructors is keyed to its corresponding APA competency 
in a document that is available on the text Web site. 
KEY CONCEPTS
Each major section of a module begins with questions about the 
key concepts addressed in that section. These questions provide a framework for 
understanding and organizing the material that fol-
lows, as well as providing assessment benchmarks.
 EXPLORING DIVERSITY
In addition to substantial 
coverage of material relevant to diversity through-
out, every set of modules also includes at least one 
special section devoted to an aspect of racial, eth-
nic, gender, or cultural diversity. These sections 
highlight the way in which psychology informs 
(and is informed by) issues relating to the increas-
ing multiculturalism of our global society. 
When a member of the Chilcotin Indian tribe teaches her daughter to 
prepare salmon, at fi rst she allows the daughter only to observe the 
entire process. A little later, she permits her child to try out some basic 
parts of the task. Her response to questions is noteworthy. For example, 
when the daughter asks about how to do “the backbone part,” the 
mother’s response is to repeat the entire process with another salmon. 
The reason? The mother feels that one cannot learn the individual parts of the task apart from 
the context of preparing the whole fi sh. (Tharp, 1989)
It should not be surprising that children raised in the Chilcotin tradition, which stresses 
instruction that starts by communicating the entire task, may have diffi culty with 
traditional Western schooling. In the approach to teaching most characteristic of 
Western culture, tasks are broken down into their component parts. Only after each 
small step is learned is it thought possible to master the complete task. 
Do the differences in teaching approaches between cultures affect how people 
learn? Some psychologists, taking a cognitive perspective on learning, suggest that 
people develop particular learning styles , characteristic ways of approaching material, 
based on their cultural background and unique pattern of abilities (Anderson & 
Adams, 1992; Barmeyer, 2004; Wilkinson & Olliver-Gray, 2006). 
Exploring