Throughout the course of this book, I have been pretty critical of psychology.

Here, I propose a change and open myself to your criticisms.
I propose a change to the nature and structure of undergraduate psychology degrees. This change would take considerable effort to implement. This change would, over years, propagate a new sort of graduate into society and into graduate psychology programs, which would itself propagate a new sort of applicant to tenure-track professorial positions. Over the decades, I propose that this change could change psychology as a field for the better.

I would like to break undergraduate psychology into three streams:

The Three Streams

1. Pre-clinical

This stream would prepare students for clinical psychology graduate programs including PhDs, PsyDs, and various clinically-oriented Masters degrees, e.g. counselling, social work, etc.

The pre-clinical stream would provide a strong focus on what is needed for careers in clinical psychology, counselling psychology, psychotherapy, and other allied mental health professions.

This is not my area of expertise. As such, I am not the right person to design the relevant curriculum. Nevertheless, I am confident that such a stream could provide a more focused set of courses than those currently provided by general psychology undergraduate degree programs.

At the very least, students would learn about abnormal psychology and diagnostic assessments, about frontline treatment modalities, and about the neuroscience of psychopathology. Some courses would overlap with the Research Psychology stream (e.g. introductory statistics) and some would be unique to the Pre-clinical stream (e.g. courses involving practical roleplay experiences). Students could also learn the fundamentals of business and self-employment, which would be useful for those headed toward private practice. If it strikes you as odd to teach about business in a pre-clinical stream, consider the precedent that basic business is commonly taught in engineering undergraduate degree programs. The goal is to prepare the person to be well-rounded and ready for a career in their field.

Students graduating from this undergraduate stream would be immediately hireable as entry-level mental health support workers, e.g. for crisis hotlines, as well as human resources personnel. The same content would prepare graduates of this stream to excel in clinical psychology graduate programs and related clinical programs.

2. Research Psychology

This stream would prepare students for graduate school in experimental psychology.

My ideal version would take the structure of undergraduate degrees in engineering, then tone down the absurdity of the level of work, but focus on a high degree of rigour and a no-nonsense approach to pragmatism.

Major foci would be in five areas:

• Foundations: philosophy of science and philosophy of statistics, reading and critique, evolution and genetics, human behavioural ecology, neuroscience and endocrinology,
• Experiment Design: Open Science and the Replication Crisis, experiment design fundamentals, research data management, biases and confounds, DAGs and causation, psychometric design and validation,
• Programming and Statistics: Introduction to programming, Introduction to R, Introduction to Python, correlations and multilevel modelling, frequentist and Bayesian statistics, statistical simulation for power analyses and bootstrapping, structured equation modelling and latent growth modelling, factor analysis and principal components analysis, introduction to time-series analysis, introduction to neuroscientific data analysis (EEG), introduction to neuroscientific data analysis (fMRI)
• Communication and Administration: The current approach of relying on assignments that induce students to practice "soft skills" without having been explicitly instructed on best practices leaves much to be desired. These "soft skills" would be explicitly taught to students: writing, presenting (oral-visual), networking and collaboration, grant-writing, mentorship, reviewing.
• Research Content Courses: various psychology-specific content courses, e.g. intro to cognitive psychology, intro to developmental psychology, attention, memory, numeric development, etc. These courses would be structured as tracks that deepen student knowledge of a particular area, e.g. intro to cognitive psychology followed by memory followed by neuroscience of the hippocampus. All students would take broad overview courses to get exposed to different areas, then be expected to specialize in two areas.

Students graduating from this undergraduate stream would be immediately hireable as entry-level data scientists and data analysts, i.e. this stream provides a white-collar non-academic exit for students not headed to graduate programs. The same content would prepare graduates of this stream to excel in experimental psychology graduate programs.

This stream would reduce the number of extraneous content courses that are unlikely to be useful to students, favouring highly pragmatic courses instead. By providing a more challenging and specialized undergraduate stream, we could train students to a level equivalent or beyond that of current Master's degree students.

3. General Psychology

This stream would prepare students for a transition into industry, including positions such as science journalist.

The General Psychology stream is intended to provide a program with lower entry qualifications compared to the other two streams.
This stream is for the students that want "any undergraduate degree". These are the students that earn Cs and Ds in today's existing psychology undergraduate programs. Students in this stream are not headed toward graduate school, but they want a Bachelor's degree on their CV.

The general stream would provide an education more like a "humanities" version of psychology.
The general stream would provide a breadth of educational enrichment to teach what is needed for general careers in business, such as those in human resources and administration, and for science-adjacent careers, such as science journalism or work at science-oriented non-governmental organizations, such as not-for-profit, non-profit, public-benefit, and charitable organizations. The general stream could also provide the foundation for further certified education, e.g. training to become a primary or secondary school teacher.

Major foci would be in four areas:

• Scientific Literacy: Students would be taught to read, critique, and accurately summarize papers. They would learn a basic understanding of how to read and interpret statistical results, though not necessarily how to perform statistical tests themselves. They would learn how to assess the design of a study and how to present the limitations of various designs.
• Public Communication: There would be a significant focus on training communication skills, including writing internally and for the public, presenting and press conferences, multimedia and communications technology, and networking and fundraising.
• Business Administration: Early courses could teach general training on being a good employee and manager whereas higher-level courses could focus on management and business administration as well as other practical skills that would help graduates obtain entry-level jobs in industry.
• Content Courses and Breadth Electives: In addition to several psychology content courses, this stream would offer more electives. Electives allow students to pick up additional training where they are most interested, e.g. some could learn more about statistics or more about philosophy of science, others might focus more on public policy or international relations. The general stream would provide the freedom to integrate disparate fields into a single university experience, e.g. a student might seek a minor in history or fine arts to compliment their general stream psychology studies.

Crucially, the general stream would be clear that it is not a pathway to graduate studies in psychology.
This contrasts with the present model wherein universities do students a disservice by giving them the false impression that they, too, might get accepted into grad school. This stream would be clear that it terminates at the bachelor's level and graduates are expected to enter the world of work, not academia. As such, the general stream would focus on teaching students practical skills that would be useful for industry work.

Conceptually, some people might question the validity of the general stream.
In some ways, this stream is arguably undesirable for society as it would contribute to "degree bloat", i.e. the issuance of more and more bachelor's degrees. While this may be an accurate assessment, there is an undeniable demand for degrees of this nature. If we accept that this demand exists and the fact that the university will find a way to provide for this demand, I propose that the content outlined above would better serve students graduating from this general stream than compared to the false hopes induced in students in existing undifferentiated undergraduate psychology degrees. Students in the general stream would know that they are not headed toward PhDs in clinical or experimental psychology and we would do well not teach them as if they were.

The general stream also serves as a "backup" for overly-ambitious students that get admitted into the Pre-clinical and Research Psychology streams. If students in those streams found themselves to be ill-equipped to succeed in those streams, they could "fail gracefully" into the General Psychology stream and still translate their credits into a useful degree that prepares them for a world outside academia.

Research Psychology: Additional Detail

Developing this kind of program change and putting it into practice would be a tremendous feat. What follows are some additional details to consider. These ideas would need to be planned in greater detail for actual implementation, but I hope this inspires you to imagine what could be.

What is the Teleology?

Where do the highest-achieving high-school students apply?
The highest-achieving high-school students often get tracked into degrees in math, physics, computer science, engineering, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy.

The best and brightest aren't generally directed toward studying psychology.

As a field, we could provide an elevated training program in psychology that could attract more of the highest-achieving students. This is one of the underlying long-term goals of the Pre-clinical and Research Psychology streams. These students would learn and understand philosophy of science and statistics at a much deeper level than current psychology undergraduates. Holding students to higher standards earlier in undergrad would help us build revolutionary academics of the future.

Step 1: Replacing Introductory Psychology

The first step is to replace "Psych 101", which is often taught as a general survey course, with a novel course called, "Introduction to the Scientific Method for use in Psychological Research".

This course would start by covering philosophy of science and philosophy of statistics: how do we know what we know and what are the fundamental limitations of our ability to model reality? With this background in place, the course would then focus on teaching experimental methods, designs, and statistical concepts (not statistical techniques). With these critical pieces in place, the course would then cover basic human evolutionary history and human behavioural ecology, then an abridged history of science followed by a history of psychology culminating in the present.

Step 2: Introducing Programming and Strengthening Statistics

In first-year, Research Psychology students would take two semesters to learn introductory programming basics.
The psychology department could collaborate with the computer science department to develop a specialized "Introduction to Computer Science for Research Psychology" course that is tailored specifically to programming that is used in psychology research. This includes programming experimental tasks in Python and data-analysis using R, but also basic data management and version-control, which are often not understood even by professors of psychology.

See also An Introduction to Programming for Psychology

In second-year, Research Psychology students would take two semesters of introductory statistics using R.
The first course could focus on Bayesian approaches to the general linear model (GLM) and special cases thereof (correlations, t-tests, ANOVA). The second course could focus on multilevel modelling, which is standard in the field but often isn't taught until graduate school. The second course could also introduce frequentist statistics, which function in ways that are far less intuitive than Bayesian statistics, but are required for reading a great deal of the literature.

Why this approach for Research Psychology?

This approach would achieve multiple benefits:

(1) Learning to program properly

Very few psychology professors —even the ones that are proficient in R— actually know how to program properly. Most professors of psychology have close to zero computer science background. Most psych profs that learned to program in R (or Python or MATLAB or any other language) learned how to program in that specific language without learning programming fundamentals first. They end up cobbling together code that technically works (most of the time), but is brittle and doesn't follow standard programming principles. In other words, they end up doing a very poor job of coding!

Finding a psychology student or professor that knows —let alone follows— programming best practices is exceedingly rare. At the same time, finding a computer science student or professor that doesn't know and follow programming best practices is also exceedingly rare! Best practices are standard instruction for first-year computer science students and are commonplace in industry.

Psychology departments should leverage computer science departments to teach computer science to Research Psychology students. With this approach, Research Psychology students would learn programming principles, not just a single programming language. When a student learns the principles of programming, they are able to quickly pick up any particular language, whether it be R or Python or anything else a psychologist might run into. Proper programming skills will translate into more reproducible research and more confidence in findings.

See also An Introduction to Programming for Psychology

(2) Spread the difficulty

By splitting programming and statistics into multiple courses, students would be able to focus on one challenge at a time. Students currently learning SPSS or R and statistics in the same course tend to struggle quite a lot. They tend to report that their statistics course is the hardest course in their entire degree. Trying to learn both at the same time means problems can arise where students have a hard time identifying the source of the problem: they don't know whether their programming is incorrect or their stats are incorrect or whether both may be incorrect. Spreading these challenging topics into multiple courses would provide a more gradual approach to learning while establishing a secure foundation and lifelong skills.

(3) Preparation for alternate careers

Most undergraduates in psychology do not get accepted into PhD programs.
Learning the transferrable skills outlined in the Research Psychology stream would prepare graduates of that stream for non-academic career options, such as data science or data analytics. This approach would open more non-academic career pathways than existing psychology degrees currently offer.

(4) Students that don't understand should be allowed to fail

The solution I propose is to take a long-term approach to addressing problems in the field.

We could enact this long-term approach by holding undergraduate students to a higher standard. Rather than populating our courses with C and D students, we allow these students to "fail gracefully" out of the Research Psychology stream and into the General Psychology stream, which safely catches them and helps them become productive members of society according to their realized means.

With the safety-net of General Psychology in place, we would be able to lift Research Psychology stream to higher heights.

Raising standards of achievement would create a virtuous cycle.
Higher standards would raise the prestige of successful graduates, which would raise the prestige of the program. As the program gains recognition, this would attract higher-achieving applicants, cultivating an elevated undergraduate degree in Research Psychology.

As this program graduates successful students, a notable proportion would go on to successful graduate programs and continue into prestigious careers in academia. Some of these would proliferate this tripartite stream approach to their new universities' undergraduate programs, replicating the three-stream model. As elite Research Psychology programs began to proliferate, more and more successful Research Psychology graduates would enter Master's and PhD programs at higher levels of competence. This would allow them to proceed faster and further than their academic peers from traditional non-streamed undergraduate psychology programs. Successful Research Psychology PhDs would end up in professorial roles and, over the decades, fill the seats of retiring psychology faculty. This new blood would bring new ideas and reliable rigour to the field and psychology would grow as a science.

Personally, I find this opportunity inspiring.
Perhaps this is my hill.

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