Becoming an Agent of Change

Short Description:
This textbook will show you how to comprehensively analyze, investigate, and address escalating problems of economic inequality, violence, substance abuse, homelessness, poverty, and racism. It will provide you with perspectives and tools to partner with community members and organizations to promote a fair and equitable allocation of resources and opportunities. Please email us at openaccesscptextbook@gmail.com with any feedback or to request downloadable versions of the chapter lecture slides and quizzes for instructor use.

Word Count: 110951

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This text represents the collaboration of more than 70 authors from multiple countries. Essentials of Exercise and Sport Psychology: An Open Access Textbook brings this diverse set of experts together to provide a free, open, accessible textbook for students studying exercise and sport psychology. Primarily directed at undergraduate students, this well-referenced book is also appropriate for graduate students.

This open resources textbook contains 10 Units that describe and explain the main concepts in statistical analysis of psychological data (managing data, measures of central tendency, measures of spread, correlations, simple linear regression). In addition to conceptual descriptions and explanations of the basic analyses for descriptive statistics, this textbook also explains how to conduct those analyses with common statistical software (Excel) and open-source free software (R). This book is directed to undergraduates studying basic statistics, especially basic statistics in psychological research.

The present adaptation constitutes the second Canadian edition and was co-authored by Rajiv S. Jhangiani (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) and I-Chant A. Chiang (Quest University Canada) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Revisions include the following:

This free online (OER) textbook demonstrates the work and impact of community psychologists and allies by showcasing actual projects conducted in partnership with communities. The book displays cases in a dynamic and interactive format that will ignite students' desire and passion to study and become future community psychologists or those whose heart beats with the beloved community. You can find community psychologists and allies partnering with communities to change racist policies, end health disparities, create alternate settings for youth, foster community-based models to heal trauma, evaluate programs, and much more!

Word Count: 72364

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Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field’s immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science.

Written by Lansing Community College Psychology professor Dr. Mark Kelland, this book covers general personality theory, with an emphasis on cultural aspects affecting personality development. There is also a section focusing on making positive choices in the development of one's personality from a number of different cultural/philosophical perspectives.

A Two-Part Introduction to the Psychology of Human Sexuality

Short Description:
This is an introductory human sexuality textbook.

Word Count: 119795

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Short Description:
This open access textbook was developed as an upper division undergraduate textbook for theories of personality. Its intended audience are students from Portland State University enrolled in Psychology 432 Personality course. The chapters are shorter than some personality textbooks and in this particular course Psy 432 the textbook is combined with other readings including scientific articles on personality.

Word Count: 104891

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Welcome to 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.

Readers will learn about the nature of health, health education, health promotion and related concepts. This will help to understand the social, psychological and physical components of health.

Interdisciplinary Insights

Short Description:
The authors of ‘Trauma Informed Behavior Support’, Dr Kay Ayre and Dr Govind Krishnamoorthy, speak with interdisciplinary experts from education and mental health about trauma informed education and practical strategies to support students.

Long Description:
As an educator, have you ever wondered about students, “Why can’t she just control her behaviour?” or “Why did he do that?” The demands of the classroom, and the scrutiny of teachers, often leave little time for teachers to consider the complex needs of children experiencing traumatic stress. Drawing on their lived experience and professional expertise, the conversations with trauma-informed education experts in this unique book offer educators an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the needs of students and strategies for responding with compassion and empathy. In a time of rapidly emerging scientific discovery, and social and political challenges, this book encourages educational leaders to question the fundamental assumptions of dominant pedagogical practices and sets the foundations for innovation in education.

Word Count: 41663

ISBN: 978-0-6453261-8-5

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This open textbook is designed for Human Development, a core Psychology course. This course provides a bird’s eye view of major milestones and developmental tasks during each age period, starting at conception and ending with old age.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions and educational settings. Genre in a Changing World provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, North and South America, were selected from more than 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies), held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

Statistical thinking is a way of understanding a complex world by describing it in relatively simple terms that nonetheless capture essential aspects of its structure, and that also provide us some idea of how uncertain we are about our knowledge. The foundations of statistical thinking come primarily from mathematics and statistics, but also from computer science, psychology, and other fields of study.

Short Description:
Trauma Informed Behaviour Support: A Practical Guide to Developing Resilient Learners guides educators working with primary school aged children to understand trauma as well as its impact on young children's brains, behaviour, learning, and development. The book provides a novel framework of practice – drawing on contemporary theories of developmental trauma and evidence-based practices of positive behaviour support. Practical strategies and tools are offered for educators to use to create strength-based environments that support children's recovery, resiliency and learning. Educators are introduced to the systemic impacts of traumatic stress and are provided with trauma-informed practices that they can use to support workforce development that enhance the quality of pedagogical practices, while promoting the safety and care of the school community.

Word Count: 56931

ISBN: 978-0-6487698-3-5

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Over the years researchers have found the necessity to develop theories of behavior that are specific to family settings. These theories have been developed by people with a variety of areas of emphasis, from family therapists to gerontologists to child development specialists. In this chapter we will briefly discuss six such theories: Bioecological Model, Family Systems, Functionalism, Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and Psychological Perspectives.

The second in a two-volume set, A Theory of Literate Action draws on work from the social sciences—and in particular sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science—to "reconceive rhetoric fundamentally around the problems of written communication rather than around rhetoric's founding concerns of high stakes, agonistic, oral public persuasion" (p. 3). An expression of more than a quarter-century of reflection and scholarly inquiry, this volume represents a significant contribution to contemporary rhetorical theory.

The Commons: Tools for Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric gives instructors and students of college writing courses a single source for information on metacognitive critical reading, rhetorical awareness, and MLA formatting basics as well as interesting and relevant reading and viewing content. Its approach is interdisciplinary, bringing in material from ecology, sociology, psychology, technology, popular culture, political science, cultural studies, and literature. Each essay, website, video, infographic, and poem has been carefully chosen to speak to the Eastern Kentucky University community, but everyone can find something that speaks to our common human experience and our need to communicate and connect with one another.