Customer Reviews

Study Guide to accompany Psychology in Action, 7th Edition

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The Study Guide is an adequate supplement to the "Psychology in Action" textbook. There's little question that if one were to do all the exercises, fill-ins, and activities in the guide that one's overall retention of the material will be improved. This is especially valuable for, say, one who takes a psych class on-line and who is not especially good at reading and remembering everything in a textbook.

The guide contains chapter outlines, learning objectives, spaces to write definitions of important terminology, practice activities, two 20-question multiple choice tests per chapter, and the visual chapter summaries from the textbook.

Downsides:
1. The crossword puzzle idea was a good one for helping students remember terminology in a fun way. Unfortunately, there is no rhyme or reason as to whether a term is going to have sudden punctuation marks (e.g., a hyphen, an apostrophe) inserted into the puzzle until a word doesn't seem to fit in the boxes provided. The guide should have pre-printed all punctuation into the puzzles.

2. Some of the multiple choice questions are nit-picky and unhelpful.

3. Many of the extra learning "activities" are more self-psychoanalytical than actually helpful in learning the chapter material. (Example: decide if you use logical fallacies in your own personal "self-talk").

4. The chapter summaries are exact duplicates of the ones at the end of each chapter in the text. Unfortunately, they are B&W photocopies which lose the color of the originals and are almost unreadable and therefore redundant and not very useful.

5. Chapter outlines contain unnecessary, extraneous subheadings.

6. The guide, purchased new, is very expensive for the paper/copy quality provided.

Good points:
1. The multiple choice tests are usually good indicators of how well one has learned the chapter.

2. Re-writing definitions for major terms in the book was helpful (to me).

3. Brief chapter outlines in the guide were helpful for quick overviews.

4. Answer keys seemed error-free, a rarity in books these days.

Bottom line: if you're good at remembering what you read in the text and visit the Huffman student website at Wiley often and do the practice there, you probably don't need this guide. If this guide adds to your confidence because you learn better by writing, then it is a worthwhile purchase.