PREFACE Certain principles have been established as fundamental to good teaching.

Theoretically, all psychologists are agreed that a course of study should proceed from the known to the unknown and from the concrete to the general; that students should learn by doing; that the problem or project method of teaching is superior to memorization of a textbook; that functional not faculty psychology should be taught; that individual differences in students should be taken into account; that a beginning course should be designed for the benefit of the great majority who never go farther; etc The aim of this course is to meet these and other ideals of teaching in an introductory course of psychology designed pri- marily for the use of prospective teachers.

Instead of beginning with the most uninteresting phases of psychology and those most unknown to students, the course takes up concrete experi- ences of everyday life, relates them to the problems of learning, individual differences, and influencing others, and so develops these topics.

Each general principle is discovered by the student out of his own experience in solving speciall} organized problems.

Only after he has done his best is he expected to refer to the text and by then the text is no longer basic but only supplementary, clearing up misunderstandings and broadening the whole view- point.