Fundamentals of Psychology: The Brain, The Person, The World Book

This was the required textbook for one of my classes for a certificate in Secondary Education, SED 800, entitled Adolescent Development. No one in the class liked it very much, and it didn't get much respect.I think I disliked it somewhat less than most of my cohort, and for different reasons.

It was common in discussions to dismiss the text by saying "Steinberg thinks this" or that, but I felt a great deal of what he was accused of was his reporting of what researchers had concluded. But I never really investigated; I never asked, "Wait, are you sure this was the author, and not something that was then attributed to cited author or study?" Because the book also wasn't anything I wanted to put effort into defending.

I suspect the primary purpose of the text is for an undergraduate psychology class. There were plenty of citations, but the overall treatment of the material was mostly at a simple level. I often forget that at least some of my fellow students are barely done with their first bachelors' degree, when mine was several decades ago. And that I've been reading books and academic journal articles on some of this stuff (especially cognition) for almost as long as those other students have been alive. So very little of the material we were assigned was challenging.

The class instructor acknowledge that the book wasn't ideal for the course and would try to find a new one. What would be much, much better would be a book on adolescence as a teacher should understand it. There are peculiarities to the teacher-student relationship that really need to be addressed.

For example, some students will respond well to being gently teased, because it is a relationship modality they are familiar and comfortable with from other adult interactions. But others will recoil and retreat. Some are so sensitive to signs of hostility that even witnessing teasing can bring forth negative emotions that it is "triggering", to use the modern lingo. In another class we studied the research done on "Adverse Childhood Experiences" and how such sensitivity develops, but that discussion was present neither in this textbook nor in the class. I should note I was reading the 10th edition of the book, not the newest (because the latter is going for well over $200 instead of the $20-40 that would buy used copies of the previous edition), but my edition was only four years old.

For an undergraduate adolescent psych text, I don't think it's horrible, but for anyone curious about current research it's probably too superficial.