Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices

Teaching courses in undergraduate psychology presents special challenges to even the most

experienced educators. In addition to concerted efforts to cover a wide array of information

in an organized and comprehensible fashion, instructors continually search for ways to

promote higher-level learning while stimulating students’ classroom participation and

enthusiasm for the subject matter. As a vehicle for accomplishing these educational aims

in the undergraduate psychology classroom, I use an innovative pedagogical strategy that

effectively highlights dichotomous meaning dimensions within the parameters of George

A. Kelly’s (1955) personal construct theory (PCT) of personality. Kelly began his career as

an engineer before becoming a clinical psychologist. Partly due to the fact that Kelly was

not an eager self-publicist, his theory rarely qualifies as required reading outside of classes

in both history and systems of psychology and personality theories. Although prominent

psychological contemporaries, including Jerome Bruner (1956) and Carl Rogers (1956),

have favorably reviewed Kelly’s work, many general readers misinterpret the core features

and direction of PCT and thereby offer conflicting interpretations of Kelly’s work (Kenny,

1984). Biographical notes on Kelly’s life and the underpinnings of his theory can be found

in a collection of his papers edited by Maher (1969).

The basic tenet of PCT is that every human being acts as a “personal scientist” who

anticipates and predicts events through unique psychological processes (Kelly, 1955).

Paramount to these processes is a system of personal constructs, which Kelly defined as

hierarchically linked sets of bipolar meaning dimensions (e.g., good–bad, easy–difficult,

and relevant–irrelevant) that each person uses to organize and interpret the world. From

his theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapeutic interview strategy called the repertory grid

technique (RGT)—originally named the role construct repertory test—as an instrument for

uncovering a patient’s personal constructs with a minimum of therapist intervention and

bias. In this method, the therapist functions as a facilitator who permits the patient to

discover his or her own personal constructs. For example, using the RGT to explore a

patient’s personal relationships, Kelly might have focused attention on the self and

Chapter 11

The Repertory Grid as a Heuristic

Tool in Teaching Undergraduate

Psychology

Joseph A. Mayo

Teaching Critical Thinking in Psychology: A Handbook of Best Practices Edited by D. S. Dunn, J. S. Halonen, and R. A. Smith