My Courses

Below, I provide the titles and brief descriptions of courses I designed and taught at the University of Chicago and Elmhurst College. If you’d like a copy of one of my syllabi, feel free to email me: rachelannking18@gmail.com

The Psychology of Wealth (University of Chicago, 2025)

This seminar focuses on the psychology of wealth, drawing from research in the fields of social psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, and economics. Students enrolled in this course will gain an in-depth understanding of the following topics:

1.     What is wealth?

2.     Who is wealthy, and how did they get there?

3.     Can money buy happiness?

4.     What assumptions do we make about people based on their wealth?

5.     What are the psychological impacts of experiencing wealth or poverty?

6.     How does wealth contribute to personal identity?

7.     Is the American Dream alive and well, or do the rich get richer?

8.     Where do people think economic inequality comes from, and what are the impacts of these beliefs?

Child Development (Elmhurst College, 2025)

This course examines various aspects of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development beginning in infancy and continuing through adolescence. We will cover a variety of topics including developmental theories, cognitive development, social learning, family and peer relationships, and emotion.

Your textbook (How Children Develop, 6th Edition, by Siegler, Saffran, Gershoff, & Eisenberg) is organized around 7 central themes of child development:

  1. Nature and Nurture. How do nature and nurture together shape development?

  2. The Active Child. How do children shape their own development?

  3. Continuity/Discontinuity. In what ways is development continuous, and in what ways

    is it discontinuous?

  4. Mechanisms of Developmental Change. How does change occur?

  5. Sociocultural Context. How does the sociocultural context influence development?

  6. Individual Differences. How do children become so different from one another?

  7. Research and Children’s Welfare. How can research promote children’s wellbeing?

In this course, students will:

  1. Develop an understanding of children’s physical, cognitive, social, and emotional

    development

  2. Learn to critically evaluate research related to children’s development

  3. Identify applications of child development to real-life situations

The Psychology of Communication (University of Chicago, 2023–2024)

course co-designed and co-taught with Ashley Leung

Talking to people is seemingly easy—we do it all the time. But what allows us to understand (and be understood by) others in conversation? Successful communication not only relies on a common language (spoken or otherwise), but also our ability to account for the knowledge and perspectives of our conversational partners. This course explores the psychology behind communication: how it works, when it doesn’t work, and how children learn to become fluent conversationalists like us.

In this course, we will read both theoretical and empirical work on human communication in the fields of psychology and psycholinguistics. We will start by discussing basic theories of communication, and evaluate the evidence presented by various researchers for or against these theories. We will also consider the various methods (experimental, observational, etc.) used for studying communication, and the unique contributions each method brings to the field. Later in the course, we will also dedicate time to explore non-verbal communication (e.g., gesture and sign language), as well as the development of conversational abilities in children. In the final weeks of the course, we will discuss the ways in which social biases are communicated, including how children infer social biases (e.g., stereotypes), often unintentionally, from subtle features of language.

In this course, students will:

  1. Develop an understanding of basic theories and concepts of communication

  2. Read and engage with scientific research articles

  3. Identify research questions and hypotheses

  4. Analyze the methods and its advantages / limitations for addressing the research question

  5. Discuss the findings and its implications for the field

  6. Understand how different research methods help us address specific questions in the study of human communication

  7. Design a study that answers a specific scientific question in the field of communication, and present their study to fellow classmates