Abstracts of recent articles published in Teaching of Psychology 51(4)

Background: Increasing students’ ability to think critically allows them to engage more fully with psychology material.

Objective: The current study used a critical thinking assignment called PsychBusters to examine critical thinking and interest in psychology in two sections of introductory psychology designated for first-year psychology majors.

Method: The experimental section completed two PsychBusters presentations including a poster presentation. The control course section also completed poster presentations but did not do the PsychBusters assignment. For both sections, critical thinking skills and levels of interest in psychology were measured at the start and end of the semester.

Results: Students in both sections maintained a high interest in psychology across the semester. The section that worked on the PsychBusters misconception assignment had similar critical thinking skills as the control at the start of the semester but had higher scores at the posttest.

Conclusion: Assignments that direct students to focus on critical thinking may not improve one’s interest in psychology. However, class assignments that hone critical thinking skills should be integrated into psychology courses with the aim of improving students’ reasoning.

Teaching Implications: The development of critical thinking skills in psychology majors should start early in the curriculum.

Keywords

Critical thinking, pedagogy, replication, teaching and learning myths

Background: Because plagiarism is such a common form of academic dishonesty, many instructors are seeking ways to effectively teach students to avoid plagiarism.

Objective: The current study tested the effectiveness of a 3-pronged intervention to teach students in an upper-level psychology course to better understand plagiarism.

Method:The intervention involved three different assignments across the first part of the semester: an online plagiarism tutorial, an in-class lecture over a plagiarism handout, and a follow-up homework exercise that helped students apply what they learned from the tutorial and handout.

Results: Study 1 showed that students in the intervention class scored higher on an end-of-semester plagiarism test compared to a control group of classes that did not use the intervention. Study 2 replicated these results and ruled out the possibility of preexisting differences in plagiarism knowledge by comparing plagiarism test scores on a beginning-of-semester pretest and an end-of-semester posttest in both the intervention and control classes.

Conclusion: The results of this naturalistic, quasi-experimental study suggest that multiple exposures to anti-plagiarism instruction in different formats can be effective.

Teaching Implications: Psychology instructors can improve students’ understanding of plagiarism and how to avoid it by using this 3-pronged approach in their courses.

Keywords

Plagiarism, academic integrity, academic dishonesty, writing skills, college students, psychology

Background: The American Psychological Association has identified information literacy as a crucial component to undergraduate education. One major barrier to comprehensive information literacy instruction has been a lack of guidance integrating this into survey courses, particularly with reduced pedagogical resources available.

Objective: This research evaluates the effectiveness of a scaffolded information literacy curriculum that may be integrated into psychology courses.

Method: Students in introductory psychology courses were taught with either an information literacy curriculum or the typical science-focused curriculum. Information literacy knowledge was evaluated using a multiple-choice test.

Results: Students who received the specialized curriculum demonstrated significant improvements on an objective information literacy test by the end of the course, while students in the control group did not.

Conclusion: Evidence suggests that this easily adaptable information literacy curriculum is effective in meeting psychology information literacy goals, more so than the traditional science-focused curriculum taught in introductory psychology classes.

Teaching Implications: Instructors and faculty should be encouraged to utilize this adaptive curriculum, available on Open Science Framework, as a way of improving information literacy. Other implications, including feasibility and content, are discussed.

Keywords

Curriculum, hybrid course design, instructional methods, information literacy, interdisplinary issues

Background: The wellbeing of university students is deteriorating, highlighting a critical role for institutions to better support student wellbeing.

Objective: The goal of this work is to determine whether a final-year undergraduate wellbeing science module, inspired by recent theoretical developments, improved wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: Participants (N = 128) completed a brief online questionnaire including the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale across baseline and follow-up assessments. Analysis involved 2 group (intervention, control) × 2 time (baseline T1, followup T2) mixed-effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) and one-sample t-tests to compare the intervention group with population-based norms for adults aged 16–75+.

Results: A significant interaction effect was observed, reflecting an increase in wellbeing in the intervention group in T2 relative to T1. Comparisons with published norms, further highlighted the beneficial impact of the module.

Conclusion: Encouraging connection to self, others and nature has beneficial impacts on wellbeing, consistent with a modern science of wellbeing.

Teaching Implications: Students learn the latest wellbeing theory, spanning the individual to the planet, and engage with opportunities to improve wellbeing, broadly defined. Teaching materials are made freely available for instructors wishing to develop a similar module or adapt materials for other purposes.

Keywords

Wellbeing science, individual wellbeing, collective wellbeing, planetary wellbeing, GENIAL model

Background: Teaching students about race and racism is critical to and relevant in psychology classrooms.

Objective: We explored whether direct instruction dismantling ideas that race is genetic affects students’ race essentialist and other related beliefs.

Method: Undergraduate students enrolled in four social psychology courses completed measures of race essentialism and other related beliefs before and after engaging in course-directed activities designed to reduce endorsement of biological essentialist beliefs about race.

Results: After class activities, students reported lower levels of general racial essentialist beliefs and estimated that more progress is needed to reduce racial inequality. However, attitudes towards racially minoritized groups or perceived need for anti-racist actions did not shift, and colorblind ideology may have increased.

Conclusion: These data provide evidence that essentialism shifts can be accomplished in the psychology classroom, but shifting related beliefs may require additional instruction.

Teaching Implications: The class activities described in this research provide a way for instructors to introduce students to a new concept (race essentialism) and change students’ beliefs in the genetic underpinning of race.

Keywords

Race, antiracism, essentialism, bias

Background: College students often do not retain what they learn in Statistics in order to apply it in Experimental Psychology. Self-explanation, that is, elaborating on what one is trying to learn by asking questions, making inferences, etc., improves learning and may improve retention.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether self-explanation was superior to students’ usual study methods specifically for learning some basic concepts in statistics, and, if so, if it was similarly useful for retention a semester after the initial learning.

Method: We used 199 college students as participants in a randomized, between participant, two-part experiment examining the effects of training by prompting self-explanations as a potential solution to this applied problem.

Results: The self-explanations that we elicited improved initial learning and were superior to students’ usual study methods, but did not benefit retention.

Conclusions: Future research on improving the quality of the self-explanations and training with spaced retrieval practice, in order to benefit retention, is suggested.

Teaching Implication: Self-explanation should be implemented for teaching statistics in order to benefit initial learning. However, teachers should explore other methods to accomplish retention.

Keywords

College teaching, teaching statistics, learning statistics, long-term retention

Background: An increasing number of undergraduate positive psychology courses offer students a holistic view of the broader discipline of psychology. Even short-term participation in positive psychology activities as part of a taught course may improve psychological well-being and lower stress. However, there is a dearth of qualitative evidence on how students experience this learning process.

Objective: This study aimed to explore UAE-based undergraduate students’ reflections on their experiences of an elective positive psychology course and their participation in various positive psychology interventions (PPIs).

Method: This qualitative study explored 21 UAE-based undergraduate students’ reflections on taking a semester-long positive psychology course, in which they participated in PPIs. The rich data from semi-structured interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results: Three main themes emerged, namely rethinking positive psychology, changes in perspective on happiness and search for positivity, and enhanced relationships.

Conclusion and Teaching Implications: The study suggests that positive psychology may reach past the time and space of the taught course and have at least a short-term positive impact on students’ mental and social lives. Findings from this study imply the potential of positive psychology in higher education and point towards further integration of such courses in undergraduate programs in the UAE and beyond.

Keywords

Positive psychology, student reflections, changed perspective, positive psychology interventions, relationships

Background: The study of myths in psychology has conceptual and educational relevance: How to adapt the teaching of psychology to confront myths with grounded knowledge? A first step is to know which myths prevail and its relation to training in psychology.

Objective: To explore myth’s prevalence among Spanish first-year university students of Social (SS) and Engineering Sciences (ES) (Study 1), and among different levels of expertise in psychology (Study 2).

Method: Questionnaire including 21 myths. Study 1: 175 first-year SS and ES undergraduates. Study 2: 102 lay, semi-experts and experts in psychology.

Results: Lower prevalence of myths among Spanish students than in other countries (approx. 37% vs. 60%), with SS students performing better than ES students. Experts performed significantly better (14% myths endorsed) than lay students (33%), but not than semi-experts (19%).

Conclusions: The lower prevalence of myths compared to other countries may be due to methodological and sociocultural aspects. University training in psychology helps to better identify myths but does not eradicate them.

Teaching Implications: Need to reflect on the little progress beyond a medium level of expertise. Teachers and students must identify their own myths and work on them in classroom, promoting critical thinking.

Keywords

Psychology, myths, university students, university teachers, expertise

Background: Completing positive psychology-related activities can increase subjective and objective well-being.

Objective: The present study investigated whether completing a condensed positive psychology course increases students’ subjective well-being and academic achievement relative to those who completed other condensed psychology courses.

Method: One hundred and eighty-one students completed a condensed 4-week to 5-week asynchronous, fully online, positive psychology, cognitive psychology, or statistics course. All students completed three questionnaires assessing their subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction, happiness, and stress level) at two time points: precompletion and postcompletion of the course. Participants were also asked to indicate how often they shared the information they learned in the course with their close others, and their course grade was analyzed.

Results: Students who completed the positive psychology course reported higher levels of life satisfaction, lower levels of stress, and had a higher course grade compared to students completing the other psychology courses. Students who completed positive psychology indicated that they were more likely to share what they had been learning with their close others than those who completed the other courses. Among the positive psychology activities, participants indicated that they were most likely to continue performing random acts of kindness.

Conclusion: Completing a positive psychology course benefits both the individual and the community at large.

Teaching Implications: The results support the use of a positive psychology course to improve students’ well-being and academic achievement.

Keywords

Positive psychology, subjective well-being, academic achievement, stress, life satisfaction

Background: Methods are needed to incentivize student attention to class material.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of in-class quizzing to incentivize student attention to class material to boost exam performance.

Method: A randomized, alternating treatments design embedded in an introductory psychology class compared learning benefits of two types of quiz-based engagement activities, mastery quizzes, and concepts checks, as compared to a no-engagement activity control.

Results: Students performed significantly better on exam content linked to classes with quiz-based engagement activities. Learning benefits of engagement activities extended across levels of cognitive complexity indexed to Bloom levels, although were stronger for low-level items. The effects of engagement activities were also stronger for content directly discussed in class. There were no significant differences in learning outcomes between the two engagement activities.

Conclusion: Students performed better on exam content linked to class sessions with quiz-based engagement activities that incentivized attention to class material compared to those that did not.

Teaching Implications: Using in-class quizzes as attentional cues offers instructors a means of incentivizing student attention to class material with minimal disruption of class time and lecture flow, while also improving exam scores.

Keywords

Classroom quizzing, attention, engagement, exam performance

Background: Psychological literacy is a set of attributes, which refer broadly to how students apply their subject-specific psychology knowledge to solving problems. However, the extent to which psychological literacy skills are unique to psychology as a discipline is unknown.

Objective: We assessed whether students perceive psychological literacy attributes to be prominent in disciplines outside of psychology.

Method: We recruited undergraduate students from Psychology, non-Psychology STEM subjects, and Humanities subjects (N = 296) and asked them to identify the extent to which they perceive psychological literacy attributes to be prominent in their degrees.

Results: Psychology students reported significantly higher perceived prominence of psychological literacy attributes in their degree, compared with Humanities and non-Psychology STEM students, in all but two of the psychological literacy attributes.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that psychological literacy mostly represents attributes unique to psychology students, but some of these attributes are also developed within other disciplines. The facets of psychological literacy unique to psychology relate to knowledge of behavior, research skills, ethics, and socio-cultural issues.

Teaching Implications: This suggests that psychology students graduate with some subject specific attributes, which may make them uniquely advantaged in a competitive work context and affirms that psychology degrees do hold unique value.

Keywords

Psychological literacy, psychology education, graduate attributes, global citizenship

Introduction: Cognitive psychology courses are rich in content that can be useful to broad audiences. Much of the foundational research presented in course texts is conducted in highly constrained laboratory settings, making the concepts difficult to apply or use in the real world.

Statement of the Problem: Students in cognitive psychology classes may not readily notice practical applications for the content. Standard assessments (e.g. written research papers) fail to capture the real-world applications of cognitive phenomena.

Literature Review: Using an applied framework can motivate engagement in cognition. The use of an Unessay project in undergraduate cognitive psychology courses requires students to present a key construct in any format except an essay. Unessay projects originated in the humanities, and are an excellent fit for psychology.

Teaching Implications: The Unessay is a useful vehicle for identifying and presenting the application of a cognitive construct in the real world. Students are required to convey that information in a creative, non-essay format. Instructions, a rubric and examples are provided.

Conclusion: The Unessay is a novel approach to a course project in cognitive psychology that can motivate student interest while aligning with several APA outcomes for psychology majors.

Keywords

Creativity, applied learning, authentic assessment, Universal Design for Learning

Introduction: Instructors assign grades to communicate to students how well they are learning the course content. However, students and instructors are often displeased with the process and outcome of grading.

Statement of the Problem: We contend that conventional grading inadvertently detracts from student learning and simultaneously replicates systems of oppression in academia. We discuss Labor-Based Grading Contracts (LBGCs) as an alternative to conventional grading.

Literature Review: We review the conceptual and empirical literature on LBGCs as an alternative method of assessing student work and extend its application to psychology and neuroscience courses.

Teaching Implications: We present recommendations for implementing LBGCs and address common concerns instructors have about this approach. We also make a call for more research on LBGCs in psychology and neuroscience teaching and learning.

Conclusion: LBGCs represent a promising shift in the purpose and approach to assessing student work and learning by centering laboring to learn and developing skills. LBGCs also create a more equitable grading structure for all students.

Keywords

Labor-based grading contracts, grading, assessment, equity, pedagogy

Introduction: Poverty is a central concept in many fields of psychology, yet poorly designed activities regarding wealth inequality may backfire or cause students to become defensive.

Statement of the Problem: Many students hold misperceptions about class mobility and lack an understanding of how systemic barriers perpetuate poverty across the lifespan. The activity described demonstrates how access to resources is often not sufficient to reduce wealth inequality over time.

Literature Review: Wealth inequity in America has worsened since the 1970s. Subjective perceptions of income are often predictive of well-being above and beyond objective measures. Students’ misperceptions of social class mobility may be changed through activities that elucidate privilege and oppression across different groups.

Teaching Implications: The activity included opportunities for hands-on learning as well as critical reflection in small groups and with the larger class. Students reported the activity was engaging, emotional, and connected to real-life contexts.

Conclusion: Activities that ask students to confront their misperceptions about class mobility and personal understanding of privilege and oppression in a non-threatening way may facilitate greater understanding and empathy towards low-income groups.

Keywords

Inequality, social mobility, lifespan

Introduction: Students in higher education courses need to practice vital groupwork skills that are increasingly relevant in today’s collaborative workplace, which often occurs through small group coursework.

Statement of the Problem: The process of forming small groups with students who are committed to the topic and goals is frequently problematic.

Literature Review: We review the literature on the advantages and disadvantages of common group formation strategies, such as self-assembly and professor assignment.

Teaching Implications: We discuss the use of a unique method of forming small groups in a university setting through a fun, interactive activity based on the classic “speed-dating” exercise.

Conclusion: We recommend that educators consider the use of a speed-interviewing group formation strategy to allow groups to form based on similar topic interests and work styles.

Keywords

Pedagogical activity, speed-interviewing, student interaction, group formation, group commitment, group cohesion, group work, workgroups