Introduction: Psychology instructors face decisions about adopting new approaches to lectures, readings, and assessment in their courses. Statement of the Problem: These choices about course structure can be both intimidating and confusing in terms of the costs and benefits for different options. Literature Review: As framed by anecdotal and…

How can instructors help students adopt effective learning strategies? In this study, students in a large introductory psychology class completed a "learning how to learn" assignment in which they read one of four randomly assigned empirical articles about the utility of a learning strategy (i.e., distributed practice, rereading,…

Many students, particularly underprepared students, struggle to identify the essential information in empirical articles. We describe a set of assignments for instructing general psychology students to dissect the structure of such articles. Students in General Psychology I read empirical articles and answered a set of general, factual questions…

Social presence (represented by salience of instructor and fellow students) in an online teaching environment has been shown to influence perceptions of course activity and self-estimates of learning. An experiment is described here in which teacher presence is manipulated via personalized messages from the teaching assistant throughout the…

Assigned textbook readings are a common requirement in undergraduate courses, but students often do not complete reading assignments or do not do so until immediately before an exam. This may have detrimental effects on learning and course performance. Regularly scheduled quizzes on reading material may increase completion of reading assignments…