Background: Psychology courses provide a good opportunity for instructors to teach students effective learning strategies integrated with content. Objective: This replication and extension study explored changes in students' self-reported use of learning strategies before and after a term paper assignment and examined the relationships between…

Objective: How do learning communities influence academic performance in Introductory Psychology? Method: The present research examines the relationship between participation in first-year students learning communities and academic performance across a variety of course requirements (midterms, finals, papers, and class participation) in…

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,…

Background: First-generation (FG) college students have been a popular subpopulation to study within educational literature as these students experience many unique challenges in their academic careers causing them to drop out within their first year. This gives courses with high first-time freshman numbers such as introductory psychology courses…

The present study explored the generation and retrieval practice effects within a college classroom using a free, online tool called PeerWise (PW). PW allows students to create their own multiple-choice questions, share them with peers, and answer the shared questions written by their peers. Forty students from two sections of an upper level…

Two studies explored properties of psychology assignments from an atypical perspective: students' own perceptions of what they learned and their emotional reactions to the assignments, specifically feelings of pride in their work. Study 1 showed that assignments vary in their likelihood of generating prideful accomplishment and identified three…

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…

Genius-level achievement is a natural draw for undergraduate students, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a topic domain within the science of psychology. Yet within the teaching of psychology literature, the psychology of genius has been largely ignored. I designed a course that combines primary source material drawn from existing empirical…

We assessed the benefits of employing microthemes--short in-class writing assignments designed to facilitate active learning--as pedagogical tools in psychology courses. Students in target course sections completed 10 in-class microthemes during a semester. We designed the microthemes to serve as active learning assignments that would enhance…

A study was undertaken among 595 students in a college psychology course to determine the relationship of test performance to competing academic assignments. Findings indicate that, in spite of a high anxiety level, college students are able to deal with the usual variations in workload that characterize academia. (Author/DB)

Reports on the impact of extra-credit assignments on the academic performance of marginal college-level students. Finds that those who attempted the assignments improved their test performance, were less likely to drop out of the class than a control group, and evaluated the experience positively. (CFR)