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,…

Students majoring in psychology are often required or encouraged to have hands-on experience in the field. One way to gain experience is through an independent research experience (IRE); however, little is known about what IREs actually entail. In an effort to learn about students' IREs, we recruited 117 undergraduates from a Research I university…

Background: Undergraduates may not use the most effective learning strategies, particularly those considered "desirable difficulties" such as spacing, elaboration, and testing ("SET"). Objective: This study examined knowledge-based, metacognitive, and behavioral outcomes from interventions designed to teach undergraduates about…

This preliminary randomized controlled experiment evaluated the effects of a single classroom mindfulness educational session, versus an active contact control activity (study skills review), on college students' mindfulness meditation frequency and self-reported stress, anxiety, and self-regulation. Those in the intervention group reported…

Many students and educators know that sleep is important to learning, yet there exists a gap between their knowledge and behavior. For example, fewer than 10% of students sleep 8 hr before final exams. In the context of two undergraduate courses on sleep (N = 34), students could earn extra credit if they averaged =8.0 hr of sleep during final…

An undergraduate senior-level course, the psychology of beauty, taught within the positive psychology approach, was designed with the aim to increase state and trait levels of engagement with beauty among its students. The course was a service-learning course in which students were paired by the Area Agency on Aging with elders in the greater…

Recent research compared the use of case studies to online discussion boards to teach about anxiety disorders. The current study extends this research to mood disorders, reports pretest and posttest scores on four learning outcomes, and compares midterm exam scores from Fall 2016 and Fall 2017 when case studies and online discussion boards were…

Undergraduate research participant pools play an essential role in facilitating research, and many universities rely on them for participant recruitment. There is an abundance of information about those who do elect to participate in research through these recruitment systems but very little about those who do not. The present study examines both…

The current set of three studies further evaluates the validity and application of the Psychological Research Inventory of Concepts (PRIC). In Study 1, we administered the PRIC to a sample of introductory psychology students and online (Mechanical Turk) participants along with measures assessing theoretically related concepts. We found evidence of…

Students in an introductory psychology class rated their level of confidence in their answers to exam questions on four multiple-choice exams through the course of a semester. Correlations between confidence judgments and accuracy (correct vs. incorrect) at the individual item level showed modest but significant relationships for item sets scaled…

This study investigated whether students use crib cards as a security blanket or a crutch by asking students to tally the number of times they used them during exams in a statistics class. There was a negative correlation between the number of times students used their crib cards and exam performance. High-achieving students did not utilize their…

Describes a research project which demonstrates to college-level psychology students the differences between experimental and correlational research methods. The project consisted of an examination of the relationships between rewards and helping and costs and helping in a nonemergency situation. (Author/KC)

Describes an activity that enables students to exercise their data entry, computational, graphical, and writing skills to learn the importance of graphs in good statistical analysis. Students use four data sets to enter data, compute Pearson correlation values, plot scatter graphs, and write results paragraphs. (CMK)

This study investigated the relation between dilatory behaviors and performance in students whom we randomly assigned to either an online or a traditional, lecture introductory psychology class. Both sections had full access to a class Web site. There were no reliable differences between the 2 sections of the class on the measures of…

Research on minimal groups demonstrates that arbitrarily creating 2 groups leads to the development of in-group favoritism. Experiments using the minimal groups paradigm show students how easily in-group biases can be created simply by categorizing others. This article describes an in-class activity that demonstrates the power of categorization.…