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…

Background: Incorporating professional development into undergraduate psychology coursework is an ongoing area of improvement for educators. Objective: We present a novel activity encouraging students to explore various professional skills and roles for which their psychology major prepares them through application to real-world issues. Method:…

Background: The Trickle-Down Engagement Model posits that instructor engagement promotes student engagement which, in turn, has positive implications for student learning. Objective: Our goal was to provide evidence-based practical recommendations for instructors to communicate their engagement with course material to students, activating the…

Background: Student anxiety about statistics may lead to poorer learning outcomes. Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate an exercise designed to teach students in an introductory statistics class the principles of bivariate regression and to emphasize how statistical tools used by psychologists are also implemented in other fields.…

Many students who declare a psychology major are unaware that they are studying a scientific discipline, precipitating a need for exercises and experiences that help students understand the scientific nature of the discipline. The present study explores aspects of an introductory psychology class that may contribute to students' understanding of…

We describe how students can be encouraged to actively review course contents on inferential statistics by creating application-oriented exercises and sample solutions on the basis of concrete and realistic research articles and their data. For evaluation purposes, we use students' reactions to the activity and investigate its effects on the final…

For this simple active learning technique for teaching, students are assigned "roles" and act out the process of the action potential (AP), including the firing threshold, ion-specific channels for ions to enter and leave the cell, diffusion, and the refractory period. Pre-post test results indicated that students demonstrated increased…

Given the recent proliferation of undergraduate psychology and law courses, there is an increased need to empirically evaluate effective methods of teaching psycholegal material. The current study used a between- and within-subject design across four higher education institutions (N = 291 students) to evaluate the effectiveness of incorporating…

A capstone experience serves as a culminating exercise for students to assimilate the information learned in a course and to realize how to use the material and skills in different contexts. Both majors and nonmajors benefit from having the material in the introductory course consolidated in such a way, for later study in the field and to more…

This article describes 14 problem-based group activities for a sensation and perception course. The intent was to provide opportunities for students to practice applying their knowledge to real-world problems related to course content. Student ratings of how effectively the activities helped them learn were variable but relatively high. Students…

Instructions concerning how to teach neuron anatomy and physiology via a one-half hour dramatic presentation involving 30 student volunteers are provided. Data are provided to support the demonstration's value as both a pragmatic aid to comprehension and as an entertaining educational technique. (RM)

During the first class devoted to assertiveness, the professor came into class, sat down, and proceeded to write notes on a pad for the duration of the period. Their rights to an education being violated, students were confronted with the option to intervene in their own best interests. (RM)

To make psychology course content more relevant to college students, popular television presentations can be used to illustrate psychological concepts. Students in a theories of personality course wrote brief essays explaining the behavior of their favorite TV characters. (RM)

Believes that there are benefits to having introductory psychology students generate a lifeline at the beginning of the course and again after they learn about developmental psychology. Presents results from evaluations where the students rate the lifelines favorably. States that creating the second lifeline encouraged students to personalize the…

Described are practical ways in which writing can be used to help students learn the concepts and methods of social psychology. These include keeping a course log (a type of journal), writing analyses of published articles, doing an observational study, and writing a formal research report. (Author/RM)