Background: Practice tests have been shown to be an effective means to foster long-term retention in higher education, at least compared to restudying (i.e., the testing effect). Objective: The present study replicated and extended prior research by examining whether and to what extent the positive effects of testing on long-term retention in a…

Research on team-based learning (TBL) generally supports its effectiveness over "traditional" lecture. In practice, however, lecturing rarely consists of teachers exclusively talking at their students, as many incorporate a variety of strategies to encourage active processing. This study compared an interactive lecture style with TBL on…

Segments are a structured presentation style that is commonly used on late-night talk and variety television shows. Research has shown that shows that contain segments with both entertaining and informative content (e.g., "The Daily Show") have increased students' political knowledge. This study investigated how the structure of segments…

Because 98% of teachers use textbooks for the introductory psychology course and the majority of introductory teachers do not assign reading beyond the textbook, examining the topical coverage allocation pattern in introductory textbooks versus that in introductory course lectures is important for our understanding of how introductory students are…

We describe an active learning exercise to teach students about social stigma. After lecturing on the topic, the instructor distributes a worksheet and shows several clips from the movie "Shrek," pausing after each clip to lead a discussion of the concepts. We provide information about the movie scenes, the student worksheet, and…

In this study, I examined the effects of offering supplemental video lecture recordings to students in a face-to-face introductory psychology course. I employed a quasi-experimental design, in which one section had lectures recordings available (recordings of the face-to-face lecture) and one section did not, and I examined whether class section…

On their first class day, introductory psychology students took a 14-question multiple-choice pretest on several principles of memory including primacy, recency, storage, retrieval, counterbalancing, and the free-recall method. I randomly preassigned students to come at one of two different times to the second class, 2 days later, when they either…

A review of prior research on the role of attendance policies in large lecture classes (including psychology) is presented. This research showed that although students often did not attend class, various policies were effective in getting students to the classroom. Moreover, some research showed that an attendance policy did not lower instructor…

To determine whether a classroom experiment improved the learning of experimental method, at the start of the semester 2 introductory psychology classes took a 10-question multiple-choice pretest on experimental method. Two days later, before the instructor covered the relevant material in the course, 1 class took part in a classroom experiment on…