Background: Instructors often use a point-based system for grading students (e.g., 100 or 1000 total points). This system can impact student outcomes. Objective: The purpose of this research was to examine the implications of different point value courses for student emotions, perceptions of courses, and classroom performance. Method: The…

Background: Limited research has compared relationships among student characteristics, study guide format, and academic performance. Objective: This study investigated relations among student characteristics (motivation, self-efficacy) and academic performance, examined the efficacy of study guide format on performance, and aggregated student…

Background: Professor-student rapport and a sense of mattering to others are associated with several college student outcomes, but no study has examined the relation between these two variables. Objective: This study sought to examine associations between professor-student rapport, mattering, and college student outcomes including grade data and…

Background: Few studies have examined the effects of later class start times in college, even though developmentally driven sleep phase changes persist into the mid-20s. Objective: We hypothesized that sleepiness would be higher in an 8 a.m. versus 10 a.m. section of Introductory Psychology, and grades, engagement, enjoyment, attendance,…

Background: Research shows distributed practice enhances learning and skill development, but less is known about the effect on perceptions and attitudes toward the material being learned. Objective: This study examined whether distributed practice could improve performance and attitudes in statistics, a subject that students report finding…

Background: Multimedia creation and curation for assignments have the potential to engage students in deeper learning. Objective: This study explored whether the same homework assignments delivered in paper versus multimedia format resulted in different student experiences. Method: Introductory psychology students submitted either traditional…

Background: Prior research has shown that pre-service teachers' learning of theory is enhanced when teacher educators model the instructional approaches that they advocate as effective. Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare undergraduate learning outcomes in a course using Team-based Learning (TBL) with those in a traditional,…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a peer tutoring system shown to increase course grades and reduce dropout, particularly for courses with significant failure/dropout rates. Unfortunately, such systems can place significant time and resource demands on faculty, SI personnel, and higher education institutions, all of which pose impediments to their…

Background: Acquisition and generalization of data analysis skills are perennial challenges for psychology students. Teaching advanced data analysis in a psychology-specific context might improve students' learning. Objective: At a mid-sized public university, we evaluated student outcomes after a new quantitative psychology course taught in the…

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 study sought to investigate whether teacher behaviors, within the Teacher Behavior Checklist dimensions of caring and supportive and professional competency and communication skills, relate to students' satisfaction. Additionally, it assessed the influence of the importance students set on teacher behaviors on students' satisfaction.…

To test the impact of the implementation of technology bans on students' experience within a course, we collected data from four sections of Introduction to Psychology at a small liberal arts college in the northeast. In two sections, students were banned from using personal technology devices during lecture. In the other two sections, students…

Interdisciplinary pedagogy can enhance Introduction to Psychology curricula. We developed an interdisciplinary project to make meaning in a learning community (LC) clustering Introduction to Psychology with Introduction to Criminal Justice. Our purpose is to describe the project as a model and report on students' evaluations of the project and…

The current study investigated whether collaborative quizzing impacted quiz performance, overall grades, exam grades, pass/fail rates, and attendance in upper-level psychology courses. Students enrolled in two sections of upper-level psychology courses completed collaborative quizzes, whereas students enrolled in two noncollaborative sections…

We used a brief scale to measure student-instructor rapport and assessed the degree to which student's perceived rapport at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester predicted final course grades in a traditional course. Results showed a positive correlation between rapport scores and final grades such that rapport at each of the time points…