I hadn’t been teaching very long when I had decided that I didn’t want to be in the business of identifying good student excuses from poor student excuses for the purpose of determining who should—and who should not—get a deadline extension. I wasn’t comfortable passing judgment on what was a significant level of stress for a student. Was this student close enough to their aunt to warrant a deadline extension upon reporting her death? Can I believe that their aunt actually died? I know other faculty ask for some kind of proof. Am I comfortable asking for some kind of proof? Or that car crash that my student was in. How bad was it? And does it even matter how objectively bad the crash was given what we know about how differently people respond to various stressors? A fender bender that is no big deal to one student may send another student into stress overload. Rather than evaluate individual excuses, I decided to structure my course for flexibility. (For those of you familiar with the “4 Connections for Faculty-Student Engagement,” you’ll recognize this as part of “practice paradox.”) At that early point in my career, students had four 50-question unit exams and a 100-question comprehensive final. The first 25 questions on the final corresponded to the first unit exam (different questions, same content), the second 25 questions on the final corresponded to the second unit exam, and so on. If a student missed the first exam—for whatever reason—I would double the points earned on those first 25 questions, and those points would be entered as their exam one score. A student could miss all four unit exams and just take the final. No one ever did, but they could. Additionally, I would compare the total score for the four unit exams (200 points) to the final exam (100 points x 2 for a total of 200 points). I excluded the lower score and used the higher score to calculate final grades. If a student, for example, decided to try to power through and take a unit exam even if they weren’t in the right space to take it, and they ended up doing poorly on it. No worries. The final exam, if higher, would replace all four unit exams. I would say, “It doesn’t matter to me if you show me that you know the course material as we go through the course or at the end of the course. Just show me that you know it.” Later in my career, I did away with in-class exams in favor of what amounts to weekly take-home exams (I call them write-to-learn assignments; read more here). In my online courses, there are weekly discussions. With multiple assignments in each of these categories that are worth the same number of points, doing poorly on one, two, or three will not greatly harm a student’s course grade. Additionally, I drop the lowest take-home exam score and the lowest discussion score. Stuff happens in students’ lives. I don’t need to know what that stuff is. We’ll just drop the lowest scores. In my courses, all assignments are available from the beginning of the course. Students can choose to work ahead if they’d like, and several of my students do. The only place where that doesn’t work is in writing responses to other students’ discussion posts. In comparison to other work in the course, writing responses is not generally a labor-intensive activity. I know many faculty who are philosophically opposed to extra credit. For myself, I’m fine offering extra credit. While I’m comfortable with my assignments and scoring rubrics, they are not perfect. They can’t be. In a nod to this inherent measurement error, offering students some extra credit feels fair. I offer extra credit under two conditions. First, the extra credit has to be available to everyone. All of the extra credit in my courses is published as part of the course at the beginning of the term, so everyone knows what the extra credit is and when it’s due. Second, the extra credit has to advance my agenda. In my online discussion boards, I ask students to share their good news for the week. (Read more about this.) In their replies, I ask students to respond to the initial post’s good news with a reaction and a question. For one point extra credit, students can answer the question asked in the reply (maximum two points, one each if the student answers two replies). In an online course, students miss the opportunities to build community by chatting with each other before class starts or during breaks. Structured discussions can push the sense of community a bit, and a little extra credit for advancing the discussion can push it even further. The other place I offer extra credit is within the take-home exams. In some of these assignments, I will include extra credit questions that ask students to reflect back on earlier material in the course, particularly correlations and experimental design. We know that spaced practice and retrieval practice help students remember course content, so I encourage students to revisit these concepts throughout the course. The best thing I’ve done in the last year to build flexibility into my course is to include an automatic 24-hour grace period. Historically, I’ve had the take-home exams and initial discussion posts due on Monday and discussion responses due on Wednesday. If I move the due date back 24 hours—take-home exams and initial discussion posts due on Sunday and responses due on Tuesday—I could then add an automatic 24-hour grace period. Effectively, assignments are really still due on Mondays and Wednesdays, but for students, their target deadline is 24 hours earlier. If they need the extra time—for whatever reason—they have it. Frankly, it’s the easiest way for the most rigid of faculty to add flexibility to their course. Set your deadline, then subtract 24 hours. How does the 24-hour grace period work in practice? Early in the course, about two-thirds of my students make the initial deadline. As the term progresses, that slips to about half. Recently, a student ran into a technical problem with his computer’s Internet connection. Unfortunately, he discovered the problem 23 hours and 45 minutes into the grace period—and he missed the drop-dead deadline. He emailed me to explain what happened. He wasn’t asking for extension. He just wanted to let me know what happened and acknowledge his mistake. He understood that the grace period was for exactly those issues, and that he would return to aiming for the initial deadline. Finally, whatever your policy, stick with it. Do not make exceptions—unless your policy says that you will make exceptions. Otherwise, you reward the students who ask, and the students who follow your rules and who never ask, do not have the benefit of your generosity. There’s nothing fair about that. If all of those structural elements are not enough to help a student who is having a tough term pass the course, they have one more option: students can retake the course. ... View more

Shortly before the start of World War I, as the story goes, two young Serbians—Nada and Relja—fell in love. Soon before Relja departed for war, they stood on a bridge in their hometown of Vrnjačka Banja and declared their love for each other. Unfortunately, while away, Relja fell in love with another woman and never returned. Nada, as the story goes, never recovered from this loss and died young. “A tradition was born of this tragedy: local couples began to etch their names onto padlocks, attach them to the bridge, and throw the key in the water, a symbolic and public act sealing their commitment to each other” (Mars & Kohlstedt, 2020, p. 42). Take a look at some photos of the Vrnjačka Banja bridge. The practice of attaching locks to bridges and other public structures has become a practice in other cities around the world. Most often the locks are keyed padlocks, but sometimes they’re combination locks. (“My love, I will show my unwavering devotion to you by forgetting the combination!”) If just one couple, or a few couples, or even a few dozen couples attach locks to, say, a bridge, there is likely no harm in it. But what happens when thousands and thousands of couples do? It becomes a tragedy of the commons example. In 2015, with “[c]lose to one million locks—weighing 45 tonnes” attached to the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, the bridge was starting to show damage. Venice, Rome, and Melbourne all encountered similar problems to their bridges where couples in love were attaching padlocks. If you’d like, pose this discussion question to your students: If you were a city official presented with this tragedy of the commons problem—everyone doing a small thing (attaching a padlock to a bridge) causing a big problem (bridge is being damaged by the added weight)—how would you solve it? Many cities replaced the bridge railings with acrylic or glass panels, e.g., Pont des Arts bridge. In Russia, they erected metal tree sculptures specifically for couples to attach their padlocks to (Mars & Kohlstedt, 2020).   Another tragedy of the commons example. Susan B. Anthony, a 19th century champion for women’s right to vote is buried in Rochester, New York at the Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery. It’s been a tradition on election day for visitors to her gravesite to put their “I voted” stickers on her gravestone. Unfortunately, the shear amount of accumulated glue from the stickers has started damaging the stone. “With this year marking 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the grave has been getting a lot of attention.” When just a few people attached stickers to the gravestone, there was virtually no damage. But many more people did the same thing, damage started to accumulate. The solution? Cemetery officials covered the stone with transparent plastic so that visitors can still place their “I voted” stickers without damaging the stone (Asmelash, 2020).   References Asmelash, L. (2020). People who place their “I Voted” stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s headstone will notice something different there this year. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/us/susan-b-anthony-i-voted-gravestone-trnd/index.html Mars, R., & Kohlstedt, K. (2020). The 99% invisible city: A field guide to the hidden world of everday design. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing.   ... View more

What better tour guide through  My Psychology  than the author himself, Andy Pomerantz. In each of these brief videos Andy introduces a specific chapter, highlighting important topics to come while addressing student preconceptions. Using these is a terrific way to set the stage for your lectures and your students' encounters with the course material. Preview the Lecture Launchers by Chapter: Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology Chapter 2: Brain and Behavior Chapter 3: Sensation and Perception Chapter 4: Consciousness Chapter 5: Memory Chapter 6: Learning Chapter 7:  Cognition: Thinking, Language and Intelligence Chapter 8: Motivation and Emotion Chapter 9: Development Across the Lifespan Chapter 10: Diversity in Psychology: Multiculturalism, Gender, and Sexuality Chapter 11: Stress and Health Chapter 12: Personality Chapter 13: Social Psychology Chapter 14: Psychological Disorders Chapter 15: Therapy ... View more

"How Should I Study?" Get this question a lot? John Dunlosky and Regan Gurung answer this question with special tips for the pandemic. Check out their video especially made for students that provides direct explanations of key cognitive strategies and some new work. http://ow.ly/58ZI50Ci5wp ... View more

Carolyn Hax (2020), syndicated advice columnist, recently received a message from a parent who was tired of being the “bad cop” to their husband’s “good cop” in parenting their son.* The parent notes that while growing up, her** father was “pretty strict,” while her husband’s father “was not very involved when he was a teen.” When it comes to discipline, the mother is the enforcer. She reports that one of their teenage sons is “very headstrong.” The father, rather than supporting his spouse, tries to negotiate peace. As an example of her being the disciplinarian, mom writes, “[O]ur son does not clean up his room after promising to do so. I take the keys to his car for the day. Son spends way more time arguing about the unfairness than it would take to actually clean his room.” Father and son both find the punishment greatly outweighs the crime. In her advice, Carolyn Hax asks the letter writer, “Why are you treating your/your father’s strictness as the only legitimate approach?” She goes on to add that there could be workable boundaries. The son can do whatever he’d like with his room (within reason***), but common spaces need to be respected, e.g., dishes need to be done. “You can allow him a voice in these expectations and consequences. Not the last word, but a place at the table.” After covering parenting styles, provide your students with access to the article, then pose these discussion questions. Based on what you read in the article, is the letter writer more of an authoritarian parent or an authoritative parent. What evidence do you have to support your choice? What type of parenting style is the advice columnist, Carolyn Hax, suggesting the letter writer try? What evidence do you have to support your choice? In reflecting on your own experiences growing up—both with your own parents/guardians and those of your friends and classmates—did you or anyone you know have parents/guardians who were more authoritarian? Give an example from you or your friends’ experiences that illustrates an authoritarian approach to parenting. How did the children respond to this parenting style? Did you or anyone you know have parents/guardians who were more authoritative? Give an example from you or your friends’ experiences that illustrates an authoritative approach to parenting. How did the children respond to this parenting style?   Footnotes *You will need a Washington Post subscription to read the article at its original source. As of this writing, you can access the column courtesy of the Dallas Morning News via PressReader.com. Otherwise, work with your reference librarians to get a permalink to the column in your library’s database that you can share with your students. Just give your librarians the reference below.    **In Hax’s column, we are not told the gender of the person who wrote in asking for advice. In writing this blog post, I wrote myself into all kinds of knots trying to keep the gender ambiguous. Out of a need for clarity (and pure selfishness in getting to that clarity), I’m going to play the odds and assume the asker-for-this-advice is a woman. ***Newspapers take syndicated columns like this one (and all articles that come off the news wires, actually) and edit them down to fit the space available on the printed page. In the Seattle Times, for example, the sentence reads, “You can agree your son’s room is his jurisdiction (barring extremes, like vermin or contraband), and hold your lines on common spaces.” The Dallas Morning News struck the parenthetical in their publication. Conversely, the Dallas Morning News included the paragraph that begins “The flagrant notworking of the old method is reason enough to try a new one.” The Seattle Times deleted it. The only place to see the complete original is in the Washington Post, Carolyn Hax’s host newspaper—either through the Washington Post website or through your library’s database. Reference Hax, C. (2020, November 8). Mom resents “bad cop” role in discipling son. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-the-parent-who-has-to-be-the-bad-cop-is-feeling-blue/2020/11/04/818025b0-1aee-11eb-aeec-b93bcc29a01b_story.html ... View more

DECEMBER 10th | 2:00 PM ET What does it mean to be WEIRD—that is, raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic? Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? Those questions are at the heart of the fascinating webinar session with Dr. Joseph Henrich, author of The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.     REGISTER HERE ... View more

I started my day by reading this Memebase post: “22 Loving People Who Restored Our Faith in Humanity.” It’s example after example of people being kind to animals and each other. After reading it, I felt compelled to reach out to a stranger and do a kindness for them. Being in pandemic lockdown makes it hard to connect with strangers, though. And then I remembered. A few months ago, I received a text from someone whose phone number is just one number off from mine. It read, "Hi number neighbor." I found the sentiment so delightful, I replied with "LOL! Thanks for that". This morning, after reading the Memebase post, I texted my number neighbor with this: "Good morning, number neighbor! Regardless of your politics, today is probably going to be a hard day. Wanted you to know that I'm thinking of you, stranger, and sending good thoughts." My number neighbor replied with, "Thank you I really appreciate it. I hope you stay safe regardless of the outcome." I wished them the same. In my Intro Psych course, we’re covering the learning chapter this week. Myers and DeWall (2020) write in that chapter The good news is that people’s modeling of prosocial (positive, helpful) behaviors can have prosocial effects… Real people who model nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others” (p. 184). In my online courses I post announcements two or three times a week. Today’s announcement included a link to that Memebase post as well as my text exchange with my number neighbor. I know that the Memebase post prompted me to engage in a bit of prosocial behavior. I hope that the Memebase post and my own prosocial behavior will encourage my students to find a way to do a little prosocial behavior themselves today. I did an Internet search for “random acts of kindness stories” and “faith in humanity restored” to find some other examples of people doing good things for strangers. There are lots out there. My plan for the rest of the term is to include a link to webpage that features such stories with my beginning-of-the-week announcements along with something that I did for a stranger. In the U.S., regardless of your politics, the coming weeks will likely be a challenge. Modeling prosocial behavior is the least we can do. ... View more

NOVEMBER 19th | 2:00 PM ET Debra Roberts (Howard University), lead supplements author of My Psychology, draws on her years of teaching and research to share strategies for talking about diversity in psychology classes.     WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

NOVEMBER 12th | 1:00 PM ET Looking for simple solutions? Professor Scott Cohn (Western Colorado University) will demonstrate tips and techniques for creating a positive online assessment experience for students. Resource options will be compared with specific examples from his Introductory Psychology course.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

NOVEMBER 5th | 1:00 PM ET Join Ronald J. Comer (Princeton University) and Jonathan S. Comer (Florida International University), the renowned best-selling authors of Abnormal Psychology and Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, as they review the rapidly growing body of research on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the state of mental health and its treatment.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

OCTOBER 21st | 1:00 PM ET APA has a new Introductory Psychology Initiative that provides recommendations for teaching the intro psych course, training teachers, and assessing student learning. In this webinar, Jane Halonen (University of West Florida) will discuss the Initiative's recommendations regarding student learning outcomes and assessment strategies to improve the quality of the introductory psychology experience.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more

In the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook group, Maria Lechtreck shared a 15-minute Graham Shaw video that teaches us how to draw. After learning—in mere minutes—how to draw cartoon faces, I have been wondering how to work this into my Intro Psych course—the video, not the cartoon faces. The Intro Psych textbook I use (Myers and DeWall, Psychology in Everyday Life) opens with a short chapter titled “Student Success,” and the chapter contains all kinds of useful information on how to be, well, a successful student. I ask my students to reflect on what they read in this chapter, identify three suggestions they found most useful and why, and then identify their biggest challenges and what strategies they have in place to cope with those challenges. As a companion to that question, I’m considering adding this set of questions. *********** How confident are you in your ability to draw? Very? Somewhat? Not at all? Now, watch this 15-minute video. Participate along with the audience, drawing the characters as the presenter Graham Shaw draws them: Spike, Thelma, Jeff, Pam, and Albert Einstein. Draw a character of your own imagination. Take a photo of your collection of 6 drawings, and paste the photo here as part of your assignment. After watching the video and participating along with the audience, are you more confident in your ability to draw? Explain. At the end of the recording, Shaw asks us to consider what other beliefs we carry around about ourselves that may be causing us to limit what we can do. If someone believed that they are “not good at math,” for example, how could that belief limit the career paths they might take? Lastly, read “How praise came to be a consolation prize” in The Atlantic. What is meant by “fixed mindset?” What is meant by “growth mindset?” When someone says, “I can’t draw” or “I can’t do math” or “I can’t write,” are they exhibiting a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? Explain. Lastly, what is meant by “false growth mindset?” According to growth mindset, what’s the best way to react to a failure? ... View more

The perennial question for any introductory course is about what to cover. Is it better to teach more stuff superficially? Or is it better teach less stuff deeply? This is the classic breadth vs. depth dilemma. I don’t think anyone goes all-in on breadth, teaching Intro Psych by covering one isolated concept after another, jamming in every known psychological concept. If that’s you, may I suggest using the APA Dictionary of Psychology as your open source textbook? Nor do I think that anyone goes all-in on depth, teaching Intro Psych by covering one concept in great detail. That’s what a graduate school dissertation is for. Instead, we’re all somewhere in between these two extremes. How far left from center and how far right from center is the question. This question would be easier to answer if we knew where the center was. When I teach Intro Psych, what I choose to cover and choose not to cover are driven by two primary factors. The first is the textbook I’m using. The authors—with much input from reviewers and editor(s)—have curated the psychological knowledge that they think is important for an educated citizenry to know. That one’s easy. I have a book that tells me what they thought was important. The second factor is my own opinion of what an educated citizenry needs to know. This one is a little harder, but not much. If knowing a piece of psychological knowledge will increase the chances of saving someone’s life, it’s more likely to make my cut. I spend more time and effort covering sleep and attention than I used to. My coverage of psychological disorders focuses much more on stigma these days than it does on, say, symptoms. (Shout out to Susan Nolan for helping me think about this.) I’ve changed my approach to psychotherapy so that students can explore how to find a psychotherapist and the questions to ask a potential psychotherapist. When Intro Psych instructors get together, these are the kinds of issues we talk about. How much of your coverage of the personality chapter is historical? Or, more to the point, do you cover Freud? Do you lecture on the sodium-potassium pump? Do you ask students to know what each neurotransmitter does? How much I/O content do you cover? Do you cover motivation and emotion? But here’s what we don’t talk about. At the Intro course level—and this is true for any discipline—we deliver the simplified version. We zoom out to the 30,000-foot view where we can’t see the nuance. In Intro to History (of some appropriate time period) we learn that the cause of WWI was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. We learn in Intro to Anatomy that there are two arteries in the human arm, the radial and the ulnar. We learn in Intro to Art that Picasso was a cubist. All of that is true. Sort of. Much had to come before in order for Ferdinand’s assassination to trigger a world war. Some people have three arteries in their arms. And Picasso, in his early years, was not a cubist; that came later. In Intro Psych we have our own typically-covered content that is true in a sort of kind of way. The brain, for example, is much more complex than could ever be presented in Intro Psych. Yes, the temporal lobes play an important role in hearing—but the temporal lobes do so much more beyond that. Yes, the occipital lobes play an important role in vision—but lots of other places in the brain are important for vision, too. But we keep it simple. Temporal=hearing; occipital=vision. Yes, perceptions of three dimensions comes from binocular vision, but not everyone with two good eyes perceives the world in three dimensions. Decision-making and memory involve much more than what we present in the Intro course. Psychological disorders are much more complex than could be covered in Intro. If students are lucky enough to take another psychology course (keeping in mind that the vast majority of students in Intro Psych are not psychology majors), the instructor of that next course will say something like, “In Intro Psych, you may have learned X. In this course, you’ll learn that that’s not the whole story. Let me tell you about Y.” And then for the few students who go on to graduate school in psychology, they’ll hear, “As an undergraduate you were probably told X and Y. In graduate school, you’ll learn that’s not the whole story. Let me tell you about Z.” And then when that even smaller number of students goes on to spend decades researching that one area, they’ll begin to fill in the other letters of the alphabet. And therein lies the challenge in teaching Intro Psych. None of us who teaches the course knows the whole alphabet—or even the portion of the alphabet known to date—for every concept we cover. In fact, we know X for most of what is in our Intro Psych textbooks. We may know Y for some concepts—probably as a result of an upper division course we took and perhaps now teach. And for even fewer concepts—the concepts we researched ourselves in graduate school—we also know Z. And if you have an area you are researching now, I bet you also know A, B, and, depending on whether your current studies are going to yield the data you expect, C. Intro Psych is the most difficult course in our curriculum to teach. It’s the course that will make you painfully aware of how much you don’t know about psychology, because you know the simplified version of most of the course content. You know X. The longer you teach it, however, the more you learn. In some areas, you start to pick up Y. You get better at answering student questions. When you first start teaching Intro, your modal answer to student questions is most likely “I don’t know.” After a few years, as you learn more, you start to answer more frequently with “it depends,” and you’ll have one or two things in your back pocket that “it” depends on. But whatever your answer, it will still be the simplified version. Because you’re teaching Intro Psych. ... View more

I read my share of blogs and news stories. Concepts we cover in Intro Psych appear with some frequency out there in the land of popular culture. Freudian terms—**bleep** retentive, oral fixation—seem to be less commonly used than they used to be. Correlations—described, if not named—pop up often. Unfortunately, they’re too often discussed in terms of causation. Classical and operant conditioning often make appearances, and, yes, negative reinforcement is frequently confused with punishment. When a writer mentions classical/Pavlovian conditioning, I go on the alert. Is this really an example of classical conditioning? Or is it mislabeled operant conditioning? I’m pulling for the writer to get it correct. And I do a little celebratory dance when they do. I haven’t been doing many celebratory dances lately. When it comes to conditioning, the default assumption seems to be that whatever the example is, it’s classical conditioning. If the person says it is an example of operant conditioning, they’re usually correct. If the person says it is an example of classical conditioning, well, they’re less often correct. When I cover classical and operant conditioning in Intro Psych, I emphasize that classical conditioning invokes involuntary behaviors and operant conditioning requires voluntary behaviors. Since we cover these topics sequentially, it’s easy to just cover and move on. But given how easy it is for people to conflate these types of conditioning, some interleaving is in order. In interleaving, it’s important for students to get practice moving back and forth between classical and operant conditioning. Here’s an example you can use to help students get a bit of practice in separating classical from operant conditioning. Ask students to read this short article (“Simone Giertz built a photo booth that lets her dog take selfies for treats”). Students do not need to watch the 15-minute video, but they certainly may if they’d like. In a synchronous or an asynchronous group discussion, ask: The author of the article writes that Simone Giertz “Pavlov’d her dog into taking selfies.” Is this true? Has the selfie-taking dog been trained using classical (also called Pavlovian) conditioning? Or has the dog been trained using operant conditioning? Explain the reasons for your choice. Once students have correctly identified this as operant conditioning, you may want to expand the discussion. What would happen if the dog kept pressing the pedal and no more treats were given? Let’s take the discussion a little further. Now let’s say that after several repetitions, the dog salivated when the rotating dispenser delivered a treat. Would that be classical or operant conditioning? Explain the reasons for your choice. And one more step. What would happen here if the dispenser rotated, but no treat was delivered? What would happen to the selfie-taking dog’s amount of salivation? Conclusion By giving students interleaving practice with classical and operant conditioning using real-world examples, hopefully, they will be better equipped to detect errors—and when they start writing for the public, they’ll not make those same errors in identification. And, in the end, the public will learn from the correct applications of these concepts. ... View more

OCTOBER 8th | 1:00 PM ET David Myers (Hope College), longtime author of our bestselling introductory psychology resources, offers his insights on the human element of this crisis—our need to belong, why we may be too much, or too little, afraid, and how shared threats affect social behavior.     WATCH RECORDING ... View more