In December 2022, I wrote about the new AI tool for generating writing, ChatGPT. Since then, the technology behemoths Microsoft and Google have rushed their own chatbots to public release. Unfortunately, neither were ready for primetime as both were reported to have delivered inaccurate information in their debut. In the meantime, discussion within the academy has exploded about the impact AI writing tools will have on education. Such discussions are often accompanied by much hand-wringing. Some instructors insist that their assignment prompts are not ChatGPT-able because, for example, the prompt asks for personal examples or personal opinion. Other instructors have embraced ChatGPT as a learning tool where they ask students to start with ChatGPT text, critique said text, and then edit it. Perhaps the biggest tell that a particular text was written by ChatGPT is that the references are bogus. The references look legitimate, but a quick Google search will reveal that the AI made them up. Making up references is academic dishonesty. A cloze test would provide further evidence that the student did not write the text. In a cloze test, the instructor removes every, say, fifth word from the text in question, and the student is asked to supply the missing words. A student who wrote the text will have an easier time supplying the missing words than a student who didn’t. This online cloze test generator will create a cloze test based on the supplied text and your parameters. The latest participant in the AI-generated text wars is Edward Tian, a Princeton grad student. During his winter break in Toronto, he spent time in a coffee shop writing code for a computer program that could detect AI-written text. He called it GPTZero (Kidson, 2023), and he has made it freely available. Paste in your text or upload a file, check the box saying you agree to the (pretty generic) terms of service, and click the “get results” button. Tian’s rationale was that since ChatGPT uses an algorithm to write text, code that is based on that same algorithm can detect that same text. For example, ChatGPT writes text by using what the next word in a sentence is most likely to be. Humans, however, tend to be less predictable in our writing. GPTZero uses a similar algorithm to ChatGPT’s to detect the predictably of each word in a sentence. The more predictable the words are, the greater the likelihood the text was writing by AI. For example, this human-written sentence has words that are, well, less predictable: The deliciousness of a Cosmic Crisp apple is to the fruit world what a fine Swiss chocolate is to the confectionary world. Tian and his colleagues are working a new version of their software called GPTZeroX (Kidson, 2023). This version is made for educators and will include a plagiarism score, highlighted sentences that were likely generated by AI, and the ability to upload multiple files (say, from the same class) at once. While they don’t say it, I fully expect learning management system integration is coming. On the GPTZero website, click the “join the product waitlist” button and fill out their form. Now, how long until we see the first case of academic dishonesty where a student used AI to generate their master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation? I predict it will be this calendar year.   Reference Kidson, R. (2023, February 17). Princeton student creates ChatGPT detector. GHacks Technology News. https://www.ghacks.net/2023/02/17/princeton-student-develops-gptzero-software-to-detect-plagiarism-by-ai-language-model-chatgpt/   ... View more

I’ve been thinking once again about, well, let’s call them age cohort differences. Eleven years ago, I wrote about how reading time on analog clocks is becoming a lost skill. I doubt that that trend has changed. Perhaps this is why no one has bothered to replace the batteries in my classroom clock. I’d do it myself, but I need a ladder to reach it. Also, when I’m standing in the front of the room, to see the clock, I need to look a little past 90 degrees to my left and into a dark corner to see it. My analog watch works just fine. Also, the students packing up their stuff—based on the time showing on their phones—gives me a five-minute warning. As I predicted in that analog clock post, clockwise and counterclockwise continue to fade away. In PowerPoint, for example, we now rotate our images 90 degrees left or right. In PDF24, my go-to pdf editor, I can still rotate pages clockwise and counterclockwise, but large icons show the direction of rotation. A friend who recently had a neurological exam told me that the clock-drawing test is still in use. (See this article, for example). I wonder if discussions are underway for a possible replacement for this task, because the clock is ticking, so to speak, on its utility as a cognitive test. And then there’s cursive. I wrote about that just this past September. To be clear, I’m not arguing that school children should learn cursive. Rather, for instructors who write in cursive, be aware that your students may not be able to read what you write, no matter how beautiful your Palmer penmanship. Which I never had. More recently, my wife sent me this 2021 article from Office Watch about young people (and not so young people) wondering what’s up with the design of the save icon that is common in so many computer apps. (Translation: apps = programs.) Some perceive the save icon as a vending machine dispensing a soda. (Visit the article to see the particular icon they’re talking about. Here’s another example.) The save icon, who don’t know, is a leftover graphic. Decades ago, this icon was an excellent way to represent save because it looked like a 3.5 inch floppy disk, a common external storage device. Think usb flashdrives, but with much less storage capacity. Also, they weren’t floppy at all. That was leftover terminology from the 3.5 inch’s predecessors—the 8 inch and the 5.25 inch—which really were floppy. Okay, they were actually more bendy than floppy. Here’s a photo of the 3.5 inch disk from the Computer History Museum. Or email me for photos. The last time I cleaned out my office, I still couldn’t bear to toss my disks—which is different than tossing one’s cookies, but feels eerily similar. I have no way to read these disks, of course. Maybe they’ll come back like vinyl records have. No, I’m not holding my breath. I’m still waiting for the return of 8-tracks. One more sidenote to add to this entire paragraph of side notes. The Internet tells me that in some parts of the world, the 3.5 inch disk was called a stiffy. Share that tidbit at your next cocktail party. No need to credit me. In fact, I’d prefer that you didn’t. And one very last sidenote. Do people still throw cocktail parties? If not, then shouldn’t we change the name of the cocktail party effect? In addition to analog clocks, Here's one more possible age cohort difference. This one I did not see coming. In the learning chapter, I have an assignment that asks students to identify the learning principles illustrated in a few different comic strips. I had a student message me about this part of the assignment. She did just fine, but she was not confident that she understood what was happening in the comic strips. She wrote, “I'm just not very familiar with reading comics.” I grew up reading comic strips in newspapers. I still get a newspaper. Just this morning I walked 100 yards up our driveway in 17 degree temperature (-8 Celsius) to retrieve the paper so that I could read it over breakfast. The more serious news is read with my egg and veggie sausage; sports and comics are read with my English muffin. My digital newsfeed on my tablet always starts with a banana. (Steve Chew: More trivia fodder for NITOP. You’re welcome.) Growing up, my hometown newspaper probably didn’t have more than a dozen daily comic strips. The big colorful comics spread that came with the Sunday paper was pure joy for my 9-year-old self. I enjoyed the Sunday comics even more if I had new Silly Putty for copying and stretching Snoopy, Woodstock, or whatever other Peanuts characters were featured that week. The newspaper of my new hometown does not have many comic strips, either, so I supplement with having hand-selected comic strips come into my news feed. Silly Putty doesn’t work as well on a tablet. Since the message from my student who struggled to understand the comic strips, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around not growing up with comic strips. With print newspapers going the way of the paper office memo and printed student assignments, I can see where whole swaths of young people would not have experience with comic strips. While graphic novels are a thing, their long-form design is a different read than a one to four panel comic strip. History departments will need to teach students how to read cursive if their students are going to be able to read original historical documents (that have not been translated into printed text). Perhaps those same departments will need to teach students how to read historical comic strips that are chockful of references to everyday life and politics. Or maybe my student’s experience is a one off? Maybe she is the only student I’ve had this year who is unfamiliar with reading comic strips. Maybe, but student questions like this feel iceberg-like. If one student is holding her hand up above the water, there are many more students who are keeping their hands below the surface. ... View more

During college, one of my professors advised the class to find interest in whatever we were learning, no matter the course. If I remember correctly, the advice was given as a way to better remember course content, but I now also recognize it as a way to be less miserable. It’s a nice reframing. Thinking “Oooo, that’s interesting!” is a clearer path to happiness than thinking, “Why do I need to learn this?!” But it’s even more than that. “Each day is an opportunity to learn a little more” (Peters-Collaer, 2023, p. 210). Curiosity could be defined, in part, as finding interest in, well, whatever. I like to think that I came to college with a strong sense of curiosity, but since I still remember my professor’s advice almost 40 years later, his words must have had some impact on my desire to learn. My sense of curiosity has certainly served me well. At root, I want to know how stuff works, whatever that stuff might be. As a psychology professor, I want to know how the mind works, but that’s only one example. In a completely different domain, I’m a big fan of industrial tourism. One of my favorite tours was of a wastewater treatment plant. (Steve Chew, you are welcome to use that tidbit in NITOP trivia.) What I learn in one domain may connect to another domain, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, as you may or may not recall from a recent blog post, I learned that the opening line to the song Jolene was the result of maintenance rehearsal. Maybe my professor’s advice just opened my mind to one of the great benefits of a liberal arts education. Exposure to a lot of different ideas in a lot of different domains can lead to novel ideas or novel solutions to problems. As I think about curiosity and how much we value it as a trait in our psychology majors (American Psychological Association, 2013), I wonder if we could be more explicit about what it means to be curious. Stephen Peters-Collaer, a Ph.D. student in forest ecology at the University of Vermont wrote a one-page essay in Science (freely available) on how curiosity has served him well in his education (2023). Invite your students to read his essay, and then ask students to respond to the following questions as part of an in-class discussion, an asynchronous online discussion, or a short writing assignment. The article author, Stephen Peters-Collaer, found his fieldwork crew leader’s enthusiasm for the natural world infectious. Have you had someone in your life have such enthusiasm for something that you found yourself becoming similarly enthusiastic? Please describe. Peters-Collaer writes, “Each day is an opportunity to learn a little more.” How might holding such an attitude help a college student? The author describes some of the strategies he uses to stay sharp in his more sedentary work. Describe some of the strategies you use to stay mentally sharp. The author closes the article with this statement, “I remind myself that any task can present an opportunity to learn—as long as I am open to it.” Would you describe the author as someone who is curious? Why or why not?   References American Psychological Association. (2013). APA Guidelines for the undergraduate psychology major: Version 2.0. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/about/psymajor-guidelines.pdf Peters-Collaer, S. (2023). Stay curious. Science, 379(6628), 210.   ... View more

Many of us who have been around psychology for a while remember ELIZA (or at least remember learning about ELIZA), arguably the first chatbot. Jumping ahead a few decades, with paraphrasing tools users copy/paste text into the tool, click a button, and the words—after being hammered by a thesaurus—are spun into new text. The tools have been marketed to freelance writers. The freelance writer can write one article, copy/paste it into the tool, click the button to get their next text, then tweak the new text to make sure it sounds good. They now have a new-enough article they can sell to someone else without it being picked up by plagiarism detectors as duplicated content. Some of our students have been using these same paraphrasing tools, although sometimes without the proofreading and tweaking. The results can be, frankly, hilarious. My favorite is a history essay that kept referring to President Shrub. Computing technology, however, continues to march on. And now we have AI tools that will write a pretty good essay based on a sentence fragment. We even get fake references. Plagiarism checker tools will not flag the content because the sentences have been newly generated. Just not by a human. The newest tool is called ChatGPT. Anyone can try it out, although at the time of this writing, the website says, “We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems.” While we wait for them to have enough servers to handle the demand (from our students?), read an essay that Mike Sharples had the ChatGPT tool create on learning styles (Sharples, 2022). Sharples gave the AI this prompt: “The construct of ‘learning styles’ is problematic because.” Here’s a paragraph from that AI-generated essay—and, yes, the Dunn and Dunn reference is fake, although it is based partially on fact. In a review of this research, Dunn and Dunn (1997) found that the evidence does not support the idea that people have a particular learning mode that is dominant or that they process information in a particular way. In their study, the authors found that when students were given a particular instructional treatment, they could be classified in a particular learning modality category. But when they were given a different instructional treatment, they were classified in a different category. In a follow-up study in which they gave students a number of instructional treatments, Dunn and Dunn found that students could be placed in a particular category in some treatments, but not others (Sharples, 2022). As I pasted in that paragraph from a four-paragraph essay, I wondered if I would be violating copyright law for the amount that I was using. And then I thought, “Wait! No one actually wrote this!” Surely if a monkey does not own the copyright to their selfies (Nauro, et al. V. David John Slater, et al., 2016), then a computer program does not own the copyright to their generated text. To make this even creepier, Sharples writes, “’Just as a student can generate an essay in seconds, so a teacher can assess it. Add ‘Here is a short assessment of this student essay:’ to the end of the text and GPT-3 writes a review.” Now that I’ve concluded that a computer cannot hold the copyright, I have no qualms sharing the entire AI-generated review with you. The essay discusses the idea of learning styles, and how they may be developed over time. It cites research by Dunn and Dunn which suggests that learning styles are not fixed, and that people can learn in different ways depending on the situation. The essay is well-organized and flows smoothly. It makes a clear argument and supports it with evidence from research. One potential criticism is that the essay does not discuss the implications of learning styles research, or how this research can be used to improve learning. However, this is not necessarily a flaw, as the essay is only meant to be a brief overview of the topic (Sharples, 2022). Sharples suggests that instructors use AI writing tools as a teaching tool rather than struggling to find ways to detect or counter their use. I’m less optimistic. Stephen Marche, writing in The Atlantic, also has concerns. “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up… Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout” (Marche, 2022). I have lots of questions and no answers. What have we done to create a generation of students who are more interested in completing an assignment for a course grade than learning? What happens when college degree recipients hit the workforce and are unable to write? Will the AI tools cover for them there, too? Does writing make us better thinkers? What happens if we stop writing? Is this the beginning of the end of online education? Are we going to turn back the clock and return to in-class, hand-written assessments? If so, will cursive writing make a comeback because it’s a faster way to hand-write? And if we all return to the classroom, what are the implications for who has and who does not have access to higher education? Or will we require students to do a Cloze test on all of their assignments to prove that they did indeed write them themselves—or at least were able to memorize their AI-generated essay well enough to convince their instructors that they wrote it? Or will we do what Sharples suggest, such as use AI to generate essays, and then ask students to critique the essays and then edit them so they are better (Sharples, 2022)? Lots and lots of questions. No answers.   References Marche, S. (2022, December 6). The college essay is dead. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/ Nauro, et al. V. David John Slater, et al., No. 24, 28 (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California January 28, 2016). http://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.orrick.com/files/naruto-v-slater-motion-to-dismiss-feb-2016.pdf Sharples, M. (2022, May 17). New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment. Impact of Social Sciences. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/05/17/new-ai-tools-that-can-write-student-essays-require-educators-to-rethink-teaching-and-assessment/     ... View more

Physicist Jessica Wade noticed a lack of Wikipedia pages for underrepresented scientists. In 2018, she began writing one Wikipedia page a day devoted to a woman scientist who did not have a Wikipedia page. Wade has created nearly 1,800 pages (including this one for Kim Cobb, a climate scientist) (Silva, 2022). The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has encouraged psychological scientists and their students to write or edit Wikipedia pages on psychological concepts since 2011 when APS president Mahzarin R. Banaji issued the challenge (Bender, 2012). While it is still important to make sure the psychological knowledge on Wikipedia is solid, Jessica Wade has a point. The people matter, too. Part of it is recognizing people for their work, but mostly it’s about our students (and the general public) seeing the diversity of the psychological community. The Women in Red WikiProject is devoted to turning Wikipedia’s red links for women into blue ones. The red links are for content that should have a wiki page but don’t. At least not yet. The project editors note that as of November 2022 “of 1,913,852 biographies [on Wikipedia], only 371,041 are about women” (Wikipedia, 2022). For those of you reaching for your calculators, that is almost 20%. The Women Scientists WikiProject has a similar goal specifically for scientists. If anyone is interested in creating a WikiProject specifically for psychologists/psychological scientists/cognitive scientists/behavioral scientists who are from underrepresented groups, this Wikipedia page explains how to go about it. However, one may certainly create pages without participating in a WikiProject. If you’d like to put your students to work creating biographies, there is no shortage of candidates. Some of APA’s presidents have Wikipedia pages, but many do not, such as Frank Worrell (2022), Jennifer F. Kelly (2021), Sandra L. Shullman (2020), Rosie Phillips Davis (2019), and Jessica Henderson Daniel (2018). Similarly, some of the APS presidents do not have Wikipedia pages, such as Barbara Tverksy (2018-2019). While presidents of these organizations may be a fine starting place, APA and APS award winners—particularly the lifetime achievement recipients—are worth a look. Perhaps there are rock stars at your institution or in your field who are deserving of a Wikipedia page. If you would like to build a Wikipedia biography assignment into one or more of your courses, I encourage you to start with APS’s Wikipedia Initiative page. While the focus here is on classroom assignments, I imagine that if your psychology club or honor society wanted to build pages, that would work, too! References Bender, E. (2012). Papers with a purpose: The APS Wikipedia Initiative’s first year. APS Observer, 25. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/papers-with-a-purpose Silva, C. (2022, November 15). Meet the person who added 1,767 underrepresented scientists to Wikipedia. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/small-talk-jessica-wade Wikipedia. (2022). Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red&oldid=1124298018 ... View more

In the days before learning management systems, my students would take exams in class and submit hard copies of their assignments. I would write carefully crafted comments on these documents before returning them to the students in class. Some students would read my comments immediately. Some students would tuck their papers into their book or notebook, and I would fool myself into thinking that each of these students would give my comments careful consideration when they were in a quiet place and could give my comments the attention they deserved. And some students would toss the papers into the trashcan on their way out the door at the end of class—my carefully crafted comments never so much as even glanced at. Now in the age of course management systems, my carefully crafted comments are digital. I cannot see if my students are reading my comments or not, but I am confident that the percentages are not all the different from the days of paper. I can see why students would read their professors’ comments, because I was that type of student. I did well in school, so if I missed a question or didn’t earn a perfect score on a paper, I wanted to know why. What to make of those students who don’t read their professors’ comments, who toss their papers in the trash? I made a they-don’t-care-about-school attribution and gave it no more thought. And then some years ago Roddy Roediger pointed out that students who found taking the test or writing the paper aversive were disinclined to revisit the experience. In other words, if they hated doing the test/paper in the first place, why would they want to spend even more time thinking about it? That was a true “doh!” moment for me. If I really wanted students to learn from their mistakes, I was going to have to provide an incentive for revisiting these aversive events. To that end, I began using an assignment wrapper (this earlier blog post describes what I do). This is not the only time I’ve thought about failure—or, more generally, about being wrong. Author Adam Grant told a story about giving a talk and having Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman who was in the audience come up to him afterward and say, “That was wonderful. I was wrong.” (See a longer description of Grant and Kahneman’s interaction and my thoughts on it in this blog post.) With all of that floating around in my head, I read Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach’s (2022) Perspectives on Psychological Science article on learning from failure. They argue that there are two big reasons we tend not to learn from failure: emotional and cognitive. The emotional reason is that we want to feel good about ourselves. As a general rule, reflecting on where we have gone wrong does not tend to produce happy feelings about ourselves, therefore we prefer not to engage in such reflection. There appear to be two cognitive reasons why it is hard for us to learn from failure. Confirmation bias causes us to look for information that aligns with our view of ourselves as a person who is correct. We focus on all of the times when we have been correct and dismiss the times when we have been incorrect. The second reason is that it is cognitively easier to learn from our successes than our failures. When we succeed, we can simply say, “Let’s do that again.” When we fail, we have to figure out why we failed and then develop a different course of action. That takes much more effort. Based on their summary of why learning from failure is hard, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach have some suggestions on how to encourage others—in this case, our students—to learn from failure. Of course, I don’t mean failure defined as scoring below standard on an assessment. I mean failure in a more general sense, such as missing items on an exam or losing points on an assignment. First, let’s look at their suggested interventions designed to counter emotional barriers to learning from failure. Rather than having to address our own failures, we can observe and learn from the failures of others. Instructors who go over the most commonly missed exam questions in class, for example, are taking this approach. When giving instructions for an assignment, some instructors will create an example with many common errors and then ask students to work in small groups to identify the errors. Creating some emotional distance between ourselves and our failures can help us look at our failures more objectively. One strategy would be to ask myself “Why did Sue fail?” rather than ask “Why did I fail?” While I can see why that would work in theory, I’m having a hard time picturing how to explain it to students in such a way that would minimize eyerolling. Asking students to give advice to other students can help students learn from their failure while at the same time turning the failure into a source of strength. For example, immediately following receiving exam scores, ask students to take a minute to reflect on what they did in studying for the test that worked well and what they would do differently next time. Ask them to write their advice—just a couple sentences—in whatever format is easiest for you to collect. For example, you could distribute blank index cards for students to write on, collect the cards, shuffle them, and then redistribute them. If you’d like to screen them first, collect the cards, read them, and then redistribute the next class session. Or you can make this an online class discussion where the initial post is the student’s advice. Remind students that they have abilities and skills, that their education is important to them (commitment), and that they have expertise. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach tell us that experts have an easier time learning from failure than do novices. Experts are committed to being experts in their field. To be an expert, they know that they have abilities and skills, but to get even better, they have to be able to learn from failure. Perhaps this is one reason it is easier for Daniel Kahneman to accept being wrong—every time he is, he learns something new and is now even more of an expert than he was before. While our students may not (yet) be Nobel Prize winners, they do have reading, study, and social skills that they can build on. Remind students that they are not born with knowing psychology, chemistry, math, history, or whatever, nor are they born knowing how to write or how to study. Knowledge and skills are learned. You probably recognized this as fostering a growth mindset. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach also have five suggested interventions that address cognitive barriers to learning from failure. Being explicit about how failure can help us learn can reduce the cognitive effort to learn from failure. For example, if your course includes a comprehensive final, point out to students that if they take a look at the questions they missed on this exam, they can learn the correct information now, and that will reduce how much time they need to study for the final. While this may seem obvious to instructors, to students who are succumbing to confirmation bias and cognitive miserliness, it may not occur to them that reviewing missed questions will save them time in the long run. We seem to have an easier time learning from failure when our failure involves the social domain. “An adult who loses track of time and misses a meeting with friends may tune in and learn more from this failure than an adult who loses track of time and misses a train” (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2022, p. 1517). I wonder if a jigsaw classroom, small group discussions, or study groups would address this. If a student is accountable to others, are they more likely to learn from their errors? It’s an interesting question. If having enough cognitive bandwidth is a barrier to learning from failure, then providing time in class for students to learn from failure may be time well spent. When I gave in-class multiple choice exams, students would take the test themselves first. After they submitted their completed bubble sheets, they got a new bubble sheet, and students would answer the same questions again, but this time it was open note, open book, and an open free-for-all discussion. The individual test was worth 50 points, and the wide-open test was worth 10 points. So much learning happened in that wide-open test that if I were to go back to multiple-choice tests, I’d make the wide-open test worth 25 points. Most students discussed and debated the answers to the questions. Even the students who were not active participants were active listeners. While the students hadn’t received their exam scores back yet, I’d hear students say, “AH! I missed that one!” They were learning from their failures—and in a socially supportive atmosphere. The more practice we have at a skill, the fewer cognitive resources we need to devote to it, and so the easier it is to learn from our failures. One approach would be to encourage students to add tools to their study skills toolbox. The LearningScientists.org study posters are a great place for students to start. The more tools they have, the easier it will be for them to choose the best one for what they are learning. By analogy, if all they have in their toolbox is a hammer, that hammer will work great when a hammer is called for. But if they have a situation that calls for a screwdriver or pliers, they might be able to make the hammer work, but it will take much more effort and the outcomes will not be that great. Picture hammering in a screw. Once students are well-practiced at using a number of different study skills, it will be easier for them to see where a particular study skill did not serve them well for a particular kind of test. What they learn from their failure, perhaps, is to implement a different study skill. We can work to create a culture that accepts failure as a way to learn. This can be a challenge with students who have been indoctrinated to see failure as a reflection on who they are as human beings. Standards-based grading, mastery-based grading, and ungrading are all strategies for embracing failure as an opportunity to learn. In each case, students do the work and then continue to revise until a defined bar has been reached. In these approaches, failure is not a final thing; it is merely information one learns from. Of the instructors I’ve known who have tried one of these techniques, the biggest challenge seems to come from students who have a hard time grasping a grading system that is not point based. Being able to learn from failure is a lifelong skill that will serve our students well. If you try any of these strategies, be explicit about why. And then tell students that in their next job interview when they are asked about their greatest strength, their greatest strength may very well be learning from failure. It’s the rare employer who would not love hearing that.   Reference Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You think failure is hard? So is learning from it. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511–1524. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059817     ... View more

I have been doing a bit of digging into the research databases, and I came across a Journal of Eating Disorders article with a 112-word “Plain English summary” (Alberga et al., 2018). I love this so much I can hardly stand it. Steven Pinker (2014) wrote an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why academics’ writing stinks.” Pinker does not pull any punches in his assessment. Let’s face it. Some academic writing is virtually unreadable. Other academic writing is actually unreadable. Part of the problem is one of audience. If a researcher is writing for other researchers in their very specific corner of the research world, of course they are going to use jargon and make assumptions about what their readers know. That, though, is problematic for the rest of us. I have spent my career translating psychological science as an instructor and, more recently, as an author. This is what teaching is all about: translation. If we are teaching in our particular subdiscipline, translation is usually not difficult. If we are teaching Intro Psych, though, we have to translate research writing that is miles away from our subdiscipline. This is what makes Intro Psych the most difficult course in the psychology curriculum to teach. I know instructors who do not cover, for example, biopsychology or sensation and perception in their Intro Psych courses because they do not understand the topics themselves. Additionally, some of our students have learned through reading academic writing to write in a similarly incomprehensible style. Sometimes I feel like students initially wrote their papers in plain English, and then they threw a thesaurus at it to make their writing sound more academic. We have certainly gone wrong somewhere if ‘academic’ has come to mean ‘incomprehensible.’ I appreciate the steps some journals have taken to encourage or require article authors to tell readers why their research is important. In the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s journal Teaching of Psychology, for example, the abstract ends with a “Teaching Implications” section. Many other journals now require a “Public Significance Statement” or a “Translational Abstract” (what the Journal of Eating Disorders calls a “plain English summary”). I have read my share of public significance statements. I confess that sometimes it is difficult—impossible even—to see the significance of the research to the general public in the statements. I suspect it is because the authors themselves do not see any public significance. That is probably truer for (some areas of) basic research than it is for any area of applied research. Translational abstracts, in contrast, are traditional abstracts rewritten for a lay audience. APA’s page on “Guidance for translational abstracts and public significance statements” (APA, 2018) is worth a read. An assignment where students write both translational abstracts and public significance statements for existing journal articles gives students some excellent writing practice. In both cases, students have to understand the study they are writing about, translate it for a general audience, and explain why the study matters. And maybe—just maybe—as this generation of college students become researchers and then journal editors, in a couple generations plain English academic writing will be the norm. This is just one of several windmills I am tilting at these days.   The following is a possible writing assignment. While it can be assigned after covering research methods, it may work better later in the course. For example, after covering development, provide students with a list of articles related to development that they can choose from. While curating a list of articles means more work for you up front, students will struggle less to find article abstracts that they can understand, and your scoring of their assignments will be easier since you will have a working knowledge of all of the articles students could choose from. Read the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) “Guidance for translational abstracts and public significance statements.” Chose a journal article from this list of Beth Morling’s student-friendly psychology research articles (or give students a list of articles). In your paper: Copy/paste the article’s citation. Copy/paste the article’s abstract. Write your own translational abstract for the article. (The scoring rubric for this section will be based on APA’s “Guidance for translational abstracts and public significance statements.”) Write your own public significance statement. (The scoring rubric for this section will be based on APA’s “Guidance for translational abstracts and public significance statements.”)   References Alberga, A. S., Withnell, S. J., & von Ranson, K. M. (2018). Fitspiration and thinspiration: A comparison across three social networking sites. Journal of Eating Disorders, 6(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-018-0227-x APA. (2018, June). Guidance for translational abstracts and public significance statements. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/resources/translational-messages Pinker, S. (2014). Why academics’ writing stinks. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 61(5).         ... View more

Drew Gilpin Faust (president of Harvard from 2007 to 2018) is back in the classroom teaching undergraduate history. In The Atlantic, she wrote about the experience of discovering that most of her students could not read cursive (Faust, 2022). Some of you may remember the 2010 battle over whether cursive handwriting should be in the standards for the K-12 Common Core. The arguments over the dinner table tore families apart. Okay, maybe not. Much more divisive political views would do that in their own time, but people certainly had opinions about whether children needed to learn cursive.   One concern was that people who did not learn cursive would not be able to read historical documents that were written in cursive, such as the U.S. Constitution. I admit that was not a particularly high concern of mine as many people had ‘translated’ the cursive into print. Faust, however, discovered that when she showed her students photographs of Civil War-era documents, most of her students could not read them. To them, it was like looking at hieroglyphics. One student said that she decided against doing a research paper on Virginia Woolf because she was unable to read the cursive handwriting in Woolf’s letters. Students who are interested in earlier time periods where ‘earlier’ is defined as before, say, 2015, will need to learn how to read cursive if they want to read original documents. How long will be until we see the first Cursive Handwriting course taught in a history department? Or is it already being offered? (I would totally teach that course!) Forget about identifying all of the squares that contain traffic lights, crosswalks, and chimneys. Just give me some cursive text. The youngsters will have to ask their grandparents to read it to them. The opportunity is ripe for a tech company who can create a tool that converts cursive handwriting to text. As for our own teaching, this shift away from cursive means that we need to make some changes. If you do any handwriting—on student assignments or on the board—be sure to print. You can write cursive if you want, but some of your younger students won’t be able to read it. As Faust writes, “Didn’t professors make handwritten comments on their papers and exams? Many of the students found these illegible. Sometimes they would ask a teacher to decipher the comments; more often they just ignored them” (Faust, 2022).   As for me, my handwriting was never that great. Through school, my cursive devolved into an idiosyncratic set of scribbles that is a jumble of cursive and print. It only got worse when I became a professor. When I was still hand writing student comments, some students would ask me to decipher them. I am certain most of my students just ignored them. Typing is my preferred mode of written communication. I can type faster than I can write. Besides, I’m much more confident you—and my students—can read my typing much better than my handwriting. Most of my students are probably still ignoring my comments, but at least I know they can read them if they so choose.   Reference Faust, D. G. (2022, September 16). Gen Z never learned to read cursive. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/   ... View more

While I structure my course—and provide direct instruction—on time management, I generally do not address procrastination head-on. Although, when I taught face-to-face, I’d wear this t-shirt to class: “Procrastinate today! Future you won’t mind the extra work.” As far as interventions go, it was low cost: $19.99 plus shipping, and it was one day I didn’t have to weigh my different clothing options. Did it help students reduce their procrastination? I don’t know. I never measured procrastination in classes that saw the shirt and those that didn’t. It wasn’t because of procrastination, though! It just never occurred to me to do it. An article in the August 2022 issues of Current Directions in Psychological Science has me thinking about procrastination again. Akira Miyake and Michael J. Kane suggest several small-teaching interventions that can help students develop some anti-procrastination strategies. Their suggested interventions are based on a self-control model of procrastination (Miyake & Kane, 2022). One reason we procrastinate is because doing the task is aversive, and so we regulate our emotion by doing something less aversive instead. James Gross has done the most thinking about and the most research on emotion regulation. A freely available article he wrote with Kateri McRae for the journal Emotion provides a nice overview of the topic (McRae & Gross, 2020). Doing something less aversive than the thing we should be doing is not always a bad thing. I’m a fan of productive procrastination. For example, yesterday morning I was going to write this blog post. While I don’t usually find writing aversive (although, I did as a college student—big time), if I have done several days of writing, sitting down in front of my computer monitor can feel like an insurmountable lift. That was yesterday. Instead, I did a whole list of household chores, including shoveling gravel—admittedly, not a typical household chore. Now, the shoveling of gravel was something I had been procrastinating on. With the heat we’ve had and, well, it’s shoveling gravel, the task was pretty aversive. Or at least it was until something else became more aversive. To help with task aversion, Miyake and Kane suggest instructors teach students about the pomodoro technique: set a timer for 25 minutes, work for those 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break, repeat. They also suggest teaching students the scientifically not-validated 5-second rule where when the inclination to work on the task hits, you have five seconds to act before the feeling passes. I would add to this my strategy of getting out everything I will need and set it up so that when that inclination hits, I am ready to go. To also reduce task aversion, Miyake and Kane recommend that instructors can do more on our end. When students see value in their assignments, the assignments are less aversive. For example, we can ask students to write a few sentences on how an assignment can be personally meaningful to them. We can also break large assignments into smaller ones. While it would be great if all students could already do this on their own, they don’t. When we break larger assignments into smaller ones, we are modeling the practice. It would probably also help if we were explicit about why we are doing that. While we’re at it, it probably wouldn’t hurt to describe big projects that we’re working on now and how we’ve broken those projects into smaller, more manageable pieces. Doing this can also help students stop thinking about the end outcome and focus on the process involved in getting there. I’ve had plenty of students who were so focused on what their end grade in the course was going to be, they forgot that the purpose was to learn. I remind them that if they focus on learning, the grades will follow. That reminder doesn’t help everyone, but it seems to resonate with some. In addition to task aversion, we may also procrastinate because we lose sight of our goals—or don’t have goals at all. As a student (high school, college, and grad school), I was firmly in the latter category. I had no goals beyond making it through each class I took with an A or a B. Those were good enough goals for me as I’ve done well enough in my career. At no point, though, did I have a long-term goal to become a college professor. I just kind of fell into it. Once I got into this career, though, I did develop some career goals, and I’ve checked a bunch of those boxes. Miyake and Kane suggest helping students create goals, and then teach students how to use planning tools such as a calendar, a to-do list (e.g., Trello), and reminders (e.g., nudgemail.com) to help them reach those goals. They also suggest instructors use their learning management system (LMS) to send reminders to students. Again, it would be great if all of our students had the skills to create reminders for themselves, but they don’t. Now I wonder if it would be effective to remind students to set up reminders—meta-reminders. There’s an empirical question. Miyake and Kane’s last set of suggestions for helping students work toward their goals is to teach students to use when/then statements to propel them toward their goals. For example, “When I leave class, then I am going to go to the student union, order coffee and a scone, and start reading the next chapter.” They also recommend encouraging students to remove distractions. For most of my students, it’s their phones. For others, it’s their family or others they live with. They’ve found going to the library or a coffee shop helps reduce distractions. My favorite was my student who would go to the food court at IKEA: not many people on a weekday, free wifi, cheap snacks, AC, and a great place to take a walk during a break. While managing negative mood states and attending to goals are important, Miyake and Kane also recommend reflection and community building to help students adopt some of the strategies discussed above. For reflection, instructors can ask students to periodically reflect on their study habits, e.g., what’s working and what’s not. Creating a supportive class environment where students can support each other in their anti-procrastination efforts provides a space where students can share their strategies and celebrate their wins. Lastly, Miyake and Kane recommend that we evaluate effectiveness of our interventions, preferably with objective measures rather than self-report. For example, are students submitting their work earlier than they did in previous quarters? If you’re game for adopting some of the strategies suggested by Miyake and Kane for your Intro Psych course and are interested in working with other Intro Psych instructors to gather effectiveness data, visit the collaboration page at Regan A. R. Gurung’s Hub for Introductory Psychology and Pedagogical Research (HIPPR) website. If you’re the first one there, fill out the HIPPR collaboration form. Do you use any of these or similar strategies to help students develop anti-procrastination skills? Or do you know of any peer-reviewed articles that have evaluated anti-procrastination strategies in a classroom or work environment? I invite you to use the comment box below.   References McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703 Miyake, A., & Kane, M. J. (2022). Toward a holistic approach to reducing academic procrastination with classroom interventions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(4), 291–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211070814       ... View more

I was pleased to see in the April/May 2022 issues of the APA’s Monitor on Psychology an interview with Dr. Laura Helmuth, editor in chief of Scientific American (Santoro, 2022). (Read it here.) According to her LinkedIn page, Dr. Helmuth has a BS in biology and psychology from Eckerd College. For those who have ever taken the airport shuttle from the Tampa airport to NITOP, you may have stopped at Eckerd to drop off students returning to college after winter break. NITOP has been at the Tradewinds in St. Pete Beach since 1988 (Bernstein, 2019). Helmuth was there between 1987 to 1991. Long-time NITOP attendees may have shared an airport shuttle with her. From Eckerd, Helmuth went to UC, Berkeley for her Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. It didn’t take her long to find her calling in science journalism. Here are some career highlights. She’s worked as a reporter and editor for the AAAS flagship publication Science, as science editor for Smithsonian Magazine, and science and health editor for Slate, as health and science editor for The Washington Post, and since 2020 as editor in chief for Scientific American. The short interview with Dr. Helmuth in the Monitor would be good for students to read for a number of reasons. For all college students, this is an excellent lesson in the importance of solid writing skills. If you can write well, you can take your career in any number of directions. For psychology majors, the interview points out the need for people who understand the inner workings of science to be able to translate it for the general public. Students should see science journalism as a legitimate career path. For Intro Psych students, the interview drives home the point that, yes, psychology is indeed a science. If you would like to build a class discussion (face-to-face or online) around this article, here are two suggested discussion questions. After reading this interview, what do you think is the most important thing Dr. Helmuth wants you to know? If you could ask Dr. Helmuth a question, what question would ask? Why? If you are feeling especially adventurous, take the questions students would ask Dr. Helmuth and combine those that are most similar together. Share the final list with students, and then invite students to vote for, say, their top three favorite questions. Send the top question or two to Dr. Helmuth via Twitter (@LauraHelmuth). If she responds, be sure to share her response with your students.     References Bernstein, D. A. (2019). A brief history of NITOP. National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology. https://nitop.org/History Santoro, H. (2022, April). Psychology coverage is vital for scientists: 6 questions for Laura Helmuth. Monitor on Psychology, 53(2). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/04/conversation-helmuth-psychologists-scientists       ... View more

The American Heart Association (AHA) developed a list of the seven top predictors of cardiovascular health, dubbed “Life’s Simple 7” (American Heart Association, n.d.). A longitudinal study of 11,568 volunteers spanning a median of 28 years found that when volunteers had high “Life’s Simple 7” scores, their risk of stroke decreased, even when they had a higher genetic risk (Thomas et al., 2022). All of the “Life’s Simple 7” factors have behavioral components. Don’t smoke. Quitting counts. Former smokers who have not smoked in over a year earn a green checkmark. Body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 25 is optimal. For someone who is 5’6”, AHA’s ideal weight is between 115 and 154. A reverse BMI calculator, such as this one, makes it easier to identify a target weight. Moderate exercise (e.g., brisk walk) for at least 150 minutes each week. Healthy diet. The AHA defines this as 4.5 cups of fruits and vegetables per day, 3 servings of whole grains per day, and 2 servings of fish per week. Additionally, we should consume less than 36 ounces of sugary beverages (e.g., sweet tea, sugar-sweetened coffee and soda) per week and less than 1,500 mg of sodium per day. The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan has more specifics. Total cholesterol under 200. Blood pressure lower than 120 over 80. Fasting blood glucose lower than 100. As a concluding activity for the Intro Psych course, ask students—either as a solo or group project—to choose one of AHA’s seven factors. Some factors will overlap. For example, blood pressure is related to high BMI, low exercise, and too much dietary sodium. For their chosen factor, students are to identify at least one concept from at least three different chapters that are relevant to their factor. Operant conditioning, stress, and conformity, for instance, may all arguably play a role in each of the seven factors. To end this section, students are to suggest one concrete behavioral change plan that an individual can implement. Point out to students that their suggested plan needs to be more than “exercise more” or “eat better.” Pretty much everyone already knows that. Explain that there is often a difference between knowing what we should do and actually doing it. Most students know that they should start working on research papers early in the term, yet how many students actually do? Telling students to get to work on their research papers as soon as the papers are assigned is unlikely to change behavior. What, then, might actually change behavior? Encourage students to use what they learned in the course to inform their suggestion. Our health is not just an issue for individuals. It is also a social justice issue. If we do not have access to quality healthcare, we don’t know what our blood pressure, cholesterol, and fasting blood glucose numbers are, let alone have someone who can help us move those numbers into heart healthy territory. If we live in a community with only a corner store and no grocery store, our ability to purchase fruits, vegetables, and whole grains may be limited or too expensive for us to purchase, whereas processed foods that tend to be high in sodium may be easier to get. For an overview of issues in health equity, invite students to read Jennifer Kelly’s presidential paper in the American Psychologist (Kelly, 2022). For their project, ask students to describe racial, ethnic, socio-economic, or other societal disparities for their chosen factor and provide possible explanations for those differences. As an example, people who have less money are more likely to live in neighborhoods where they feel unsafe. If it feels unsafe to be outside our home, we are unlikely to walk 150 minutes each week. We could use a treadmill indoors, however if we had the money to buy a treadmill and the space to set it up—or the money for a gym membership, we probably would not be living in a neighborhood that feels unsafe. Students are to suggest one concrete plan that can be enacted at the community level that would help reduce health disparities for their chosen factor. For example, are there things community leaders can do to make communities safer or ways they can create safe exercise spaces? Through doing this project, students will have more of an appreciation for the role that psychology and communities can play in improving the health of everyone.   References American Heart Association. (n.d.). Life’s simple 7. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://playbook.heart.org/lifes-simple-7/ Kelly, J. F. (2022). Building a more equitable society: Psychology’s role in achieving health equity. American Psychologist, 77(5), 633–645. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001019 Thomas, E. A., Enduru, N., Tin, A., Boerwinkle, E., Griswold, M. E., Mosley, T. H., Gottesman, R. F., & Fornage, M. (2022). Polygenic risk, midlife life’s simple 7, and lifetime risk of stroke. Journal of the American Heart Association, e025703. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.122.025703   ... View more

Observational learning is a powerful thing. We use the labels that those around us use, and often without giving much thought to the connotations those labels have. They are worth thinking about. APA recently released Inclusive Language Guidelines (American Psychological Association, 2021). With little preamble, the guidelines dive into the terminology. First, some terms—such as privilege and social justice—are defined to ensure that we are all on the same page. The bulk of the document identifies and provides rationale for terms that are best avoided and suggested terms to use instead. It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone reacts the same way to the terms the guidelines recommend for avoidance or recommend for use. When it comes to language, there is simply no way to please everybody. Instead, the best we can do is use the least polarizing and most innocuous language we can. The more we can model this for students in our teaching and writing, the more thoughtful our students will become in the language they use. At the beginning of your course, ask students to download the free APA Inclusive Language Guidelines. Suggest that students refer to it often during your course. Invite students to flag the less inclusive terms used in your presentation slides, your lectures, your exams and assignments, and your course readings, including their textbook. Remind your students that a society’s language changes over time, and it takes effort for each of us to change the language we use. You would like to enlist their help in ensuring that the most inclusive language is used in your course. If students are looking for non-inclusive language in the course, they should be more cognizant of the language they use in their own writing. If you cover thinking and language in your Intro Psych course, you may want to refer students back to the APA Inclusive Language Guidelines as an example of how our language can influence our thinking. The terms “third world” and “developing countries” were not included in this edition of the APA Inclusive Language Guidelines. If you would like your students to explore the concerns with these terms, invite students to read an essay from Science written by a Kenyan scientist (M’Ikanatha, 2022) or this article from NPR (Silver, 2021). Both agree that the terms “third world” and “developing countries” are problematic. Both struggle with what term would be best. Both land on the same conclusion: name the countries. From a research and teaching perspective, naming the countries is more accurate than boxing them up into a category that may or may not be relevant.   References American Psychological Association. (2021). Inclusive language guidelines. https://www.apa.org/about/apa/equity-diversity-inclusion/language-guidelines.pdf M’Ikanatha, N. (2022, March 17). I’m a scientist from Kenya—Not the ‘third world’ or a ‘developing country.’ Science, 375(6586). https://www.science.org/content/article/i-m-scientist-kenya-not-third-world-or-developing-country Silver, M. (2021, January 8). Memo to people of Earth: “Third world” is an offensive term! NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/01/08/954820328/memo-to-people-of-earth-third-world-is-an-offensive-term     ... View more

One variable that consistently arises as important to student success in college or graduate school is perseverance (Hwang et al., 2018; Ramey et al., 2019; Tynan et al., 2020), a component of grit (Duckworth et al., 2021). Anecdotally, when I ask colleagues who have earned graduate degrees the key to their success, their narratives frequently include stories of perseverance. I want to pause here to be crystal clear. While perseverance is important, it is not the only important factor. For example, it does not matter how much I persevere, my 54-year-old self will not become an Olympic athlete. (I might have a shot at the Senior Olympics, though—if I were so inclined. I’m not, but I could be.) We can help students find their own inner drive to persevere, but we have to be careful to not blame a student’s lack of success on their unwillingness or inability to persevere. In other words, when you don’t see me competing in the Super G at the next Winter Olympics, don’t put my failure to be there solely on my lack of perseverance. For starters, I could use some financial support to help me live near a resort with world class ski runs. Oh. And to take ski lessons.  In college, I was accustomed to earning good grades. And then I ran into a Theories of Sociology course that gave me fits. On the first essay exam, I earned a D. I thought I had included all of the necessary information on which theorist said what, but evidently not. The second exam replicated the results of the first. I talked to my professor. My answers were bullet points, which was the style preferred by a previous professor. This one wanted sentences assembled into paragraphs. A fair request. And, in retrospect, that style of writing should have been my default. However, as a first-generation college student creating college-student schemas by the tried and true methods of trial/error and observation, I had created a schema for college essay writing. “Professors want bullet points.” I had to make some significant changes to that schema if I were going to recover my grade in Theories of Sociology. I studied my butt off for the final. During the final, I filled my blue book and was the last one to finish. My score on the final was enough to bring my overall course grade up to at least B. To get through Theories of Sociology, I needed perseverance. I could have given up, taken an F, and sacrificed my minor in sociology. In the greater scheme of things, that wouldn’t have been a tragedy. But, no, I persevered. But I also brought other resources to the table. I had strong study skills (thanks largely to a challenging high school chemistry class that forced me to up my study game), I had decent enough writing skills (thanks to some excellent K-12 teachers and a love of reading modeled by my mother and older sister), and I had solid social support in the form of college friends who were there to encourage and study with me. Perseverance wasn’t the only thing I needed to succeed in that course, but it was necessary. In Science, each issue ends with a feature called “Working Life.” Readers of Science are encouraged to submit essays about their careers. Here are three very different stories that, at their root, are about perseverance. Students may find inspiration in reading these freely-accessible essays. For each, I suggest a few discussion questions. (Each article appeared in print under different titles and different dates. I’ve provided the online references rather than the print references.) A horribly embarrassing interview landed me a Ph.D. position—and taught me a valuable lesson (Holzer, 2022) Senka Holzer had several opportunities to give up, yet she persevered. Which challenge—either when interviewing for the Ph.D. program or in her life—do you think was the most difficult for her? Why? Identify at least two other skills or resources Holzer may have beyond perseverance that contributed to her success. Explain. Describe an academic challenge you have experienced that required perseverance to overcome. Identify at least two other skills or resources you drew upon to overcome that challenge. Doing research abroad felt lonely. Here’s how I made friends (Bonnesen, 2022) Kasper Bonnesen had reason to believe that his six months abroad would not go well, yet he chose to go anyway. In his time in Atlanta, he persevered. Why do you think it was important to him to succeed in staying this time? Identify at least two other skills or resources Bonnesen may have beyond perseverance that contributed to his successful stay in Atlanta. Explain. Describe a social challenge you have experienced that required perseverance to overcome. Identify at least two other skills or resources you drew upon to overcome that challenge. I worried my cerebral palsy would halt my progress in science—but I found a path forward (Smolensky, 2022) Ilya Smolensky had several opportunities to give up having a science career, yet she persevered. Which challenge do you think was the most difficult for her? Why? Identify as least two other skills or resources Smolensky may have beyond perseverance that contributed to her success in a science field. Explain. Describe a physical challenge you have experienced that required perseverance to overcome. Identify at least two other skills or resources you drew upon to overcome that challenge.   References Bonnesen, K. (2022, June 30). Doing research abroad felt lonely. Here’s how I made friends. Science, 377(6601). https://www.science.org/content/article/doing-research-abroad-felt-lonely-heres-how-i-made-friends Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., & Tsukayama, E. (2021). Revisiting the factor structure of grit: A commentary on Duckworth and Quinn (2009). Journal of Personality Assessment, 103(5), 573–575. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2021.1942022 Holzer, S. (2022, May 19). A horribly embarrassing interview landed me a Ph.D. position—And taught me a valuable lesson. Science, 376(6595). https://www.science.org/content/article/horribly-embarrassing-interview-landed-me-ph-d-position-and-taught-me-valuable-lesson Hwang, M. H., Lim, H. J., & Ha, H. S. (2018). Effects of grit on the academic success of adult female students at Korean Open University. Psychological Reports, 121(4), 705–725. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294117734834 Ramey, H. L., Lawford, H. L., Chalmers, H., & Lakman, Y. (2019). Predictors of student success in Canadian polytechnics and CEGEPs. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 48(2), 74–91. https://doi.org/10.7202/1057104ar Smolensky, I. (2022, June 16). I worried my cerebral palsy would halt my progress in science—But I found a path forward. Science, 376(6599). https://www.science.org/content/article/worried-my-cerebral-palsy-would-halt-my-progress-science-found-path-forward Tynan, M. C., Credé, M., & Harms, P. D. (2020). Are individual characteristics and behaviors necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for academic success?: A demonstration of Dul’s (2016) necessary condition analysis. Learning and Individual Differences, 77, 101815. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.101815   ... View more

I have been fascinated by the Great Resignation—the mass of people who have left their jobs starting when the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring of 2020 and is continuing as I write in summer of 2022. The number one predictor of why people are leaving their jobs? Toxic work culture (Sull, Sull, & Zweig, 2022). And it’s not even close. “A toxic culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.” The next closest is “job insecurity and reorganization,” and it’s only 3.5 times more likely to contribute than pay. Pay does not even make the top five reasons. Now the next challenge: determining what makes a work culture toxic. Researchers did a language analysis of employee Glassdoor reviews. Of the negative reviews, the comments fell into five categories: disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). Unsurprisingly, I found myself looking at these toxic work culture components through a classroom lens. If the class has a toxic culture, some students will stick it out. Classes, by their nature, are time-limited. When the term ends, the class ends. Other students may decide it is just not worth it and withdraw. Entire departments may have a toxic culture, and students may opt to change majors altogether to escape to a better space. For the purpose of this post, let’s focus on our classes and instructors as classroom leaders. Disrespect. This has the biggest impact on how employees rate their employer’s culture (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). When an instructor has intense dislike for a student, disrespect for the instructor is a common reason why (Boysen et al., 2020). For students, feeling disrespected by instructors contributes to low subjective well-being (Small et al., 2019). As instructors, one place we can start showing and modeling respect for our students is in our syllabi. It is all too easy to add content to our syllabus with that one student in mind. Instead, write for the rest of your students. Do your late assignment policy and academic dishonesty statements read like accusations? Ask a trusted family member or friend to read your syllabus. Would they want to take your class? Abusive. This takes disrespect to another level. “The most frequently mentioned hostile behaviors in our sample are bullying, yelling, or shouting at employees, belittling or demeaning subordinates, verbally abusing people, and condescending or talking down to employees” (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). If we replace the word “employees” with “students,” it is easy to picture a class we would not want to be part of. Noninclusiveness. A toxic work culture is fostered when members of historically marginalized groups feel marginalized by their employer (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). Their allies notice it, too. Managers who favor some employees over others or the existence of cliques are included in the noninclusiveness category. As instructors, we need to ensure all of our students feel like they can be heard. Voting systems are a way to foster feelings of inclusion. Ensuring that our textbooks and our presentation slides represent everyone—in photos and names—can help students feel like they belong. When students say or do things in our class that contribute to noninclusiveness, it is our responsibility as instructors to speak up. Having course policies that apply to everyone and do not require instructor judgement can also help. For example, allow everyone to submit work up to 24 hours late or allow up to three assignments to be submitted up to a week late. This eliminates the instructor from having to decide if a child’s rescheduled soccer match is a good enough reason to allow the parent—your student—to submit late work. These are just a few examples. Books have been written on how to foster inclusiveness. Cutthroat. Social loafing is not uncommon in the workplace, but, interestingly, it is not perceived as a contributor to a toxic work culture. Toxicity happens when coworkers actively undermine and sabotage each other (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). Encouraging student cooperation is much better for class culture than encouraging student competition, especially for first-generation college students (Canning et al., 2020). The practice of curving grades—where, say, the top 10% of grades earn As, the next 15% earn Bs, the next 50% earn Cs, the next 15% earn Ds, and the last 10% earn Fs, regardless of the actual number of points earned in the course—may result in students sabotaging others. If a student who earns 85% can fail the course if everyone else in the class earns above 85%, it is not hard to see how this course policy would encourage students to undermine everyone else. Unethical. This category includes employees and the employer engaging in unethical behavior, being dishonest, and lacking regulatory compliance (Sull, Sull, Cipolli, et al., 2022). In a class setting, unethical behavior may include allowing students to submit work late when they ask even though the syllabus late assignment policy clearly states that late work will not be accepted. Outright lying to students? Also not okay. If you teach long enough, you will have a class that will go sideways. Sometimes all we can do is mitigate the damage and get to the end of the term. For instructors who frequently have classes go sideways, it is time to take a close look at how the instructor’s behavior or class policies may be contributing to the class culture.   References   Boysen, G. A., Isaacs, R. A., Chicosky, R. L., & Delmore, E. E. (2020). Intense dislike of students: Frequency, causes, effects, and management among college teachers. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000200 Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Kroeper, K. M., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Feeling like an imposter: The effect of perceived classroom competition on the daily psychological experiences of first-generation college students. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(5), 647–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619882032 Small, S. P., English, D., Moran, G., Grainger, P., & Cashin, G. (2019). “Mutual respect would be a good starting point:” Students’ perspectives on incivility in nursing education. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 51(3), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/0844562118821573 Sull, D., Sull, C., Cipolli, W., & Brighenti, C. (2022, March 16). Why every leader needs to worry about toxic culture. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-every-leader-needs-to-worry-about-toxic-culture/ Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022, January 11). Toxic culture is driving the Great Resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/       ... View more

When I first started teaching, I remember getting some advice about students asking questions. If a student asks a question in class that you don’t know the answer to, research the answer, and then at the next class session, report what you learned. I tried that a couple times, both with the same result: students looking at me blankly, including the student who asked the question. Not all questions have the same degree of importance. There are burning questions, there are idle curiosity questions, and then there are questions that flick through our consciousness sticking around only long enough to come out of our mouths. Yesterday, my wife and I were on our way to meet friends for lunch. (That detail is not necessary for the story, but it adds a bit of ambiance.) I told her that I recently learned that where we used to live, King County, Washington (Seattle and environs), has a population of 2.2 million. The entire state of New Mexico—where we recently moved back to—has a population of 2.1 million. The difference of 100,000 is the population of our new hometown and the second largest city in the state, Las Cruces. In other words, if New Mexico had a second city the size of Las Cruces, we’d have as many people as King County, Washington. (This is merely one example of the deep, intellectual conversations we have.) Then I added that I recently learned that in the 1980s, Las Cruces had about 50,000 people. My wife replied, “I wonder what the population of Las Cruces was in the 50s and 60s.” I waved my hand in the direction of her phone. She said, “I don’t care that much.” I laughed, and said, “There should be a word for that.” There should be a word for a question that we have that we don’t care enough about to even pick up our phones to google it. My wife immediately coined a term. A question not worth googling we now call a “noogler,” a non-googler. (I just googled “noogler,” and it’s a term Google uses for their new employees. Since most of people don’t work for Google—at least not yet—I don’t expect us to run into any confusion. The next time you’re in class, and a student asks a question that you think might be a noogler, ask. “Is this a question you’d really like the answer to or is it a noogler?” If they’d really like the answer, give them the Google search terms you’d use to look it up and a reminder them that Reddit and Quora are not reliable sources. “Raise your hand when you’ve found the answer.” If it’s a noogler, return to your regularly scheduled course content. ... View more