Just in time for finals, students joined renowned psychologist and author David G. Myers for a live virtual study hall hosted by Macmillan Learning. Dr. Myers shared research-backed tips on how to study effectively for psychology courses and answered student-submitted questions in a lively, engaging Q&A. If you missed it—or want a refresher—you can now watch the full recording here: https://youtu.be/GghkvjEqVlc For more insights from Dr. Myers, check out his Talk Psych blog. ... View more

Friends and colleagues, In 2015 Macmillan invited me to write about teaching Intro Psych for their Communities site. While it was an easy request to say yes to, I had no idea it would be so much fun! This is my 345th blog post (!). I estimate that the posts, collectively, have had around 500,000 views (also, !). Now I have some good news and bad news. Bad news first. This will be my last Macmillan Communities blog post. Now the good news. I will still be writing these kind of blog posts about teaching psychology. You can find the new posts at SueFrantz.com. This website—which I’ve had since 2009—had been Technology for Academics. In the last few years, my focus has shifted from writing about technology to writing about teaching psychology. It just made sense to transition SueFrantz.com from tech posts to teaching psychology posts. If you decide to follow me to the new site, in the right-most column, you can subscribe by entering your email address. When a new post goes up, you will get an email. This is the only thing I will use your email address for. I do not sell my list of subscribers—not that anyone has ever asked me to buy it. I plan to follow the same writing schedule—four blog posts a month. In closing, I want to thank Katherine Nurre at Macmillan for her years of support, and I want to thank all of you intrepid readers for your years of support. Let’s begin the next chapter! In gratitude, Sue Frantz ... View more

Introduction to Psychology is the hardest course we teach because we are unfamiliar with so much of the course content (Frantz, 2024). We rely heavily on our textbooks to tell us what we—and our students—need to know about the field. This creates an unfortunate feedback loop that is difficult to break. Let’s take the personality chapter as an example. I am not a personality researcher nor did I take a personality course as an undergrad for my major. Yet, here I am teaching Intro Psych, and it seems like personality is a pretty important topic, so I’m game for teaching it. Step 1. I read the personality chapter in the Intro Psych textbook I have adopted. “This must be what Intro Psych students should know about personality.” Step 2. The personality chapter spends a lot of time on the history of personality theory, so I spend a lot of time lecturing on the history of personality theory. Repeat Step 2. Every term. For years. One day, the personality researchers were asked, “What should we teach Intro Psych students about personality?” They said, “Please focus on today’s personality research, and stop teaching the history of personality theory.” (See pages 8 to 16 of the 2017 Division 1/Division 2 Joint Task Force Report on Introductory Psychology.) Step 3. Authors of Intro Psych textbooks listen to the personality researchers. The authors greatly pare back the coverage of the history of personality theory in the personality chapter. Step 4. The publishers of those Intro Psych textbooks send the personality chapters out for review. They ask people who use the textbook—or who might one day use the textbook—what they think of the chapter. Step 5. The reviews come back. The personality researchers who review the chapter are thrilled! “Finally,” they say, “Intro Psych students are going to be learning about what we are really doing in the field.” Everyone else, though, is ticked off. “Wait! Where is the coverage of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis?! Where is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?! You can’t take that content out! I teach that!!” Let’s stop here for a minute to reflect. Why am I teaching the history of personality? Because many, many years ago when I first started teaching Intro Psych, the personality chapter in the textbook I used devoted many, many pages to the history of personality. That’s it. I don’t have any independent knowledge of personality. Because this is what I have always taught, this is what I think should be taught. Step 6. The publishers read the reviews. There is a very short stack of reviews saying, “Yay! Thanks for taking the history out of the personality chapter!” Those are primarily the reviews from the personality researchers. There is a very tall stack of reviews saying, “WTH?! Put the history back into the personality chapter, because I teach that!” Those are reviews from everyone else, including the neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and cognitive psychologists. Step 7. The publishers tell the Intro Psych textbook authors, “Look at all of these instructors who won’t adopt our book, because this chapter doesn’t cover what people want. You have to put the history back in.” Step 8. The Intro Psych textbook authors respond with, “But… But…” And the content goes back in. As someone who has reviewed plenty of Intro Psych textbook chapters, I own that I was part of the problem. In retrospect, I should have said, “I know you want me to review five chapters, but I’m really only expert in two of these: research methods and social.” If they insisted that I pick three others, I should have said, “Okay, I will also review neuroscience, sensation and perception, and personality, but understand that I will defer to what the experts in those areas think should be in the chapter. For example, yes, I cover dark adaptation in the S&P chapter, but if the S&P researchers don’t think that’s important, I’m fine not covering it.” (And, indeed, S&P researchers do not think coverage of dark adaptation is particularly important. See page 7 of the 2017 Division 1/Division 2 Joint Task Force Report on Introductory Psychology. If you ever heard Scott Lilienfeld’s talk on Intro Psych, you’ll remember he had a great story about a reviewer’s thoughts on his dark adaptation coverage in his textbook.) “Yes, I teach that, because… well… I guess because I have always taught that.” Psychology is a dynamic field. Is having taught particular content a good enough reason to keep teaching it?  Or should what we teach be just as dynamic as our science?   Reference Frantz, S. (2024, April 4). Intro Psych: The hardest course we teach. Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/intro-psych-the-hardest-course-we-teach/ba-p/20067   ... View more

My first full-time job was at a small college. I was both the psychology and the sociology department—although after a year or two I convinced them to hire a sociologist. In college, I minored in sociology and my graduate degree was in social psychology, but the two disciplines look at the human condition very differently. Anyway, that’s just to explain why the head of the social sciences division (the closest thing we had to a department chair) was from accounting. One day while we chatting, she told me that she believed that anyone can teach an intro course in anything. All they need is a good intro textbook. In my memory, my first thought was, “Please don’t ask me to teach Introduction to Accounting.” My second thought was, “What a weird way to insult my expertise.”  But now, 30 years later, I’m thinking she may have been right. To a point. Introduction to Psychology is the hardest course in the psychology curriculum we have to teach. That’s only because, as instructors, we don’t know most of the content of the course. The first time I taught Intro Psych, I was a third-year social psych grad student. I had a solid handle on three chapters: “Welcome to Psychology,” research methods, and social psychology. Now, what about those other 11 chapters? As an undergrad (three to seven years earlier), I had taken biopsych, development, learning, memory and cognition, and abnormal psych. With those five chapters, I had a fighting chance. I was familiar enough with most of the concepts, that I could relearn them without too much trouble. Although, admittedly with some concepts, I only fully grasped them when I had to teach them to my students. And, also admittedly, not always the first, second, or even third time around. (To all of the students I had in my first few years of teaching, I’m sorry!) If you have been keeping track at home, you know that I felt competent—or reasonably competent—in eight of 14 chapters. That leaves sensation and perception, consciousness, intelligence and language, emotion and motivation, personality, and therapy. Here’s an idea. What if I just don’t cover some of those? In a survey of 814 Intro Psych instructors (Richmond et al., 2021), the chapters taught by over 90% of the respondents were learning, neuroscience, personality, abnormal, memory, social psych, and development. Six of those seven I felt pretty good about teaching. What about the chapters I was less comfortable with? What percentage of my fellow Intro Psych instructors taught those? Perception: 78.1%; therapy: 77.2%; sensation: 75.6%; consciousness: 71%; intelligence: 64.2%; emotion: 64.1%; motivation: 60.3%; language: 41.4%. I encourage you to look at the survey’s results for each Intro Psych content area. The chapters most of us teach are courses that are typically part of the core for the major. The chapters in the second tier are typically second tier courses for the major. The chapters we’re commonly excluding are typically electives for the major, if they are offered at all. Maybe I wasn’t the only one teaching Intro Psych content that I was most familiar with. As a newly-minted Intro Psych instructor, I relied heavily on the textbook I adopted to teach me what I needed to know in all of those chapters where I felt, frankly, incompetent. The textbook wasn’t my only source, though. A grad student ahead of me in my program was headed off to a job in industry, so she gave me her hand-written Intro Psych lecture notes to get me started. Someone also gave me this nugget of advice: get a high-level Intro Psych textbook, and use that for your lecture material. During the recording of a Psych Sessions podcast (Landrum & Nolan, Feb 29, 2024), I learned that I wasn’t the only one who got that advice. In some ways, my first division chair was right. When we teach Intro Psych, we are learning the course content from our textbooks as we go. For high school teachers who teach Intro Psych—especially AP Psych—they may not have a background in psychology at all, so they are absolutely learning as they go. And the AP Psych instructors don’t have the luxury of not teaching chapters they’re not comfortable with. The students need all of the chapters in preparation for the AP exam. Some of the best Intro Psych instructors I know teach AP Psych. In a recent conversation with one of those best AP Psych instructors, she said that she feels like she has just the surface of the field, not the depth. I countered that college instructors have just the surface, too, except for their area of expertise. The more education we get, the narrower our knowledge becomes. There is one exception to the narrowing of knowledge: research methods. That is one way where my division chair was wrong. Through my BA and graduate training, I became well-versed in the research methods we use in psychology. Research methods underpins everything we do; it is our way of knowing. While an accountant would struggle to wrap their head around how psychological researchers do science, a scientist from a different field might have an easier time. Science is science. Our methods may differ, but the basics—and the values—are the same. To everyone who is teaching Intro Psych for the first time, if you feel incompetent in most of what you are teaching, it is because you are. But you are not alone in that experience. And it will get better. Every time you teach the course, you will learn more.   References Landrum, E., & Nolan, S. A. (Feb 29, 2024). STP and new challenges, with guest Sue Frantz (Beyond Teaching S6E4) [MP3]. https://psychsessionspodcast.libsyn.com/beyond-teaching-s6e4-stp-and-new-challenges-with-guest-sue-frantz Richmond, A. S., Boysen, G. A., Hudson, D. L., Gurung, R. A. R., Naufel, K. Z., Neufeld, G., Landrum, R. E., Dunn, D. S., & Beers, M. (2021). The Introductory Psychology census: A national study. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 7(3), 163–180. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000277   ... View more

In season three/episode four of the Andy Griffith Show (first aired October 22, 1962), Opie advises his father, Andy, not to lick the tip of the pencil he’s about to write with. Opie says, “It’s an indelible pencil. If you lick indelible, you die in a minute and a half.” His father asks Opie who told him that. “Johnny Paul Jason.” This is after Opie has shared a few other similar ‘facts’ that Johnny Paul Jason has uttered. Andy replies, “Boy sure is a gold mine of made-up facts.” Johnny Paul Jason would be right at home with today’s Internet. I visited with a friend last week at a conference. He told me that upon someone telling his daughter, Melina Gurung, something that sounded questionable, she replied, “Is that an Internet fact or an actual fact?” What a great response! The subtext: “That sounds like a bunch of baloney. Have you checked the source to see if it’s legitimate? Or are you just repeating it?” Isn’t Gurung’s phrasing beautifully concise? It immediately puts the onus back on the speaker: “Is that an Internet fact or an actual fact?” The speaker has to stop and consider the source. Back in the 1960s, Opie’s father would have asked, “Is that a Johnny Paul Jason fact or an actual fact?” Just a couple of days ago I learned that today’s Johnny Paul Jasons are sharing tax advice on TikTok (Dietz, 2024). No, creating a limited liability company (LLC) does not mean you can deduct your groceries from your taxes. No, as a business owner, you cannot list your 4-year-old as an employee. If the person giving you tax advice is a tax attorney or an accountant, you can give what they say some credibility. But a seemingly random person? Is that really a good idea? When it comes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), actual facts are less likely to land you in hot water than are Internet facts. Have you seen the photo of the British Airways plane with a flock of birds in the foreground? (Shout out to Linda Woolf for sharing this with me.) The Internet fact says that smuggled exotic birds were on the plane, and that’s why the wild birds swarmed it. (Who makes this stuff up?) The good folks at Snopes.com, who have been sorting Internet facts from actual facts since 1995, discovered the actual fact (Liles, 2024). Adam Samu took the photo on June 15, 2004, and he confirmed that the birds were not near the plane. It’s an optical illusion. The birds are starlings that “range in size from 19 to 23 centimetres” (7.5 to 9 inches). The birds simply happened to be in the foreground when he took the photo. Many years ago, I had a Johnny Paul Jason in class. I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to write down the Internet facts he shared—always uttered with complete conviction. One in particular I remember. He said that dolphins can identify humans who were born underwater. We took some class time on that one to design an experiment that would test his claim. While that was a useful activity, I’m now ready for my next Johnny Paul Jason. “Is that an Internet fact or actual fact?” Thank you, Melina Gurung!   References Dietz, M. (2024, March 18). Ignore this tax advice from TikTok. Lifehacker. https://lifehacker.com/money/ignore-this-tax-advice-from-tiktok Liles, J. (2024, March 15). Pilot reacted emotionally when he realized why birds were flying alongside his airplane? Snopes. https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/pilot-emotional-birds-plane/   ... View more

My favorite conference activity is attending poster sessions. I love talking with students. They are always enthusiastic about their research. The poster topic doesn’t matter to me, although I tend to favor the topics I know very little or nothing about. The student presenters get to experience what it’s like to be the experts and in a position to teach someone else not only about their study but about the topic more generally. Last week, I attended the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA) conference. Whenever I had free time, I popped into the posters and wandered around until I found a poster where the presenters were not currently speaking with anyone. “Hi! Tell me about your poster,” I say. The first poster I went to, the students surprised me, though. One student looked at my name badge, and said, “Oh! Sue Frantz. We read a couple of your papers.” I haven’t published much in journals and what I have published was not related to their poster topic, so this was especially surprising. Of course, I asked what they had read. It took them a bit to remember, but they got there. One was a paper on how Intro Psych can dispel myths (McCarthy & Frantz, 2016), and the other was the Intro Psych pillars article (Gurung et al., 2016). Once we had that sorted, I asked why they read those articles. They said that their professor asked them to read one to three articles written by each of the invited speakers in preparation for coming to SEPA. Brilliant! I quickly looked at their poster to find their affiliation: Covenant College. I asked for the name of their professor: Carole Yue. Later that afternoon, I gave my talk on the need to give careful consideration to what we cover in Intro Psych. After the talk, two students came up to me. They said that they needed to interview one of the invited speakers and would I be willing to take 10 to 15 minutes to answer their questions? My first thought was, “I have no idea what questions you are going to ask, but there is no way I can answer them in 15 minutes.” And that was okay by me since I had nowhere in particular I needed to be. But what I said was, “Are you from Covenant College?” Yes, yes, they were. After our conversation—which took at least 30 minutes—I asked that if they see me and their professor, Dr. Yue, in the same room, to please introduce me. I remember my very first conference: Eastern Psychological Association (EPA), Buffalo, NY, 1989. Or at least I’m pretty sure about the location, but the year could have been 1988. That was a long time ago. Anyway, I remember seeing someone whose work I had been reading for a research project I was working on. I wanted to say hi, but I didn’t have any words for after “Hi.” Yue’s students have something to say after “Hi.” The next day, Carole Yue found me, and I learned more about what she does to ensure her students get the most out of their conference experience. I was so impressed, I asked her to email me with what she does because I wanted to share it with all of you. At Covenant College, students can enroll in Psy310: Psych Field Trip. This course was created decades ago by Yue’s predecessor, Mike Rulon. Yue reports that Rulon graciously shared everything with her when she took over the course, and she has since revised it. Here’s the catalog description. The psychology department arranges and sponsors field trips to various professional psychology conventions. The conventions attended in the past have included the Southeastern Psychology Association (SEPA), the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR). By these means, students are able to gain a wide sampling of the range of topics, issues, controversies and personalities in psychology today. A travel fee is individually set for each field trip (based on distance, housing, etc.).   This year’s trip fee was $600, “but presenters get a 50% scholarship. We've been fortunate that the administration has been willing to largely subsidize the trip for students (over half the total cost)” (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024). For context, Covenant College is near Chattanooga, an 8.5-drive to Orlando where this year’s SEPA conference was held.   Students needed to prepare for SEPA by doing the assigned readings (one to three articles by each invited speaker) and discussing some of those articles with one to three other SEPA attendees. Yue ensures students get exposure to what’s new in a breadth of topics. She divides psychology into eight broad areas (e.g., clinical/counseling/addiction/therapies, neuroscience/cognitive neuroscience/neurology, industrial-organizational/human factors/forensic). Students need to identify one session in at least five of those eight categories that they plan on attending. Yue writes, While at the conference, students check in with me around 8am and receive their per diem for food…They conference all day, and we meet for dinner each night…We then have debriefing meetings after dinner where each student shares about their day. Even though it makes the days very long, students also generally appreciate having the debriefing because they get to reconnect and hear about talks they didn't get to, unusual experiences, or interview/presentation tips. At some point during those two days, students need to find and interview (or have a substantial conversation with) a psychologist. I give them some interview guidelines and suggested questions/topics, but I do encourage them to think of it as a professional fact-finding mission and tailor questions to their own interests (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024). After the conference, students write about their experiences. Yue writes, Their post-SEPA writings are reflections/summaries of their experiences…I've divided it up into one for each day (Thursday and Friday), as well as a summary of their concentration…They do a summary of their interview, and they do a final reflection of the trip in the style of a letter to a future student who might be considering attending SEPA… Students also submit a list of "Five 5's" in which they tell me 5 things they thought were unusual or surprising (behavioral or content-based), 5 applications they want to implement, 5 memorable events, 5 ideas/concepts they want to remember, and 5 suggestions to me.  Since we have the evening debriefs and the long bus ride home, we won't meet again this week. I think one of the appealing aspects of the course is that after the trip is done, they're done with the class (C. Yue, personal communication, March 18, 2024).  Based on the interactions I had with four of Yue’s students, there is no doubt in mind that they were well-prepared for attending SEPA. After Yue shared with me how she prepared them, I understood why. Conferences can be overwhelming, especially for first-time attendees. Yue’s students are familiar with the conference program and the invited speakers, and they have goals they want to accomplish. What an amazing experience it must be for them—and for their professor. Yue adds, “[T]his course is only possible because the students really jump into the work, and they're amazing. It's such a privilege to see them stretch themselves and grow into themselves as psychologists” (C. Yue, personal communication, March 19, 2024) If you are interested in exploring similar assignments or a similar course for your students, please download Yue’s Psy310 syllabus, pre-SEPA requirements checklist, concentration plan, and breadth requirements.   References Gurung, R. A. R., Hackathorn, J., Enns, C., Frantz, S., Cacioppo, J. T., Loop, T., & Freeman, J. E. (2016). Strengthening Introductory Psychology: A new model for teaching the introductory course. American Psychologist, 71(2), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040012 McCarthy, M. A., & Frantz, S. (2016). Challenging the status quo: Evidence that Introductory Psychology can dispel myths. Teaching of Psychology, 43(3), 211–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628316649470 Yue, C. (2024, March 18). Re: SEPA student assignment [Personal communication]. Yue, C. (2024, March 19). Re: SEPA student assignment [Personal communication].   ... View more

In an Optimist Daily article this morning, I learned that there are 54 Taylor Swift songs that have a beat that matches the recommended number of beats per minute for giving CPR (Optimist Daily, 2024). The healthcare professionals who identified the songs think that these songs may be more relevant to younger generations than the Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive. I’m going to digress a bit before getting to the student activity. <DIGRESSION> First digression thread. I cannot think of Stayin’ Alive without first thinking of Saturday Night Fever followed immediately by Airplane!. If you’re desperate for examples of retrieval cues, you’re welcome to use those. I wonder how many of your students know that the “man dancing” emoji (🕺🏻) is John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. If you’re looking for a light but very entertaining read, check out Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!. If you want to give Stanley Milgram’s six degrees of separation some love, I know someone who knew the actor who played the character to first vomit. He obviously knew Leslie Nielsen and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. If you know me, then you are five degrees from them, making you six degrees from just about everybody in the acting world and the sports world. If you and I haven’t met yet, then let’s meet the next time we’re at a conference together. Just say, “Hi, I want to get closer to Leslie Nielsen.” Second digression thread. Ambulances used to be operated by police departments. No treatment was offered along the way. There was one goal: get the injured to a hospital as quickly as possible. One physician—the one who invented CPR—and an all-Black ambulance crew in Pittsburgh changed ambulances into what they are today. For that history, I highly recommend the book American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. Third digression thread, which is really a sub-digression. My wife volunteers for the box office—it’s a small table and a laptop—at our local arts theater. One patron who is a frequent attendee has an incredible mental database of actors and movies that he shares snippets from. For example, he recently shared that one actor’s niece and another actor’s daughter appeared in a movie together. Not the movie that was playing that night, mind you, but some other movie. I’m afraid that I don’t remember what cued this particularly memory for him. In my defense, I didn’t know I was going to need a few days later! My first two digressions remind me of this guy. Something cued his retrieval of that movie, and in this blog post, I seem to sharing with you every memory retrieval I am having this morning. Which leads to… …the fourth digression thread. Have you seen the 2024 Oscar-nominated film for Best Picture, American Fiction? That was the movie that was playing the night I met the affectionately named Random Movie Fact Guy. If you haven’t seen American Fiction, I highly recommend seeing it. Be sure to notice the cameo by Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll study. < END DIGRESSION> I also learned from the Optimist Daily article that this Taylor Swift/CPR information was delivered at Swiftposium 2024 held Feb 11-13 at the University of Melbourne. It appears that the Swiftposium was an opportunity for the University of Melbourne faculty to share with the University of Melbourne community how their fields intersect with the cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. While I am not a Swiftie—nor am I an anti-Swiftie—I enjoy a good cultural phenomenon. As of December 2023, nine of her songs had over a billion listens on Spotify (Morgenstern, 2023). Whether your students are Swifties or not, a cultural phenomenon is worthy of psychological study. As an activity to wrap up Intro Psych, consider inviting your students to present at their own in-class Swiftposium—posters or presentations, individually or small groups, in-person or online. Do whatever makes the most sense given your course modality and number of students. Even if you don’t do a Swiftposium, this would work as the basis for a written assignment or discussion. Instructions: Identify one concept we covered in this course (in class or in your course readings) and explain how that concept connects to Taylor Swift. The connection could be to just about anything, such as her music, her concerts, her fans, or her relationship with Kansas City player Travis Kelce. Identify the concept, briefly explain the concept, and then draw the connection to Taylor Swift. Here are a few examples. After the Super Bowl, Kelce asked Swift who had flown in from Tokyo for the game, “How do you not have jet lag right now?” She replied, “Jet lag is a choice” (Hanson, 2024). Based on what students have learned about sleep, is jet lag a choice? From what we know about jet lag, what might Taylor Swift have done to minimize jet lag? What behaviors do Swifties engage in to signal in-group membership to other Swifties? Taylor Swift encouraged her fans in an Instagram post to register to vote by going to Vote.org. “Vote.org registered more than 35,000 voters after Swift's post, which was a 22.5% increase from the previous year, organization CEO Andrea Hailey said Wednesday. There was a 115% increase in registrations by 18-year-olds when compared to last year. The organization also helped 50,000 people verify their registration status” (Chasan, 2023). This behavior could be explained by the persuasion principle of liking.     References Chasan, A. (2023, September 21). More than 35,000 people register to vote after Taylor Swift post—CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-encourages-voter-registration/ Hanson, H. (2024, February 17). Taylor Swift’s 5-word take on jet lag will have you go, “Hmmm.” Yahoo Entertainment. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/taylor-swifts-5-word-jet-170134945.html Morgenstern, L. (2023, December 5). Taylor Swift’s 15 most popular songs, ranked (according to Spotify). TheThings. https://www.thethings.com/taylor-swift-most-popular-songs/ Optimist Daily. (2024, February 19). Fearless hearts: More than 50 Taylor Swift songs are perfect for life-saving CPR. https://www.optimistdaily.com/2024/02/fearless-hearts-more-than-50-taylor-swift-songs-are-perfect-for-life-saving-cpr/   ... View more

There are lots of opportunities for professional development in the teaching of psychology no matter your budget. If you haven’t already, join the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP). Annual membership is $25 for psychology teachers, $15 for students and postdocs. If you live in a country that is not classified by the World Bank as a high income economy, it’s $5. As a member of STP, you get online access to our quarterly journal Teaching of Psychology, the ability to join one or more of our affinity groups and participate in their online discussions, the opportunity to join us at STP’s Annual Conference on Teaching (Louisville in 2024 and Minneapolis is 2025), the opportunity to apply for numerous grants and awards, the opportunity to participate in our mentoring program, and the ability to post to and view our list of job postings. Between September 1, 2023 and October 4, 2023, a total of 34 job postings have gone up. And by joining STP, you will have the opportunity to give back to the teaching of psychology community (and adding professional service to your CV) by getting involved in STP. If you’re on Facebook, join the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook group. With over 22,000 members as of October 2023, the members can help you with any teaching of psychology related question you may have. Need new ideas for the Sensation and Perception chapter in Intro? Have a challenging student, colleague, department chair, or administration? Looking for a new kind of assignment? We’re here for you. If you’re not on Facebook, STP operates the PsychTeacher listserv. A listserv is an email subscription service. When you have a teaching of psychology related question, send an email to the listserv email address. Other subscribers will reply to your question. If you’re a fan of webinars, check out the American Psychological Association (APA) Education Directorate’s Learn 2 Learn Series.   For the podcast listeners, there are a number of excellent options. For example, there is Psych Sessions (conversations with psych instructors), Hidden Brain, Speaking of Psychology (from APA), Under the Cortex (from APS), and All in the Mind (from the BBC). The best (and only?) Intro Psych conferences are TIP Northwest (Seattle in the spring) and Psych One (Duke University in June). The two conferences have joined forces to host an online conference in January called Intro Psych: Coast-to-Coast. Psi Beta will be holding their Second Annual Psi Beta Teaching of Psychology Conference (PBTOP) online on December 1, 2023. All seven of the regional psychological associations (i.e. EPA, SEPA, MPA, NEPA, RMPA, SWPA, and WPA) have teaching of psychology programming either as a one-day preconference or embedded throughout the program. There are also local teaching of psychology conferences, such as the Southeastern Teaching of Psychology conference (SETOP) the Mid-Atlantic Teaching Psychology conference (MATOP) and the Midwest Institute for Students and Teachers of Psychology (MISTOP). If you’d like to start your own conference, this document—even though it’s a little dated now—provides some excellent advice. STP also has programming at the APA convention. When I attended my first APA convention, I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the number of presentations. A trusted colleague said, “Just attend the STP sessions. Treat it like a teaching conference.” It was fantastic advice. You can also find STP programming at the Association for Psychological Science conference, at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference, and at the Society for Research in Child Development conference. The National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP) is held every January. It is one of the best teaching of psychology conferences. If you’re interested in international collaboration on scholarship of teaching and learning activities, check out the Biennial International Seminar on the Teaching of Psychological Science (BISTOPS) held in July on even years in Paris. If you want to flip the script and be paid for professional development rather than paying for professional development, I recommend participating in the AP Psych reading. It was the best move I ever made in my career. I learned a lot about writing essay questions and about rubric development. You'll get that if you do the reading online. However, if you're able, attend in person, at least for the first few years. The best part was making friends who love teaching psychology as much as I do. I have learned--and continue to learn--so much from them. ETS (the owner of the Advanced Placement testing program) pays you, and they cover all travel expenses including hotel for the week. In 2024, the reading will be in Kansas City. Read more about the requirements and apply. I am certain I have missed some fantastic professional development options. Please share your favorites in the comments!   ... View more

In eight days, I officially retire from Highline College, where I’ve taught since 2001. For a number of months, I’ve been saying that I’m pre-semi-retired. It occurred to, however, that that’s hogwash. I’m actually differently employed. More on that in a bit. Since I announced to my colleagues that I was going to retire in fall 2023, I’ve had several people ask me about whether I had concerns about losing my professional identity. No, I don’t. In fact, I have so few concerns about it that it never occurred to me that I might no longer see myself as a professor. Years ago, my wife and I were watching some sort of sporting event. One of the broadcast analysts was once a coach, and everyone kept calling them “coach.” My wife said something like, “Oh! ‘Coach’ is an honorific. Once a coach, always ‘coach.’” Now that I’m close to no longer being a full-time professor, “professor” feels the same to me as “coach.” And, really, they’re pretty similar professions. There are other reasons that I don’t see me shedding my professor identity. For example, I can teach a class as an adjunct if I’d like. It’s hard to not see myself as a professor if I am professing to a class of students. Also in my professorial role, I am writing textbooks. I have an Intro Psych textbook on the market now and a Social Psych textbook will be published in the next year. Textbook writing feels a lot like teaching; I curate psychological science and explain it to students. As everyone who has been teaching for a while can attest, students comprise just one part of our teaching role. We also ‘teach’ colleagues. The ‘lessons’ commonly start with a colleague saying, “Hey, do you have a minute? I’d like some advice on…” I’m still doing that. While I don’t get as many questions as I did when I was full-time, I get the occasional text or have such a conversation at a conference. These blog posts are just another form of that. More generally, there are plenty of things I’m doing to maintain my happiness as I slide into the next chapter of my life. For all of my colleagues in the professoriate who are considering retiring or who have made the leap, let’s use the PERMA model of subjective well-being (Seligman, 2018) to see how things might go. P is for positive emotions One of the joys of retirement is that we get to choose to get involved in projects that are fun without having to suffer through job responsibilities that are, well, insufferable. Teaching a class as an adjunct? Fun! Chairing a search committee? Not fun! We know all of the things we should do to manage stress: eat well, exercise, sleep. With retirement we may find that we have even more time to do those things. My wife and I have more time to plan, shop for, and make meals. We have a basic home gym (dumb bells and a rowing machine), and we block out time on the calendar to use it. And sleep—I go to bed when I want (early!), and I get up when I want (early!). E is for engagement Flow. Let’s completely lose ourselves in the activities we enjoy. Writing frequently does that for me. Not always, but frequently. Most of my friends have hobbies that engage them. After retiring, they have more time to do the activities they love. R is for relationships The loss of work relationships is a real concern for most everyone who is considering retirement. That was one of the many lessons of COVID. Those of us who were sent home to work learned what it was like to no longer have hallway conversations. I know I couldn’t have told you how important those conversations were until they were gone. There are some Highline College colleagues that I occasionally exchange texts and emails with. My professional circle is much greater that, though. My wife refers to all of my non-Highline psychology colleagues in the collective as the “psychosphere.” Because I never saw them (you!) in the hallways of my college, I don’t feel like I’ve lost them (you!). As some work relationships fade with time, retirement gives us the opportunity to build new ones. I wrote a few weeks ago about how becoming a regular someplace can provide important relationships (Frantz, 2023). Online forums can provide similar opportunities. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) recently launched affinity groups that give STP members with shared identities or experiences the opportunity to meet and discuss important and not-so-important topics in an online forum. Conferences were another place where we were able to connect—confer—with colleagues. I’ll confess that well before I retired my primary purpose for attending conferences was to meet with my friends and make new friends. In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the author and Roman historian Mary Beard tells us that Polybius (200 BCE – 118 BCE) supposedly advised a young man, “Never come back from the Forum…until you have made at least one new friend” (Beard, 2016, p. 184). If we are not yet friends and you see me at a conference, please say hi. Remember that I’m following Polybius’s advice. After every conference trip, I need to have made at least one new friend. Attending conferences is more challenging as a retiree because your institutional travel support is gone. This is less of an adjustment for those who were at institutions that didn’t provide much or any travel support to begin with. Who knew that there’d be a plus side to that? If you have money budgeted for travel, consider building a vacation around a conference. NEPA/NECTOP are in Worcester, MA in early October 2023. My wife and I will be coming in a few days early and leaving a few days after so we can spend some time touring New England. Or, if you’re lucky, a conference may be held near your city. Here are some conferences worth considering. Some even have reduced registration rates for retirees. For example, STP’s ACT early bird registration for retirees (and adjuncts and high school teachers) is $35 less than the regular rate: NEPA/NECTOP (Oct 2023). Worcester, MA STP’s ACT (Oct 2023). Portland, OR NITOP (Jan 2024). Bonita Springs, FL EPA (Feb/Mar 2024). Philadelphia, PA SWPA (Mar 2024). San Antonio, TX RMPA (Apr 2024). Denver, CO SEPA (Apr 2024). Orlando, FL MPA (Apr 2024). Chicago, IL WPA (Apr 2024). San Francisco, CA Teaching Intro Psych (TIPNorthwest) (Apr 2024 – probably). Seattle, WA APS (May 2024). San Francisco, CA PsychOne (Jun 2024). Durham, NC APA (Aug 2024). Seattle, WA M is for meaning This may be the one that people contemplating retirement fear losing the most. The fear is not unwarranted. It’s not uncommon for recent retirees to struggle with finding meaning in their lives when for so long work provided so much of that meaning. These days, I get a lot of my meaning from writing. In addition to textbooks (including the Teaching Psychology book I have with Doug Bernstein and Steve Chew, I also have this blog and my Technology for Academics blog. I recently spoke with a publisher who was looking for someone to write a “how to teach Intro Psych” manual of sorts. While it’s not a project I can take on, it was a good reminder to let you know that if you’re interested in any kind of writing for publishers, let your book reps know. They’ll pass your contact information along to their editorial team. Lots of publishers are looking for people to create textbook supplements. Someone has to create the slide decks, instructor resource manuals, and test banks. It might as well be you. While writing a book is a significant commitment, a blog can be written on your own timeline. Here are some tips on getting started with blogs. Or maybe podcasts are more your thing. If you want to try out podcasting and you have an idea for a series, ask the good people at Psych Sessions (info@psychsessions.org) if they’d be interested in you being a series host. For example, a “where are they now?” series could be fun. You could have 30-minute conversations with teaching of psychology luminaries who have retired. What are they doing now? Or maybe you’d like to work one-on-one with someone who is new to teaching psychology. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has a mentoring program where seasoned/experienced/veteran (you choose your adjective) faculty are paired with early career faculty or advanced graduate students. It’s a terrific opportunity to share your expertise. I also highly recommend getting involved in your professional associations. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology has a boatload of service opportunities—diversity and international, membership, resources, programming, awards. STP has something for everyone. You can always find current openings on the Get Involved page. A is for accomplishment Don’t underestimate the power of achieving goals. If you are about to retire or have recently retired, take some time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished (so far!) in your career. Now’s a good time to review your CV. What were your favorite classes to teach? Who are your most memorable students? What was your most satisfying research line? Who did you learn the most from? Who do you think learned the most from you? (Also, these are great questions for the guests on your “where are they now?” podcast series!) Now, what are your next set of goals? It’s time for a new chapter!   References Beard, M. (2016). SPQR: A history of ancient Rome. Profile Books. Frantz, S. (2023, August 21). Decreasing loneliness through weak ties: A survey example. Macmillan and BFW Teaching Community. https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/psychology-blog/decreasing-loneliness-through-weak-ties-a-survey-example/ba-p/19251 Seligman, M. (2018). PERMA and the building blocks of well-being. Journal of Positive Psychology, 13(4), 333–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2018.1437466   ... View more

The Introduction to Psychology course is the hardest course to teach because we do not have expertise in the vast majority of the material. When you teach Intro Psych for the very first time, you get used to saying, “I don’t know.” As the years have rolled by, I’ve accepted that “I don’t know” is just part of my Intro Psych teaching lexicon. For me, however, it’s not the not knowing that’s problematic. It’s all of the information that I thought I knew, but, alas, did not. Finding out that I’ve gotten something wrong makes me wish I could contact all of my previous students and say, “Hey! Remember that thing I told you about? No, you don’t remember? Well, anyway, it turns out I was wrong. Here’s the right information. Or at least here’s the right information as we know it today.” Okay, maybe it’s best that I can’t contact my previous students. In some cases, the scientific research has given us updated information. For example, research published a week ago in Nature reveals that the motor cortex is not all about motor control (Gordon et al., 2023). There are pockets of neurons in between the motor control sections of the motor cortex that connect with other parts of the body. “As a result, the act of, say, reaching for a cup of coffee can directly influence blood pressure and heart rate. And the movement is seamlessly integrated into brain systems involved in planning, goals and emotion” (Hamilton, 2023). This is a beautiful example of the first of APA’s overarching themes for Intro Psych: “Psychological science relies on empirical evidence and adapts as new data develop” (Halonen et al., 2022) In some cases what I got wrong was me just not understanding. For example, if you used to teach that the cat running to the sound of the can opener was classical conditioning, you can identify with what I’m saying. (See this 2016 blog post for the explanation as to why this is not classical conditioning, but operant conditioning.) While I don’t have any suggestions on how we can speed up science, I do have some suggestions on how we can mitigate how much stuff we don’t understand, and, thus, mis-teach to our students. Here are some excellent books that will expand your Intro Psych knowledge. Most are written by experts in the field. Others were written by people who got deeply interested in the topic. If you have books that you have found useful for expanding your Intro Psych knowledge, please add them to the comments. Thanks! Neuroscience The tale of the dueling neurosurgeons: The history of the human brain as revealed by true stories of trauma, madness, and recovery written by Sam Kean Incognito: The secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman Livewired: The inside story of the ever-changing brain by David Eagleman Sensation and Perception An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms us by Ed Yong Perception: How our bodies shape our minds by Dennis Proffitt and Drake Baer Consciousness Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams by Matthew Walker Buzzed: The straight facts about the most used and abused drugs from alcohol to ecstasy, 3e by, Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, and Wilkie Wilson Development Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long and well you live by Becca Levy The gardener and the carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children by Alison Gopnik Memory The memory illusion: Remembering, forgetting, and the science of false memory by Julia Shaw Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything by Joshua Foer Cognition Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman The undoing project: A friendship that changed our minds by Michael Lewis Emotion Aroused: The history of hormones and how they control just about everything by Randi Hutter Epstein Why zebras don’t get ulcers: the acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping, 3e by Robert M. Sapolsky Stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert Social Aggression and violence: A social psychological perspective by Brad J. Bushman Kitty Genovese: The murder, the bystanders, and the crime that changed America by Kevin Cook Personality Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking by Susan Cain   References Gordon, E. M., Chauvin, R. J., Van, A. N., Rajesh, A., Nielsen, A., Newbold, D. J., Lynch, C. J., Seider, N. A., Krimmel, S. R., Scheidter, K. M., Monk, J., Miller, R. L., Metoki, A., Montez, D. F., Zheng, A., Elbau, I., Madison, T., Nishino, T., Myers, M. J., … Dosenbach, N. U. F. (2023). A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2 Halonen, J., Thompson, J. L. W., Whitlock, K. H., Landrum, R. E., & Frantz, S. (2022). Measuring meaningful learning in Introductory Psychology: The IPI student learning outcomes. In R. A. R. Gurung & G. Neufeld (Eds.), Transforming Introductory Psychology: Expert advice on teacher training, course design, and student success (pp. 57–80). American Psychological Association. Hamilton, J. (2023, April 20). An overlooked brain system helps you grab a coffee—And plan your next cup. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/20/1171004199/an-overlooked-brain-system-helps-you-grab-a-coffee-and-plan-your-next-cup         ... 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

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