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

We know that when students have a growth mindset they tend to perform better in school (Yeager & Dweck, 2020). Do what instructors communicate about mindset matter? Here’s an activity that will give students some practice in experimental design while also introducing students to the concepts of fixed and growth mindset and perhaps even inoculating them against instructors who convey a fixed mindset. For background for yourself, read Katherine Muenks and colleagues’ Journal of Experimental Psychology article (2020). The activities below will replicate their study designs. After explaining to students the difference between a growth and fixed mindset, ask students if they have ever had an instructor who said something in class or wrote something in the syllabus that conveyed which mindset the instructor held. For example, an instructor with a growth mindset might say, “This course is designed to help you improve your writing skills.” An instructor with fixed mindset might say, “Either you have the skills to succeed in this course or you don’t.” As students share examples that they have heard, write them down where students can see them. Ask students if they think that these instructor statements could affect students. If so, how? Perhaps these statements could affect how much they feel like they belong in the course, or how interested students are in the course, or even how well students do in the course. Write down what students generate. Point out to students that they just generated two hypotheses. 1. If students hear an instructor with a growth mindset, then they are more likely to feel like they belong (or/and whatever other dependent variables students suggested).  2. If students hear an instructor with a fixed mindset, then they are less likely to feel like they belong (or/and whatever other dependent variables students suggested). Point out to students that the “if” part of the hypotheses gives us the independent variable (instructor mindset). Suggest that the experiment they will design has three levels to the independent variable: growth mindset, fixed mindset, and a control condition of no mindset. The “then” part of the hypotheses gives us the dependent variables, such as feelings of belonging and whatever other variables students think could be affected. Ask students to spend a couple minutes thinking about how they could design an experiment that would test both of these hypotheses. Then invite students to group up with a couple students near them to discuss. Lastly, give students an opportunity to share their designs. Remind students that conducting experiments is a creative endeavor and that there is no one right way to test hypotheses. In fact, the more ways researchers test hypotheses, the more confidence we have in the findings. Share with students how Muenks and her colleagues did the first of their studies. They created three videos of what was ostensibly a calculus professor talking about their syllabus on the first day of class. The same actor delivered the same information; it was all scripted. The only difference was that for the growth mindset condition, the script included growth mindset comments sprinkled throughout, such as “These assignments are designed to help you improve your skills throughout the semester.” For the fixed mindset condition, comments included things like, “In this course, you either know the concepts and have the skills, or you don’t.” The control condition excluded mindset comments. Volunteers were randomly assigned to watch one of the three videos. Muenks and colleagues assessed four dependent variables: vulnerability which was a combined measure of belongingness (five questions, including “How much would you feel that you ‘fit in’ during this class?”) and evaluative concerns (five questions, “How much would you worry that you might say the wrong thing in class?”), engagement (three items, including “I think I would be willing to put in extra effort if the professor asked me to”), interest in the course, and anticipated course performance. (See the second study they reported in their article for additional dependent variables, including feelings of being an imposter and intentions of dropping the course.) Volunteers reported that they would feel the most vulnerable with fixed mindset instructor, less vulnerable with the control instructor and the least vulnerable with the growth mindset instructor. Volunteers reported that they would feel the least engaged with either the fixed mindset or control instructor and the most engaged with the growth mindset instructor. Volunteers reported that they would be least interested in a course taught by the fixed mindset instructor, more interested in a course taught by the control instructor and the most interested in a course taught by the growth mindset instructor. Lastly, volunteers expected that they would perform the worst in a course taught by the fixed mindset instructor and best in the course taught by the growth mindset or control instructor. After sharing these results, explain that volunteers in this study reported what they think they would feel or do. For ethical reasons, we cannot randomly assign students to take actual courses taught by instructors who express these different views. However, if students were taking courses, researchers could do correlational research on student experiences. In studies three and four, Muenk and colleagues did correlational studies where students were asked immediately after attending class for their impressions of their instructor’s mindset along with a number of other measures, including feelings of belonging, evaluative concerns, imposter feelings, and affect. After the course was over, students reported how often they attended class, how often they thought about dropping the course, and how interested they were in the course discipline. Student grades in the course were gathered from university records. While there is a lot in the results to unpack, in sum, instructor mindset had an impact. For example, student grades were worst when students perceived their instructor as having a fixed mindset, but this result seems to have been driven by student feelings of being an imposter. End this activity with this question: Is it possible that being consciously aware of an (Leave it as a rhetorical question or challenge students to design the study as a take-home assignment.)   References Muenks, K., Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Green, D. J., Zirkel, S., Garcia, J. A., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Does my professor think my ability can change? Students’ perceptions of their STEM professors’ mindset beliefs predict their psychological vulnerability, engagement, and performance in class. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(11), 2119–2144. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000763 Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794   ... View more

[Updated May 8, 2022: David Myers wrote a blog post in 2020 where he identified economist Paul Krugman's Arguing with Zombies book as inspiration for Myers' own psychology zombie ideas. I was aware of neither Krugman's book or Myers' blog post when I read the Science article that was my inspiration for this zombie idea post. Mea culpa!] In the teaching of psychology world, we talk a lot about myths that need to be dispelled. Scott Lilienfeld filled a book with 50 of them (2010). For example, we only use 10% of our brain. Um, no. We use all of it. When we put that up on a slide and tell students that’s a myth, we may be inadvertently reinforcing it, not dispelling it. When we talk about it, it is not the first time students are hearing it. (That’s why it’s a myth.) Nor will it be the last time. If everyone keeps saying it—even us, even though we say “it’s wrong!”—it must be true. We also know that source amnesia doesn’t help matters. Students may remember that they’ve heard this 10% thing before, but forget that they heard it in our classes where we said, “it’s wrong!” Instead, some researchers make a compelling argument for not talking about myths at all, and instead just talk about the truth (Schwarz et al., 2016) . For example, rather than talk about the 10% myth, we can instead talk about how we use 100% of our brain—and to drive the point home, how removing 90% of our brain would result in, well, catastrophic failure. For some myths, it is difficult to imagine how we could focus on the truth without tackling the myth head on. Here is one. Exercise provides many benefits, including improved sleep and reduced stress. Weight loss, however, is not one of the benefits. Exercise can help us keep from gaining weight and can influence where we store our fat, but it will not result in weight loss. Weight loss is mostly about diet—what and how much we eat (Gibbons, 2022). We can keep listing the benefits of exercise and excluding weight loss, but the latter is so engraved in our consciousness, people will assume it’s one of the benefits. John Speakman, an evolutionary physiologist, calls our collective belief that the key to weight loss is exercise is a zombie idea (Gibbons, 2022, article is freely available). Zombie idea. In psychology, I propose that we stop calling psychological myths “myths.” Let’s call them zombie ideas. It’s much better marketing. In fact, let’s up its stature with capitalization: Zombie Ideas. For every slide you have that features a myth, add the title “Zombie Idea,” and—this is crucial—drop some gruesome zombie images on the slide. Let’s see if we can get a little classical conditioning working for us. Think of Zombie Idea, experience revulsion. This may be another Zombie Idea; all of you who teach Developmental Psychology will know this better than I do. Who has the highest metabolism? Pregnant women and teenagers do not have a higher metabolism than anyone else. Toddlers between the ages of 9 and 15 months are the ones with an off-the-chart metabolism. They “expend 50% more energy in a day than do adults, when adjusted for body size and fat…That’s likely to fuel their growing brain and, perhaps, developing immune systems” (Gibbons, 2022, p. 713). Zombie Ideas. Who’s in?   References Gibbons, A. (2022). The calorie counter. Science, 375(6582), 710–713. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ada1185 Lilienfeld, S. O. (Ed.). (2010). 50 great myths of popular psychology: Shattering widespread misconceptions about human behavior. Wiley-Blackwell. Schwarz, N., Newman, E., & Leach, W. (2016). Making the truth stick & the myths fade: Lessons from cognitive psychology. Behavioral Science & Policy, 2(1), 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1353/bsp.2016.0009   ... View more

Invite your students to register for this PsiChi Webinar with two Macmillan authors on getting the most out of your major in Psychology!  May 3, 2022 3:00pm EST PsiCh Webinar Getting Where You Want to Go in Psychology   with  Dr. Jane Halonen & Dr. Dana Dunn This webinar will focus on making smart choices about how to select priorities and invest your time to get the most out of your undergraduate major.  Register on the PsiChi website at:  https://www.psichi.org/page/ learningresources#.YmMiZefMI2y ... View more

Earlier this year, the journal Science “asked young scientists to imagine that they could go back in time and create a university course that would help scientists navigate the years 2020 to 2022” (da Silva et al., 2022, p. 1086). In the psychology category, one person suggested a course titled “Resilience in research: How to collaborate in a virtual world.” Another suggested “New academic hotspots: Opportunities and challenges.” While the focus of the Science article is on conducting research, I’ve been thinking more broadly about the role psychology could play for the general public. As a way to bring closure to an Intro Psych course, give students this prompt (adaptable for an online discussion): Imagine we could go back in time to early 2020, right before the pandemic. Imagine that we have access to the resources to create a high quality, 20-minute YouTube video that we know will go viral. It will be translated into dozens of languages and seen by millions of people around the world. What content from this course would you want everyone to know before we headed into the pandemic? Pick up to three topics and be ready to explain your rationale for each. If you are done thinking about the pandemic, use these instructions instead. The topics student generate may or may not be different. Imagine that we have access to the resources to create a high quality, 20-minute YouTube video that we know will go viral. It will be translated into dozens of languages and seen by millions of people around the world. What content from this course would you want everyone to know? Pick up to three topics and be ready to explain your rationale for each. After students have had a few minutes to choose their topics. Invite students to get into group of three to five. In your groups, share your topics and rationales. As a group, from the topics shared, choose your group’s top three topics. After groups have agreed on their topics, ask a group to share their topics and rationales. Ask the next group to share any different topics that they generated, and so on. Write the topics where everyone in the class can see them. Once all groups have had an opportunity to share their list of topics, invite individual students to share any topics that they feel are important but did not make the list. Ending the Intro Psych course with a discussion such as this provides students with an opportunity to reflect on what they learned as well as reflect on the value of psychology. And maybe—just maybe—one of our students will someday have the resources to create that high quality YouTube video that will go viral.   Reference da Silva, C. F. A., Uzonyi, A., Cusimano, J. M., Nilsson, T., Konstantinides, N., Oda, F., Al Harraq, A., Beardsley, F., Heim, A. B., Jiang, J., Buhle, E. L., & Burnette, K. (2022). A pandemic education. Science, 375(6585), 1086–1087. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo5791 ... View more

Remote work and online courses—both synchronous and asynchronous—existed before COVID, but COVID introduced many, many more people to this work/educational modality. And it looks like remote work and its educational counterpart is now a permanent part of our work/school landscape, whether employers or educational administrators like it or not. Workers and students had been striving for something that felt like work/life balance. For those who can work/go to school from home, removing commute time and having our dogs under our desks and our cats on our laps (or on our keyboards) suddenly made it all feel more humane. While it is not for everybody, for others it has been a God send. The Great Resignation has workers who are being forced back into offices to quit their jobs and seek employment with those who are happy to have quality employees who work from home. Career advisers have begun offering advice to people who are just starting in a new remote job (Dietz, 2022). As I read through the advice, there is a lot here for students as they start a new term with a new professor and new classmates. “Ask how your [instructor] prefers to communicate” As instructors, we should tell students how best to reach us—email, phone, office hours. When we have multiple options, providing some guidance on what modality to use for what can help. Short questions with (likely) short answers? Email may be easiest. Bigger issues that would benefit from discussion? Phone or office hours. If an instructor does not share their communication preferences with students, students should ask. “Ask for feedback sooner than later” In the first week of the term, students should ask for a short five- to ten-minute meeting with their instructor to discuss instructor expectations. Even if no assignments have been scored yet, students can get an idea of whether or not they are on track. For instructors who use an online booking service, such MS Bookings, YouCanBook.me, or Calendly, consider setting up a booking calendar with ten-minute meeting times for, say, the first two weeks of the term. Encourage students to make an appointment to meet with you as a quick, beginning-of-the-term check-in. “Schedule meetings with your coworkers” In an online class, it might be going a bit too far for students to ask a classmate for a phone call or Zoom meeting. However, if the class has a discussion board, students should take full advantage of it. Are there others in the class who have similar interests or concerns? A reply to those students—even if not required for points—can foster a feeling of connection. As instructors, we can build our discussions to encourage connection. For example, in my weekly discussions I have a section where students are asked to share their good news from the last week. I assure them it can be anything, even eating a candy bar is good news. Pretty quickly, we learn about each student’s favorite activities: gardening, cooking, reading, sports, cars, movies, television, video games. I’ve heard from students who share similar interests connecting in real life. “Send a quick ‘thanks’” When students receive help from their instructor or classmates, it is good practice to reply with a thank you. In my discussion instructions, I encourage students to thank anyone who helps them. We can also help students express thanks. When a student emails me with a question, I always end my reply with “Does that help?” Most students take the time to respond with a quick “Yes, thanks!” “Keep yourself sane with a routine” For all students, having a routine is essential. For students who are taking asynchronous online classes, having a routine is crucial. It is too easy to not think about online classes. Students should be encouraged to set aside time in their calendar to work on each of their online classes, and then guard that time, just as they would if it were a time when then needed to be in a classroom. By looking at what is due and when in each of their courses, students can create a weekly work plan. For my Intro Psych course, I provide a weekly work plan students can start with and then adjust as they need. If they’re able, they should create a space in their home where they go to study, even their bedroom floor will work. It just needs to be a place where going there tells their brain it is time to get to work. And turn off the phone. Lastly, students should take breaks. Set a timer and every 20 minutes or so, get up, stretch, step outside for a little fresh air. Then go back to it. “Be kind to yourself” For employees, this is about recognizing you’re the new kid, and there is a lot to learn about the job and the culture of the company. For students, this is about recognizing that each instructor has different expectations and different assignments with different requirements. The first few weeks of any course is about sorting it all out and finding a rhythm. For students who are taking a full load of courses, there will be a lot of sorting to do. Assure students that it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to say, “I can’t deal with this right now.” Take a longer break—take a brisk walk, visit a coffee shop, catch a movie.   As instructors, we know that the skills students develop or further develop in college will help them in their careers, whatever those careers may be. If that career involves working with others remotely, taking synchronous or asynchronous online courses can only be a benefit.   Reference Dietz, M. (2022, March 17). Everything you should do on the first day of a remote job. Lifehacker. https://lifehacker.com/everything-you-should-do-on-the-first-day-of-a-remote-j-1848666722   ... View more

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity and how our identity—whether it’s an accurate reflection reality—influences our behavior. Most recently I’ve been thinking about this after reading Jeff Holmes’ article in the Teaching of Psychology journal on students who have identified themselves as bad test-takers (Holmes, 2021). Holmes opens the article with this statement: “One of the best ways to be bad at something is to tell yourself you are bad at it” (p. 291). In Holmes’s study of 311 college students, a whopping 91% believed that students who otherwise know the course material can be bad test-takers with 56% of the students identifying themselves as bad test-takers. A third of the students said that someone else told them that they were bad test-takers. Importantly, those who identified as a bad test-taker were more likely to disagree with “I know how to study effectively.” Additionally, “Students who see themselves as bad test-takers…tend to—relative to students who do not possess such an identity—have lower confidence in their broader academic abilities, expend less effort on cognitive activities, and feel entitled to positive academic outcomes regardless of performance” (p. 296). And, yes, those who identify as bad test-takers were also more likely to report test anxiety, even when other variables—such as overall academic performance and study skills confidence—were controlled for. I could retire early if I had a dollar for every time I had this conversation with a student: Student: “I studied hard for this test, and I still failed! I’m just a bad test-taker.” Me: “Tell me how you studied.” Student: “What do you mean?” Me: “When you sat down to study, tell me what you did.” Student: “I read the chapter, then I read it again, and again. Oh! And I highlighted stuff.” Me: “Tell me what you know about <concept covered on exam>.” Student: <awkward silence> “I don’t remember.” <More awkward silence> Since I’m a bad test-taker, can I do something for extra credit?” In Intro Psych, wherever you discuss attributions (e.g., social psych, abnormal, psychotherapy), consider using the bad test-taker attribution as an example. If a student does poorly on an exam and they say, “I’m a bad test-taker,” they are making an internal, stable, and global attribution. Internal: It’s a trait I have. Stable: It’s a trait that’s not going to change. Global: My bad test-taking applies regardless of the test. It is unlikely that a student who makes this attribution will do anything differently on the next test.   Now ask students to imagine a different attribution. After doing poorly on a test, the student says, “I didn’t know that material well enough.” This is an internal, unstable, specific attribution. Internal: The grade was because of something I did. Unstable: If I do things differently, I can get a different result. Specific: This is what happened on this specific test; that doesn’t say anything about the next test. This student has agency. “I’m going to try out some of the known-to-be-effective study strategies my instructor told me about.” Reiterate to students that in both examples, the result of the first test was the same; both students failed. But who is most likely to fail the second test, too? To make that second attribution—“I didn’t know the material well enough”—students have to have enough insight into their own knowledge or have to accept that their test score is a reasonably accurate reflection of their knowledge. When students read and reread chapters over and over and over again, the material begins to feel familiar. That familiarity can feel like knowledge. It’s not. It’s the illusion of knowledge. One of the many benefits of self-testing is that it keeps students from deluding themselves while they study. Unless they attribute their poor self-testing to being a bad test-taker. [Side note: If the student sees test-taking as a skill that can be learned (unstable attribution), then they may choose to work on upping their test-taking skills. A quick Google search of “test taking skills” produced a number of websites with a bullet-point list of strategies. The sites I saw all included some version of “be prepared.” What’s the best way to be prepared? Use solid study strategies to learn the material.]     References Holmes, J. D. (2021). The bad test-taker identity. Teaching of Psychology, 48(4), 293–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628320979884 ... View more

In 2015, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) added behavioral science questions to the test. If you haven’t read the MCAT’s overview of the Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior Section, it’s worth a look. Two-thirds of the questions from this section are expected to come from Intro Psych. They say that this “section emphasizes concepts that tomorrow’s doctors need to know in order to serve an increasingly diverse population and have a clear understanding of the impact of behavior on health.” As readers of this blog know, as an Intro Psych instructor deciding what should and should not be in the course, I keep my audience in mind. Many of our Intro Psych students will be pursuing careers in healthcare, and, for at least some of them, that means taking the MCAT. Some of us think about what we cover in our courses in terms of what we want students to remember years from now. What might the physicians of tomorrow remember from their Intro Psych course of today? I recently purchased this book written by physicians for physicians-to-be: Boland, R. J., Verduin, M. L., Ruiz, P., Shah, A., & Sadock, B. J. (Eds.). (2022). Kaplan & Sadock’s synopsis of psychiatry (12th ed.). Wolters Kluwer. The print edition of the book comes with free (pre-purchased, really) access to the ebook. All you need to do is enter the access code, give them your name, and pick the option that best describes your role. Here are my options: medical student, nursing student, resident, fellow, practitioner, nurse, nurse practitioner, program director, program coordinator, librarian. That’s it. Not even an “other” category. Since I had to pick something to continue the registration process, I decided to throw some love to my librarian colleagues. And where do I practice my librarianship they wonder? None is an option, but if I’m going to pretend to be a librarian, I’m okay being a librarian in the U.S. At least some of their data will be meaningful. In the chapter on anxiety disorders, they have a section on the neurobiology of these disorders with a subsection titled “Neuroimaging Studies.” For reasons that are unclear to me, within that subsection is a sub-subsection titled “Psychological Studies.” I’m guessing that this was an error, and that this sub-subsection was supposed to be a section at the same level as the neurobiology section. I logged into the ebook to see if they may have fixed it there. Nope. So, there you have it. Psychological studies are a type of neuroimaging. That section weirdness aside, I found their description of classical conditioning fascinating.   Behavioral scientists have helped to elucidate the psychology of fear and anxiety through both animal and human studies. A full discussion of the psychological research is well beyond the scope of this chapter, but most relevant to anxiety disorders are the work of Pavlov and later scientists on the nature of conditioning. In the classic studies, the scientist exposes an animal to an (sic) neutral stimulus, such as an auditory tone, and then presents the tone while introducing an aversive stimulus, such as an electric shock. With the repeated pairing of the two stimuli, the neutral stimulus becomes associated with the aversive one, to the point where it alone can elicit the same response even when removing the aversive stimulus. The result is that the animal has been conditioned or learned to fear the neutral stimuli. In behavioral science, the neutral stimulus is called the conditioned stimulus and the aversive one the unconditioned stimulus. If the scientist presents the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned one and repeats this often enough, the animal will no longer associate the two stimuli; this is called extinction. How long extinction learning takes will depend on the particular stimuli and the individual animal. It also can depend on context, and a different setting can change the response. Behavioral studies suggest that the animal does not forget the conditioning. Instead, it is now competing with a new memory. Under appropriate circumstances, the pairing, and associated fear response, can be reinstated. As humans are animals, they experience conditioning and extinction as well. The relevance to anxiety disorders, particularly phobias, should be obvious. Research in conditioning has gone well beyond this simplified description to identify and elaborate the many subtleties of conditioned learning. (Boland et al., 2022, p. 411). Some observations. First, behavioral science and behavioral scientists have replaced psychology and psychological scientists. I knew we were doomed when behavioral economics replaced cognitive psychology, but it still pains me. I know many of you rebranded your departments of psychology as departments of psychological science. Have you rebranded again to the department of behavioral science? And is it solely behavioral science because the cognitive research has gone to economics? Identity crisis, anyone? Second, evidently it is important for the psychiatrist-to-be who is reading this text to know the terms conditioned and unconditioned stimulus. The terms conditioned and unconditioned response, however, are not noteworthy. And that brings me back around to an earlier blog post. How important are any of these terms? Third, extinction gets a shout-out by name and spontaneous recovery gets a shout-out by description, sort of. This sentence is a little mysterious to me: “Under appropriate circumstances, the pairing, and associated fear response, can be reinstated.” Yes, if you present the tone and shock the rat again, the fear would be reinstated. I’m not sure if that circumstance is appropriate, however. In any case, I’m just not sure what they were getting at here. Four, even though the authors recognize that this is a “simplified description,” I would have loved to have seen generalization get a mention. Yes, your patient is afraid of the person who sexually assaulted them, but your patient is also going to show some fear of people who look like their attacker. Of course, we cannot assume that the authors, editors, and reviewers of this text are representative of all physicians, but it does give me something to think about. Is this what our Intro Psych students remember about classical conditioning years later? Is this what we want them to remember?    ... View more

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My Intro Psych students, on the whole, are able to design a pretty good study when given a hypothesis. They describe using a control group and one or more experimental groups. They describe holding everything constant except for the independent variable. They describe the use of one or more dependent variables. Where they most often falter is in applying the labels. For our non-psychology majors, how important is it that students be able to say what the independent variable is? Even for our psychology majors, the world won’t end if after Intro Psych they can’t yet apply the correct label to the independent variable. It not like we keep our psych majors from taking Research Methods if they missed the research methods questions on their first Intro Psych exam. By the end of Research Methods, they should have the differences between independent variable and dependent variable down solid, but it might even be possible to pass Methods without having a solid grasp of which is which. I bet a psych major could even earn a BA degree in psych without doing better than chance on identifying the independent variable and dependent variable. I’m nearing the end of revising an Intro Psych textbook. For the last 12 chapters, my brilliant wife has been my in-house editor. We’ve been together almost 25 years. She’s heard a lot of psychology during that time. Reading this textbook, she’s learned even more (as have I in writing it). Periodically, she will say, “Oh! That’s that thing where <description of concept>.” Last week, she perfectly described the tragedy of the commons applying it to something she had just read in a non-psychology source, but she couldn’t come up with the name “tragedy of the commons.” I confess that it took my brain a minute to dig through my mental files to come up with the term. For Intro Psych, I think of my neighbors as my audience. Many of my neighbors have bachelor’s degrees in something other than psychology. Looking at how many college students take Intro Psych, it’s likely that most of my neighbors took the course. As we all know, our writing and speaking has to be geared to our audience to be most effective. When I think about my Intro Psych audience, I think about my neighbors—people who will go into careers like healthcare, business, engineering, and social work. What do they need to know about psychology? This brings me to my terminology crisis. Which is more important? That my Intro Psych students/neighbors can design a decent experiment? Or that they can accurately label the independent variable and dependent variable? Is it more important they can identify a novel example of the tragedy of the commons? Or that they can accurately label the example as the tragedy of the commons? When I gave multiple choice tests, most of the questions were about accurately labeling. I didn’t do that because I gave deep thought to what my multiple choice questions should be testing. I did it because that’s how I was tested, that’s how my colleagues tested, and those were the bulk of the questions in the test bank. If everyone is testing for knowledge of terminology, then I must test for knowledge of terminology, too. (Is it more important that I recognize this as an example of going along with the group or that I can accurately label it “conformity”?) Here’s an example of testing for concept knowledge, rather than terminology knowledge. In a city, the roads are a shared resource. As individuals, we have a choice to drive (or take some other individualized transportation, such as a cab/Uber/Lyft) to work (adding to air pollution) or to take public transportation (not adding to air pollution). What does psychology predict that people are most likely to do? Drive (or take some other individualized transportation) without consideration for what is good for all of us. “If I drive, I won’t be adding much air pollution.”) Take public transportation because it is for the good of all of us. (“If I take the bus, I won’t be adding more air pollution.”) For those who can’t quite give up terminology altogether, tack this question on at the end. For ¼ point extra credit, what is the name of the concept that describes this? _________ Here’s another example. A researcher hypothesizes that students who take tests in hot rooms will score more poorly on the test. Which research design would be best for testing this hypothesis? Give students a test in a hot room and see how they score. Ask students if they would prefer to take a test in a hot room or a comfortable room. Put those who prefer a hot room in a hot room and those who prefer a comfortable room in a comfortable room. Give all students the same test and see how they score. Ask students if they would prefer to take a test in a hot room or a comfortable room. Put those who prefer a hot room in a hot room and those who prefer a comfortable room in a comfortable room. Give the hot room students a difficult test and the comfortable room students an easy test. See how they score. Randomly divide students into two groups. Put one group in a hot room and another group in a comfortable room. Give all students the same test and see how they score. Randomly divide students into two groups. Put one group in a hot room and another group in a comfortable room. Give the hot room students a difficult test and the comfortable room students an easy test. See how they score. For ¼ point extra credit, identify the independent variable in this example. ___________ For ¼ point extra credit, identify the dependent variable in this example. ___________ Currently, my Intro Psych students take open-note, open-book, take-at-home essay tests of a sort. In looking through my questions, for about half of them, I have an expectation that my students will be able to wrestle with the terminology and accurately apply it. My students aren’t expected to memorize the terms, but I do expect them to go from definition to application. Is it because it’s really necessary? Or is it out of my own convenience? For example, in one question in the learning chapter, I give students four examples, and ask students to identify the schedule of reinforcement. It’s much easier for me to score whether “fixed ratio” is correct, than it is to score “reinforcement after a set number of responses.” Although, in the end, what I really want is for a student to remember years later is something like, “I want to exercise more. I’m going to put a quarter in the jar for every 2,500 steps. I can only use jar money at the coffee shop.” If they don’t remember that this is a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule, I’m okay with that. If I’m okay with that for years later, it seems like I should be okay with it while they’re in the course. ... View more

I read an article in Nature about how academics who work with graduate students could do a better job preparing grad students for non-academic careers (Forrester, 2022). It reminded me of when I was in grad school 30 years ago. (Yes, I walked through the snow uphill to get to campus–and to get home.) While I don’t remember anyone explicitly telling me that choosing/getting/accepting an academic job that primarily involved teaching would mark me a failure in the eyes of the program, I implicitly got the message. I remember one grad student who got a job in an applied field, and her work was discussed as a curiosity, not as a legitimate option for life after grad school. If we take the discussion down one more level, we can talk about the expectations undergraduate psychology programs put on bachelor’s students to go to grad school. If we’re not actively talking about career paths outside of grad school, we’re implicitly telling students they’re a failure if they don’t go the grad school route. Take a look at APA’s Center for Workforce Studies’ Careers in Psychology page to see how many people with which degrees and at what career stage are working in each career field. In the word cloud, click on a career field to get the estimated number of people working in the field and a percentage of this segment of the workforce. While the Nature article was written with an engineering, physical, and earth science grad faculty audience in mind, the advice works for psychology, too. And for both grad students and undergraduates. “Voice your support for alternative paths,” and “[g]ive students time to explore.” Let’s talk with our psych undergrad and grad students about psychology’s career path possibilities. If we feel we are not well-versed in the topic, then let’s make it an assignment. Turn students loose to do their own research with a report back to the class. Be prepared to learn a lot! As advisors, let’s “[a]sk students about their career interests and goals,” and “[d]evise a mentoring plan to help [our] students.” If students are interested in careers that we know nothing about, then it’s time to tap our networks. Let’s connect our students with others with similar degrees who are working in the fields they’re interested in. Have a psych major who is interested in going into business or healthcare? Or a grad student who is interested in helping golfers avoid the yips? If you don’t know where to start, I recommend posting to the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) Facebook group. If you’re not on Facebook, try Twitter; STP’s Twitter name is @TeachPsych. Join the STP PsychTeacher email listserv and ask for networking help there. You may also want to contact the leadership of one or more of the 54 APA divisions that most closely matches your student’s interest. Don’t overlook your own department’s alumni. What are your former students doing now? If career and career interests match, are they willing to have a conversation with your current students? Mentoring isn’t always about having the answers. Sometimes it’s about helping finding someone who does.   Reference Forrester, N. (2022). How lab leaders can support students’ non-academic career plans. Nature, 601(7894), 655–657. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00162-y   ... View more

Students should not only be taught the core concepts of introductory psychology, but also how those ideas play out in their daily lives and the world around them. In a seven-part video series produced exclusively for Macmillan Learning, Garth Neufeld shows how APA’s Introductory Psychology Initiative (IPI) offers a guided structure for doing just that. As Professor Neufeld (Cascadia College) explains, APA’s IPI’s themes help students understand the trends and patterns of human thoughts and behaviors, which are concepts they can then apply to their current and future studies, and to their lives beyond the classroom. Furthermore, APA IPI themes allow instructors to organize course goals, learning, and assessments around these key topics. Watch the full series with a community account. ... View more

Available exclusively in Achieve starting Fall 2022, this extraordinary new collection features over 120 in-demand clips from high-quality sources—classic and contemporary— as well as engaging original content. It’s a remarkably diverse and relevant resource, developed in partnership with a faculty and student advisory board, and encompassing such captivating topics as COVID and stress, Alzheimer’s, loneliness & the brain, Black Lives Matter/racial trauma & racial bias, online dating, and topics related to transgender youth. Videos are closed-captioned with warnings for sensitive content, and each clip includes assignable assessments, with results reporting into the Achieve gradebook. You can learn more and view the full Table of Contents here or with the attached file. ... View more

In the October 1, 2021 issue of Science, Jennifer S. Chen shares with readers her experience switching from one research direction to another mid-graduate career. The four big lessons she learned from this experience apply to, well, life. But since this is a blog about teaching, let’s talk teaching. “It’s OK to fail.” In the context of doing research, failure is part of the game. Although, if a study didn’t go as I expected I don’t know that I thought of it as failure. In any case, I certainly don’t think that way now. Regardless of the results, we always know more after the completion of a study than we did before. Even if I managed to screw up the procedure in some way, I now know to be more careful next time. That’s progress. In teaching, how often have I tried something new—assignment, discussion, activity—only to have it completely bomb? Raise your hand if you have ever passed out a test only to discover that the answers were copied onto the last page. Those instructors who are so fearful of failure are too paralyzed to try anything new. Anyone else thinking of growth mindset? If we are going to get better—at teaching, at science, at life—we have to see failure as a learning opportunity, not as a comment on who we are as a teacher, a scientist, or a human being. I have worked with faculty going through the tenure process, and I have served on the committee that recommends faculty for tenure. I was not looking for perfect teaching. I was looking for instructors who were willing to take risks. If that risk didn’t work out, what did the instructor learn from it? What are they going to try next? “Value your transferable skills.” All of the time Chen spent working within her first research area was not wasted time. Instead, she learned skills, such as how to quickly read a research paper, that will serve her well, no matter her research area. The two biggest skills that I have learned through teaching that come immediately to mind are public speaking and translating science for a general audience. I am not saying, by any stretch of the imagination, that I am perfect at those, but I am sure a whole lot better than I was 30 years ago! While teaching a new course for the first time can be intimidating and we don’t feel like we know everything to be covered in the course, we have the basic skills: public speaking and science translation. I see these in all of you, too. When I attend conference sessions, those who spend a lot of their time teaching are, on the whole, much better speakers than those who don’t. And because we have to communicate (sometimes complex) psychological findings to novices, we get pretty good at translating psychological science to the general public. I would love to see more psychology instructors writing blogs, writing editorials, or hosting podcasts geared toward a general audience. Have you noticed that a lot of psychology instructors lead college and university teaching and learning centers? (See for example, Claudia Stanny at the University of West Florida, Elizabeth Yost Hammer at Xavier University of Louisiana, and Regan A. R. Gurung at Oregon State University.)  Given our knowledge of psychological science and our ability to communicate those scientific findings, instructors of psychology are easy choices for departments that help others become better instructors. “Ask for help.” In Chen’s new research area, there was one component of her research that she didn’t know how to do. Rather than take weeks to learn how to do it on her own, she solicited the help of another lab who had the experience and the expertise to do it for her.   Teaching Intro Psych is hard. The word Intro is deceptive. “Introductions” to things should be easy. The Intro Psych course is not so much an “introduction” as it is “a tidal wave of information from every corner of the field.” But we don’t call it that because it exceeds the number of characters allowed by the course title field in our college catalogs. If you have a colleague who is an expert in sensation and perception, then ask them to present that content to your Intro Psych students. Take notes! Now you can lecture on it for the next year or two. Then invite your colleague to do it again. Take notes on what’s changed, and you’re good to go for another year or two. If you are having a tough time with a particular concept, ask. If you don’t work with someone who knows, put it out to the teaching of psychology community. At the time of this writing, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook group has over 16,000 members. Someone will know the answer to your question. “Share your story.” When Chen started talking about her experiences with failed research studies and switching research areas, she discovered others who had had the same experiences. Talking with our teaching colleagues about our teaching failures helps us normalize the experience. This is especially important for our colleagues who are relatively new to teaching. Trying and failing are all part of the profession.   Reference Chen, J. S. (2021). Embracing a change. Science, 374(6563), 114 ... View more