Do your students know what makes them happy? They probably think they do, and much what they think is probably wrong. Professor Gilbert will discuss the science of happiness, and tell you about some findings that will surprise your students – and maybe you as well! WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

Dr. Kelly Goedert and Dr. Susan Nolan will describe how the use of statistics in psychological science is changing as the field undergoes an open-science revolution. They will highlight ways to update your undergraduate statistics course that center on an ethical approach to analyzing, interpreting, and reporting data, and will offer engaging examples and activities you can use in your classroom. WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us for the Macmillan's Psychology Speaker Series!  At Macmillan Learning, our psychology community includes committed teachers, researchers, and authors. Among them are some exceptionally compelling advocates for how psychological science can help us understand our contemporary lives. Join us for this timely, idea-rich series of talks from some of the most effective voices in psychology education today, as they share their thoughts on teaching, learning, and living in these unsettling times. You can register for one or all of the following webinars: October 8 - Human Behavior Amidst the COVID Crisis: Helping and Hurting? with David Myers - 1:00 PM EST: VIEW THE RECORDING David Myers (Hope College), longtime author of our bestselling intro psych resources, offers his insights on the human element of this crisis--our need to belong, why we may be too much, or too little, afraid, and how shared threats affect social behavior. October 21 - The APA Introductory Psychology Initiative Outcomes: What You Need to Know with Jane Halonen- 1:00 PM EST: VIEW THE RECORDING APA has a new Introductory Psychology Initiative that provides recommendations for teaching the intro psych course, training teachers, and assessing student learning. In this webinar, Jane Halonen (University of West Florida) will discuss the Initiative's recommendations regarding student learning outcomes and assessment strategies to improve the quality of the introductory psychology experience. November 5 - Abnormal Psychology in the Era of COVID-19 with Ron & Jon Comer- 1:00 PM EST Join Ronald J. Comer (Princeton University) and Jonathan S. Comer (Florida International University), the renowned best-selling authors of Abnormal Psychology and Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, as they review the rapidly growing body of research on how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the state of mental health and its treatment. November 12 - Making a Smooth Transition to Online Assessment with Scott Cohn- 1:00 PM EST Looking for simple solutions? Professor Scott Cohn (Western Colorado University) will demonstrate tips and techniques for creating a positive online assessment experience for students. Resource options will be compared with specific examples from his Introductory Psychology course. November 19 - A Hidden Strength in the Psychology Classroom with Debra Roberts - 2:00 PM EST Debra Roberts (Howard University), lead supplements author of My Psychology, draws on her years of teaching and research to share strategies for talking about diversity in psychology classes.   Register today to save your seat! REGISTER HERE *NOTE: You must follow this link to register.  ... View more

I recently read Michele Harper’s memoir, The Beauty in Breaking, about her experience as an emergency room physician. In one chapter, she writes about people coming to the ER who have so much more broken in their lives than, say, their arm. With some gentle probing, Harper may learn that the cause of the broken arm is the boyfriend sitting in the waiting area. She writes: [W]hat's even worse is when I ask the question, and the patient declines assistance. Their doing so shouldn't feel like a personal affront, but for an instant, it can. Of course, if a patient declines help, that has nothing to do with me personally. Clearly, I'll go home to my life and not be beaten just the same. Perhaps what bothers me most is the raw realization that I care more deeply for the welfare of another human being than he cares for himself, and that that human being will leave my care to suffer more needless violence. While Harper is speaking of physical danger, this section resonated with me as an educator. A student may come to me because of a poor grade on an assignment. With some gentle probing, I may learn that the student has an abusive boyfriend, has three part-time jobs, is a single parent to an infant and a toddler, is battling addiction/anxiety/depression—or some combination of all of these. When these are the cause, and my offers of help—such as a referral to our college counseling center—are declined, I feel sadness, certainly, but it doesn’t affect me as deeply as it seems to affect Harper, most likely because our roles are different. These are students who I believe value their education—they care about their education—but there are significant barriers in them achieving their educational goals. And my ability to help them navigate life’s choppy waters is limited.   Major life circumstance barriers aside, there are times that I do find myself with a similar raw realization—that I care more deeply for a student’s education than they care for it themselves. I feel this most acutely with students who seem to have none of those life circumstance barriers, but who see education as something to be slogged through with minimal effort, not as something worthwhile in its own right—they seem to want the degree without the learning that it represents. In some cases, they don’t even seem to particular want the degree; they’re in college because of someone else’s expectations. It’s difficult to write supportive and constructive comments on the assignments of such students when I know that the comments will likely go unread—or if read, unheeded. I was probably in the first year of my first full-time teaching job in the mid-1990s when one of our counselors spoke at a faculty meeting. She said, to paraphrase, “I know all of you mean well when you give students 3rd, 4th, and 5th chances, but you are not doing your students any favors. Students need to at least meet you halfway.” And then she said, “Students have a right to fail.” As a young faculty member, that was mind-blowing. I could deliver material that was important and relevant. I could present it in the most compelling way. I could construct meaningful assessments of their learning. I could not, however, do the learning. My students were the only ones who could do that. Twenty-five years later, that is still true. I’ve been teaching at the same college long enough to have students come back for a round two. They’ll say, “I took your class 7 years ago, and I didn’t do very well.” They mean that they failed. “I wasn’t ready to go to college then, but I am now.” And they are. Invariably, they do much better than they did the first time. I see students with those significant life barriers again—they got away from the abusive boyfriend, they have a better-paying job, their children are older and more independent, their mental health is better. When a student doesn’t do as well in my course as I believe they can, I cannot let myself think that I care more deeply about their education than they do. Instead, I have to think, “I look forward to seeing you again.” ... View more

In 2017, I wrote a blog post about the federal law that mandates that at every institution of higher education in the United States that receives federal funding that students spend a minimum of two hours outside of class working on the course for every hour in class—or equivalent for online/hybrid courses. For example, if at your institution a fully face-to-face course meets 3 hours a week, students should be spending an average of 6 hours each week working on that course for a total of 9 hours. If that same course is offered online, all 9 hours of work would happen outside the classroom. The challenge for faculty is calculating how much work is in their course. In that same blog post, I wrote about the Course Workload Estimator created by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University. The Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University adapted the code and created a new and improved estimator: Workload Estimator 2.0/Enhanced Course Workload Estimator. Below is an assignment designed to get students to review the syllabus and think about the course from a broader perspective through the use of this Estimator. I encourage you to use the Estimator yourself to estimate the workload in your course before asking students to do it.   Assignment instructions Purpose When taking a road trip, it is a good idea to zoom out on the map to see where you are going and how you are going to get there. Having the big picture makes it less likely that you will encounter unexpected turns along the way. Zooming out allows you to better plan your trip. Where are you going to spend the night? What attractions are you going to stop at? The purpose of this assignment is to help you zoom out on our course, see what you’ll be doing this term, and create a road map for how you’re going to get to the end. Task Visit the Course Workload Estimator 2.0. Use your syllabus and textbook to determine what values to enter into the Estimator. [Note to instructor: Include any information that cannot be found in your syllabus here. For example, “For each discussion post, you are expected to write a minimum of 350 words.”] Take a screenshot of your completed Estimator, and paste it into a document. Directly above your screenshot, please write a paragraph describing when during the week you plan on working on this course. For example, if the estimate for how much time you will need to work on this course outside of class—independently—is 6 hours, you may decide that you will work on the class one hour a day Monday through Saturday. Criteria This assignment is worth 10 points. Eight points will be assigned for accurate completion of the Estimator—one point for each section. Two points will be assigned for a weekly work plan that matches the independent hours calculated by the Estimator. ... View more

Because of the pandemic the Association for Psychological Science (APS) canceled their 2020 convention. In its place, they invited all of their poster presenters to upload their posters to the “APS Virtual Poster Showcase” which runs June 1, 2020 through September 1, 2020. If you’re teaching Intro Psych this summer, ask your students to register. Registration is free. This is an amazing opportunity for students to see current psychological research (hundreds of posters!) and, if they’d like, ask the researchers about their studies. While I have framed this activity as an online discussion forum, this can be adapted for discussion in a synchronous class or as a stand-alone assignment. Here are some discussion forum questions that would be appropriate for the Intro Psych development chapter. Amend the topic for other chapters. ***** There are several ways psychological scientists share their research. They will, for example, publish their research in peer-reviewed journals—journals where others who are doing similar research will review articles that have been submitted for publication, and offer critiques that will make the article better. Psychological scientists also present their research at conferences. In some cases, they’ll stand in front of an audience (just like your I do when I teach face-to-face) and talk about their research. In other cases, they’ll print a summary of their research on a big poster (something like 3 feet x 4 feet) and then post that on a bulletin board in a big hall with 50 to 100 other researchers and their posters. A poster session will typically last an hour. Conference attendees can visit the hall, read the posters, and ask each researcher questions about their studies. While we won’t be able to go to a psychology conference during this class, one conference’s research posters are coming to us. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has asked the psychological scientists who had their posters accepted for presentation at this year’s APS conference to make their posters available online. Visit this webpage, and register for free for the Association for Psychological Science’s Virtual Poster Showcase. Once you’re registered, visit the posters. In the left navigation menu, click on “Virtual Posters,” and select “Cross-Cutting Theme Posters—Risk and Resilience During Emerging Adulthood.” Choose a poster title, and read the abstract—a short summary of the research. In your initial post, please address the following:   What is the title of the poster you’ve chosen? Who are the researchers? What college or university are they from? In 50+ words, why did you choose this particular poster? After viewing or downloading the poster, quote a sentence or two from the poster that stands out to you. In 50+ words, explain why you chose this quote. Lastly, after having read this research poster, in 50+ words, please share what else you would like to know about this topic. Please respond to the initial posts of two classmates. In each of your responses, use at least one of these types of comments to reply to the initial post’s answer to #3 and to #4. For example, in response to their quote, you may choose a compliment, and in response to what else they’d like to know about the topic with a question of your own. A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."        ... View more

In the FAQ section of my syllabus, I write: The general rule is for every hour you spend in class, you need to spend two hours outside of class. In a face-to-face class, you're in class about 5 hours per week*, so you should spend 10 hours outside of class working on this course. That's also why three 5-credit classes is considered full-time. If you are taking three 5-credit classes, you'd be spending about 45 hours a week, both in and out of class, working on those courses.** As I was writing this post I wondered about the origin of this general rule. It turns out that it is U.S. federal law that applies to any institution that doles out federal financial aid. I have no idea how I’ve managed to make it this long in higher education without knowing that this “general rule” is federal law. In any case, I know now and have changed my syllabus. “The general rule (and the federal law minimum) says for every hour you spend in class…” This is the federal government’s definition of a Carnegie unit, the credits that our courses are worth. Quoting “34 CFR 600.2 of the final regulations,” a Carnegie unit is: An amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that is an institutionally established equivalency that reasonably approximates not less than: One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution, including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours. This U.S. government document will tell you all you could possibly want to know about Carnegie units. That document also makes clear that each institution of higher learning can divide up those hours per week as they see fit. My 5-credit online class, for example, has 15 hours of work per week that is all outside of class time since the concept of “class time” does not exist in asynchronous courses. Additionally, the 2 hours out for every hour in is the minimum standard. If colleges and universities so desire, they can set a higher standard, say, 3 hours outside for every hour in. Some colleges and universities make their expectations clear on their websites, such as Stanford, Northwestern, and Cal Poly -- all of whom, incidentally, go with the minimum 2 to 1 ratio. Does your class, each week, have 2 hours of work outside of class for every hour in? How do you know? Elizabeth Barre and Justin Esarey at the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University created a pretty cool tool, the Course Workload Estimator. Put in what and how much your students should be reading, what and how much your students should be writing, how much time your students should be studying for exams, and how much time students should be spending on any other assignments, then look at the estimated workload – how much time students should be working on your course each week. The website makes it clear that this is an estimator. You would be hard-pressed to find two students who have identical reading rates, identical writing rates, and identical ideas on how they should study. This is a good place for you to plug the study techniques from the LearningScientists.org website. "The course is designed with the expectation that you will spend <x number> of hours studying for each exam. The more efficient and effective your study techniques, the more you will learn in that finite number of hours. Also, put away your phone while you are studying. You lose a lot of precious study time when you are frequently switching between tasks, between your studying and your phone." [This blog post describes a classroom demonstration that illustrates how much time is lost when we switch back and forth between tasks if you'd like to hammer this point home.] On the Course Workload Estimator website, scroll down for the rationale and research that went into creating this tool. Their research points out some gaping holes in our knowledge. If you're looking to start a new research program in the scholarship of teaching and learning arena, their lit review is worth checking out.  Using the Course Workload Estimator, this is how my Intro Psych course breaks down. I added up the total number of pages I’ve assigned students to read and divided that number by 11 for the number of weeks in the term. My students are reading a textbook with many new concepts. I want my students to not just survey or understand the material; I want them to engage with the material, “[r]eading while also working problems, drawing inferences, questioning, and evaluating.” For writing assignments, I sampled what some of my better-performing students submitted last term, and on average, they wrote 27 pages of single-spaced text over the course of the term. I give my students application essay questions to answer, and that sounds the most like writing an “argument,” “[e]ssays that require critical engagement with content and detailed planning, but no outside research.” Students can revise whichever responses they would like, but it is not required ("minimal drafting"). Since students’ engagement while reading the text is part of their writing assignments, I manually adjusted the “hours per written page” to 2 hours. That’s about 30 minutes per essay question. Of course that’s an average. Questions that students find easier will require much less time than questions students find more difficult.   I have a couple other assignments that should take about 2 hours total between them, so I entered 1 hour per assignment. The estimated workload per the Course Workload Estimator? For my class that meets about 5 hours in class each week, students should dedicate about 10.69 hours to this course outside of class each week. To be clearer with my students about my expectations, I just added the image below to my course FAQ along with this text: About half of your out-of-class time will be spent reading the textbook and thinking about what you are reading (estimated at 5 pages per hour, that's about 5.5 hours per week). The other half of your out-of-class time will be spent responding to the write-to-learn assignment questions (estimated at about 30 minutes per question, that's about 5 hours per week) where each completed assignment, minus the text of the questions themselves, will average out to be approximately 3 single-spaced pages.    ... View more