GSTA Blog

By: Natasha Segool, Ph.D., Margaret Tarampi, Ph.D., Beth Richards, M.F.A., Jessica Nicklin, Ph.D., University of Hartford

Writing and effective communication are hard! As professors and graduate students in psychology, we engage in a very specialized community that disseminates our scientific knowledge through peer-reviewed journal articles, books, scholarly blogs, and other professional products. Indeed, as graduate students we immerse ourselves in dissecting scientific literature and eventually, through many iterations and by receiving critical feedback on our drafts, we produce a scholarly dissertation as the hallmark of our expertise on a specialized topic. This is often a grueling, years-long learning process that is undoubtedly influenced by our earlier writing experiences in both college and the K-12 educational system. Yet, as we become expert writers, it can be hard to remember how daunting and anxiety-provoking writing can be for undergraduate college students. Effectively teaching our students to write skillfully is even harder—we discuss in this blog post two promising strategies for supporting psychology-majors’ writing experiences.

Entering college, few high school students are well-prepared for first-year writing courses that are designed to provide general, non-disciplinary, academic writing instruction (Aull, 2015). In 12th grade, just 27% of high school students score at or above the “proficiency” standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing assessment, which assesses students’ ability to persuade, explain, or convey experiences to a specific audience (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2011). Further, just what makes a “good writer” is often unclear to students and instructors, especially disciplinary instructors, and each need clear (and shared) descriptions of the expected organization, skills, language, and argumentation strategies expected in academic discourse. As a result, students often do not know what type of writing is expected of them or how to translate their current skills into the murkily-framed expectations of collegiate instructors (Aull, 2015).

Recognizing that writing is an essential learning outcome for psychology majors, we describe a program evaluation of specially designed courses providing writing instruction for Psychology majors. We examined instruction through curriculum-based Learning Communities (LC) and major-specific cohorts of first-year psychology majors in comparison to traditional non-major-specific instruction through our University’s Academic Writing general education program. Our hope was that LC and Cohort courses would address writing skill deficits among students, enhance retention and academic success, and enhance community among Psychology majors. Our results suggest promising relational and learning effects.

Psychology-Writing Partnership

Learning communities (LCs) involve groups of students sharing similar academic goals, collaborating on coursework, or focusing on learning distinct skills (Kern & Kingsbury, 2019). Curriculum-based LCs link two or more courses serving the same group of students (Zrull, Rocheleau, Smith, & Bergman, 2012). They are implemented on college campuses and in universities to build stronger relationships between students, increase student engagement, and enhance academic achievement.  Research supports numerous benefits of LCs including higher GPAs and university retention (Baker & Pomerantz, 2001; Bonet & Walters, 2016; Kern & Kingsbury, 2019). Other significant benefits include improved sense of belonging in the major (Masika & Jones, 2015), which has been found to be associated with reduced dropout (O’Keefe, 2013). Furthermore, Buch and Spaulding (2008) found that in a longitudinal study of a psychology LC, students had greater retention, academic progress, academic involvement, and satisfaction within their major. 

The Department of Psychology at our mid-sized university partnered with the Academic Writing program to pilot two new approaches to instruction in comparison to traditional instruction: (1) cohorting psychology-majors in a typical writing course to create a major-specific community within a non-major course and (2) developing a learning community that paired a 200-level Psychology course with a writing course to create a major-specific LC emphasizing “writing for psychology.” The cohort writing course, just like the traditional non-major-specific course, emphasized the practices of close readings of diverse texts, critical thinking, and rhetorical writing as a multistep process. In the LC, a few writing assignments were planned across both courses, providing students greater instruction in writing for the psychology discipline. Over a period of five years, we surveyed 128 students at the end of their writing course using questionnaires to assess their experiences in the different classes. 

We found that students reported significant positive effects of both the LC and the major cohort courses. In comparison to students in the traditional general education writing classes, students in the LC reported greater overall academic writing and psychology writing skills, greater confidence in their psychology writing skills, and greater connectedness with their peers. Interestingly, compared to the major-cohort students, the LC students reported significantly greater overall academic writing and psychology writing skills, and greater connectedness, suggesting that the LC students demonstrated greater positive learning and relational outcomes. It is possible that the LC benefited from the scaffolding of concepts across courses. The Cohort students reported some benefits compared to students in the traditional classes, including greater psychology writing skills, greater commitment to their major, and fewer plans to change their major. Interestingly, we found indirect benefits of greater commitment to their major and lower major turnover intent among the Cohort, but not the LC, and the LC students reported lower University commitment than students in the Cohort. It is possible this could be due to the greater choice students in the Cohort had in selecting their Psychology courses (versus taking the pre-selected psychology Learning Community course).

Ultimately, in education, and especially in this time of tight higher-education budgets, we must look for promising pedagogical interventions that are low-cost yet have the potential to make a meaningful impact on students. This intervention, which was cost-neutral for students, and low-cost for the university ($400 in instructor professional development) positively impacted not only student perceptions of learning and skill development but also relational outcomes and major commitment. We encourage graduate students to teach within Learning Communities if you have the opportunity – or to advocate for the development of first-year Learning Communities – especially within the area of writing. Not only will your students benefit, but we hope that working closely with an expert writing instructor will benefit your own teaching.

References 

Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: A corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. Palgrave.

Baker, S., & Pomerantz, N. (2000). Impact of earning communities on retention at a metropolitan university. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 2(2), 115–126. doi: 10.2190/62p5-cq2u-ntuw-dm1c

Bonet, G., & Walters, B. R. (2016). High impact practices: Student engagement and retention. TheCollege Student, 15, 224-235.

Buch, K., & Spaulding, S. (2008). A longitudinal assessment of an initial cohort in a psychology learning community. Teaching of Psychology, 35, 189-193. doi:10.1080/00986280802181582

Kern, B., & Kingsbury, T. (2019). Curricular learning communities and retention. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 19(1). doi: 10.14434/josotl.v19i1.26779

Masika, R., & Jones, J. (2015). Building student belonging and engagement: insights into higher education students’ experiences of participating and learning together. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(2), 138–150. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1122585

O'Keefe, P. (2013). A sense of belonging: Improving student retention. College Student Journal, 47(4), 605–613. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1029294

U.S. Department of Education (2011). National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2011 Writing Assessment. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/writing_2011/ summary.aspx

Zrull, M. C., Rocheleau, C. A., Smith, M. C., & Bergman, S. M. (2012). Curriculum-based learning communities centered within a discipline. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2012(132), 19–29. doi: 10.1002/tl.20033

Authors' Bios

Natasha Segool is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Undergraduate Program in Psychology at the University of Hartford. Her scholarship focuses on teacher stress and student anxiety in educational settings.  Natasha is a dedicated teacher-scholar who is proud to train school psychologists to be skilled mental health providers. Natasha leads with a student-first perspective and diligently promotes student success.

Margaret Tarampi is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Hartford. Her Spatial Cognition and Physical Environments (SCaPE) Laboratory investigates the cognitive mechanisms that underlie space perception and spatial cognition in select populations including visually impaired individuals and spatial experts such as dancers and architects. She implements an interdisciplinary approach in her teaching by employing student-centered teaching methods that use content and approaches from other disciplines.

Beth Richards is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages and director of the First- and Second-Year Writing Programs. A former technical writer, her work at the University of Hartford focuses on helping students develop effective writing skills for their academic journey and for their future careers. She also works extensively with faculty in various disciplines, helping them more effectively integrate discipline-specific writing into their courses. She does not have pets, but she does have an adopted philodendron that is conspiring to take over her home office. 

Jessica Nicklin is the Associate Vice President for Student Success and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Hartford.  She is dedicated to providing innovative solutions for student success and retention. Her research interests include work-life management, positive psychology, and motivation in the workplace. Jessica is published in several prestigious outlets, including Psychological Bulletin, and is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Inaugural Schmidt Hunter Meta-Analysis Award.

By: The GSTA Steering Committee

This position statement and call to action was originally published on June 11, 2020 at https://bit.ly/GSTAstatement06112020. 

The GSTA stands in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and with fellow graduate students of color. The events of the past several weeks have, once again, highlighted how systemic racism and inequality have long permeated our lives. We call on our departments, institutions, and professional organizations to address these issues in the context of graduate student admissions, training, and mentorship. As graduate students, we must also address these issues in our circles of impact. Advocating for inclusion, equity, and anti-racism should be at the heart of our scholarship, our teaching, and our practice.

As graduate student teaching assistants and instructors of courses in psychology, we must recognize and acknowledge the ways that our own and our students’ experiences, prejudices, and biases shape our classrooms. If you are not familiar, we encourage you to seek out resources to educate yourself on the history of racism and injustice in and beyond higher education. It is not the job of your students or colleagues of color to educate others. For our colleagues of color and for those who are teaching students of color right now, we hope that you and your students are being supported in your actions and decisions inside and outside the classroom.

Looking ahead, we must find ways to show support for our students and colleagues through our actions as educators. We call on our fellow graduate student teaching assistants and instructors in psychology to:

• Decolonize your syllabi by including the work of scholars and psychologists from diverse identities and backgrounds.
• Adopt anti-racist and culturally responsive teaching and assessment practices.
• Create inclusive learning environments that celebrate diversity, do not tolerate discrimination, and embrace all voices and opinions.
• Discuss with students and colleagues how discrimination and inequity have shaped the field of psychology and the world around us.
• Engage with students and colleagues across disciplines in activism to create change in your classrooms, institutions, and communities.
• Above all, be compassionate and supportive to your students, your colleagues, and yourself during these times.

Our actions as today’s graduate student teaching assistants and instructors set the tone for what the psychology classroom and the field of psychology will look like now and in the future. We call upon you and ourselves to be the change we want to see in this future.

Over the upcoming months, the GSTA Steering Committee will be collaborating with editors of the GSTA Blog (https://teachpsych.org/page-1784686) to post resources addressing these action items. We also invite our community to engage with us in an ongoing dialogue about possible and effective ways to foster inclusion, equity, and anti-racism in our classrooms, institutions, and communities. Voicing your opinions, suggestions, and needs is crucial to guiding our work. We can be reached on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/theGSTA/) and Twitter (@gradsteachpsych), as well as by email at gsta@teachpsych.org.

Sincerely,

The GSTA Steering Committee

Jessica Brodsky, Adam Green, Amy Maslowski, Laura Simon, Terrill Taylor, Maaly Younis

By: Barnard C. Beins, Ph.D., Ithaca College

In choosing potential dating partners, women are more selective than men, right? Did we actually need research to know this?

Psychological research, especially research that finds its way into mass media, often evokes the dreaded response by non-psychologists that the outcome is so obvious that there was no need to conduct the study. This is nothing new. Over a century ago, E. C. Sanford wrote that “Somebody has defined psychology (with a touch of cynicism) as the science of what everybody knew beforehand, anyway” (1906, p. 118). The exercise I describe here is designed to illustrate to students that they need to go beyond obvious and cursory explanations about research findings.

To start, we should ask how obvious our results really are. Although we clearly have some insights into human behavior, our ability to predict outcomes in advance may not be as good as we would like to think.  For example, consider the possible outcomes listed below from five studies that I have taken from the published literature. (These are not “Gotcha” types of findings for which one would learn to pick the “less obvious” outcome.) Can you pick out the actual result (A, B, or C)?

I ask my students to identify the actual outcome; I subsequently group them in pairs to come up with an explanation for the results. As it turns out, they can come up with plausible reasons for the answer they choose, even when they are wrong. This exercise serves to let them know that predicting results is not as straightforward as they might think and that results might be obvious only in hindsight.

Available Materials

These materials that follow are part of my presentation at the 2020 Eastern Psychological Association convention. The entire set of scenarios, reference citations, and classroom materials (along with the presentation itself) are available on my website: http://barneybeins.com/epa/epa2020.html

Select the Actual Outcome

A	B	C
Short tests in school lead to worse performance.	Test length is unrelated to test performance.	Short tests in school lead to better performance.
Women wearing lipstick while taking a test score lower than women not wearing lipstick.	Women wearing lipstick while taking a test score about the same as women not wearing lipstick.	Women wearing lipstick while taking a test score higher than women not wearing lipstick.
People with high cognitive abilities (i.e., smart people) are less likely than others to form social stereotypes.	People with high cognitive abilities (i.e., smart people) are just as likely as others to form social stereotypes.	People with high cognitive abilities (i.e., smart people) are more likely than others to form social stereotypes.
When looking at reviews of online products, people pay more attention to how many people reviewed a product than to the rating of the product.	When looking at reviews of online products, people pay about equal attention to how many people reviewed a product as to the rating of the product.	When looking at reviews of online products, people pay less attention to how many people reviewed a product than to the rating of the product.
Women spend less time making eye contact with men they know are gay than with men they know are straight.	Women spend about the same amount of time making eye contact with men they know are gay as with men they know are straight.	Women spend more time making eye contact with men they know are gay than with men they know are straight.

How Well Do Students Perform?

            When I ask my students to give their best guesses on an expanded set of 15 studies, they are invariably at chance levels. The level of accuracy is pretty constant across sections and semesters.

            I should point out that students do score relatively well with some scenarios. For instance, 75% of students correctly predicted that people undergoing stress are likely to gain weight. And they were correct 57% of the time when speculating that the sleep of people with insomnia improves when they take vitamins. I point out to them that the purpose of this exercise is not to embarrass them, but to show the difficulty of our task as psychological researchers. In addition, when I have demonstrated this for Ph.D.-level psychologists, they were no better than students in their guesses.

            As such, why are outcomes so “obvious” after you know what actually happened? Our job as researchers (and as people) is to construct a good story about why people behave as they do. It is pretty easy to construct a plausible story in each of the scenarios above, (although as psychologists we call them interpretations) regardless of the direction of the outcome. Solid interpretations can be very convincing, even if you are describing an outcome that is opposite to the real result.

Goals of the Exercise

            I use this activity in my Research Methods class, although it is also effective in an introductory class. I like this demonstration because it helps students understand three important points. First, predicting research outcomes is difficult, although experts may be right more often than others in their specialty area. Interestingly, it appears that expertise is fairly narrow; when experts discuss matters even a little outside their specialty, their knowledge pretty quickly becomes similar to that of a layperson (Pigliucci, 2010).

We do research because we want to know with a level of confidence what people do and why they do it. And we won’t know that until we actually do the research.

            The second point is that we can come up with plausible explanations, no matter how research turns out. But just because we can generate an explanation, it doesn’t mean that we actually understand the phenomena we are investigating. After all, we can construct compelling stories that are the opposite of what actually occurred.

            A third, related point is that for most research results, there are multiple possible explanations for the outcome. When students generate explanations, they often generate different reasons to explain the same predicted results. This points out the need to plan further research so we can identify the best explanation and, as with most complex behavior, why we need to pay attention to combinations of variables. Students are often quite good at asking “What would happen if we manipulated this or that variable?”

How Well Did You Do?

How well did you predict the outcomes? The table below shows the actual outcome and the percent of my students who picked the real result.

Actual Outcome	Percent of Students Answering Correctly
Short tests in school lead to worse performance.	20%
Women wearing lipstick while taking a test score higher than women not wearing lipstick.	16%
People with high cognitive abilities (i.e., smart people) are more likely than others to form social stereotypes.	20%
When looking at reviews of online products, people pay more attention to how many people reviewed a product than to the rating of the product.	25%
Women spend more time making eye contact with men they know are gay than with men they know are straight.	14%

            Finally, to address the issue I posed at the beginning about women being more selective than men in choosing a dating partner, maybe the answer isn’t so obvious. If you change the parameters of the setting, women and men seem to show similar levels of selectivity (Finkel & Eastwick, 2009). This is why we do “obvious” research.

References

Finkel, E. J., & Eastwick, P. W. (2009). Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1290-1295. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02439.x

Pigliucci, M. (2010). Nonsense on stilts: How to tell science from bunk. University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, R. M., Bernstein, J. H., & Brown, K. W. (2010). Weekends, work, and well-being: Psychological need satisfactions and day of the week effects on mood, vitality, and physical symptoms. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 29(1), 95-122. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2010.29.1.95

Sanford, E. C. (1906). A sketch of a beginner's course in psychology. Pedagogical Seminary, 13(1), 118-124.

The British Psychological Society has a digest in which they provided a list of 10 counterintuitive research findings: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2014/12/01/10-of-the-most-counter-intuitive-psychology-findings-ever-published/

Authors' Bio

Barney Beins is Professor of Psychology at Ithaca College. He is the author of Research Methods: A Tool for Life (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of Effective Writing in Psychology: Posters, Papers and Presentations (Wiley) and The Worth Expert Guide to Scientific Literacy (Worth Publishers). He has taught at Ithaca College since 1986. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the New England Psychological Association. He also served as president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and of the New England Psychological Association. He is the 2020 president of the Eastern Psychological Association.

By: Thomas E Heinzen, Ph.D., William Paterson University

When was the last time a student turned in an exam and then begged the professor, “That was so much fun! Would you let me take it again but next time, please, make it a little more difficult!”  

Never? Well, that happens all the time in game design. The extravagant promise that game designers make to higher education is that we can induce academic persistence. That includes students labeled as “poorly prepared” or “just not ready.” Many of those same students will hurry home after class in order to spend the next eight hours playing a difficult video game, learning from (and teaching) fellow players, managing complex on-line relationships, and figuring out constantly changing rules. They’re doing all the stuff we want them to do for a grade but for the pure joy of achievement. Yet we dare to think of them as “unmotivated.” 

Higher education has a lot to learn from game designers (see Schell, 2008). A mash-up of definitions produces the idea that play is the voluntary expenditure of exuberant energy in an aimless activity: voluntary energy. The definition of a game is just as important: Arbitrary obstacles that make it difficult to achieve a specific goal: rules and goals. 

My cousin and I were “just playing” when we kicked an empty box down the sidewalk of a New York City street. But we started “playing a game” when we invented a competition to see who could kick the box the farthest. What, specifically, can professors and curriculum designers learn from game designers? Here are four principles. 

1. Deliver an Experience.  Game designers don’t design games; they design experiences. They use game mechanics to deliver that experience. In chemistry lab, the experience could be an almost pure solution; in psychology, an “aha” moment of self-recognition; in literature, a shock of understanding. 

Two actor friends started laughing while watching an independently produced film. They had spotted a boom mike dipping into the tippy top of the screen. But they still loved the film because it delivered a satisfying experience even though some of the filmmaking mechanics were sloppy. 

2. Get Good at Onboarding. Game designers recognize onboarding as the most critical moment in a game. Onboarding in a course is a first impression opportunity to grab and sustain a student’s attention. Onboarding makes players want to play and students want to learn. 

Some professors design the first moments of a class the way a novelist labors over an opening sentence. They might come to class ten minutes early to chat with incoming students. The number of possible course points in the syllabus can convey impressions of fairness. The first contact with students is bursting with consequential opportunities.  

3. Design a Flow Zone. The flow zone carries students higher up the ladder of difficulty (“leveling up” in game-speak).  A flow zone relies on the same game mechanic financial planners use to carry clients to a safe, early retirement: continuous rebalancing. 

A teaching flow zone continuously rebalances difficulty and rewards as it shifts the student’s experience from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Many classic games (Tetris, Pac Man) require greater achievements before accelerating the game’s pace. A flow zone can sustain a student’s engagement from week to week, course to course, and across an entire, satisfying career. 

4. Model Failing Forward. Higher education too often relies on threats to motivate learning. An error lowers your grade; too many leads to an embarrassing trip to the Dean; keep it up and higher education rejects you from the system. But a fear of failing that can be lethal to authentic learning. So change things, teachers: get out there and fail! (see Bennett, 2017).

Don’t be timid; there is plenty of failure to go around. Toddlers learn to walk by experiencing many painful failures. Yet they learn because a) walking looks like fun; b) they suspect there is a cookie high up on the table, and c) everyone else is doing it. Higher education succeeds when the effort is fun, rewarding, and common (see Birney, Burdick, & Teevan, 1969; Boston & Zhao, 2017).

In 2015, an APA symposium presented game-based applications to diabetes management, aging, education, assessment, and much more. Game labs are promoting “serious games” and using fun to solve social problems. So, if you are thinking about or playing with game design to improve the art of your teaching and learning, you’re not alone! This is a growing interest among many educators. 

References

Bennett, J. (2017, June 24). On campus, failure is on the syllabus. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/fashion/fear-of-failure.html 

Boston, P. & Zhao, B. (2017). Failing to innovate. Ivey Business Journal. Retrieved from http://iveybusinessjournal.com/failing-to-innovate/ 

Birney, R. C., Burdick, H., & Teevan, R. C. (1969). Fear of failure. Van Nostrand-Reinhold Company.

Heinzen, T. E., Gordon, M. S., Landrum, R. E., Gurung, R. A., Dunn, D. S., & Richman, S. (2015). A parallel universe: Psychological science in the language of game design. In Gamification in education and business (pp. 133-149). Springer, Cham.

Heinzen, T. E., & Ivezaj, S. (2019). Fat Points and Fairness: Inserting a Minor Game Mechanic in the Syllabus. Journal of Applied Testing Technology, 20(S1), 60-68.

Lee, P. T. Y., Chau, M., & Lui, R. W. C. (2019). The Role of Attitude toward Challenge in Serious Game Design. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 1-12.

Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. CRC press.

By Laura Freberg, Ph.D., California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and Stephanie Cacioppo, Ph.D., University of Chicago.

All of us have been there. Our herculean efforts to assemble fascinating experiences for students are met not with rapt attention, but with mobile phones and bored expressions. The goal of promoting engagement seems impossibly elusive, especially when coupled with COVID-19 adjustments to our means of instruction.

What does it mean to be “engaged” with course material? Our dictionaries tell us that to engage means to “make an effort to understand.” We can present the most amazing class experiences, but if the students don’t meet us halfway, it’s all for naught.

How then, do we encourage students to make an effort to understand? To answer that question, we need to dig deeper into students’ motivations. Although we all know the dangers of introspection, it might be useful to contemplate what drives your own engagement with psychology. What attracted you to this amazing field of study? What were you trying to accomplish in your own search for knowledge?

In this personal search, you might find yourself thinking, “I was so curious about what makes people do what they do!” The concept of curiosity fits rather nicely with our construct of engagement. To be curious means that you have a “strong desire to know or learn something.” In other words, curiosity is what leads to engagement.

Psychology has a rich history of examining curiosity. William James (1899) called it “the impulse toward better cognition.” Pavlov (1927) called it the “what-is-it” impulse. More recently, Kidd and Hayden (2014) refer to curiosity as a “drive state for information.” Curiosity has been presented as a trait, whether that is an aspect of openness to experience, novelty-seeking, need for cognition, intrinsic motivation, tolerance for ambiguity, sensation-seeking, and even IQ. Curiosity seems developmental, as each leaf, twig, and bug encountered on a walk with a two-year-old is special.

Does this mean that curiosity is fixed?  Are we doomed to work with students whose engagement is simply low? No! Looking around us, we see many situations in which people from all walks of life are perched on the edge of their seats waiting to see what will happen next. Will Elizabeth Barrett and Mr. Darcy finally get together? Who will sit on the Iron Throne? What is going on in Tiger King? Is there a person among us who hasn’t clicked on click-bait at least once? We maintain, with an homage to Carol Dweck, that curiosity is not fixed but rather something that we can grow.

A somewhat neglected article by George Lowenstein, published in 1994, provides a road map to growing curiosity. Lowenstein argued that curiosity happens in a special place between what we know and what we need to know, or within the so-called “curiosity gap.” Think about the following—are you more distracted when listening to another person speak on the phone, or when you overhear a conversation at a restaurant? Most people say the former is more distracting. Lowenstein would argue that listening to a phone conversation naturally elicits curiosity from us, because there is a gap between what we’re hearing from the person who is present and what the entire conversation is all about. We try to fill in the gaps! A master of manipulating the curiosity gap is the tech giant LinkedIn. All of us have received notifications saying, “someone has looked at your profile.” We ask ourselves with considerable curiosity, “who could that be?” Then LinkedIn provides a solution. By “upgrading to Premium,” you can close the gap. The user interface (UX) community is far more familiar with George Lowenstein than most psychologists are, and they use the curiosity gap constantly to push us in a particular direction, usually toward a purchase.

How can psychology instructors harness the curiosity gap to promote student engagement? Again, let’s think about tasks that make us feel curious, like playing Trivial Pursuit or completing a puzzle. Two principles stand out: 1) Curiosity is highest when confidence is moderate, and 2) Curiosity is highest when learning the solution is valuable. Both principles can be applied in the classroom with a minimum of effort.

We see the impact of confidence on engagement in our classes every day. Students with too little confidence shut down. The gap between what they already know and what they’re being asked to learn is too great. These students might benefit from many low-stakes practice opportunities and the presentation of material in small chunks. Regular formative feedback gently nudges them to greater confidence. The gap narrows to a manageable width. Then there are those who come into our classes thinking that they already “know” human behavior. We need to rattle their confidence a bit, perhaps by addressing common psychological myths and demonstrating the gaps that we are trying to fill with our own research programs.

More specifically, we can take advantage of the natural “puzzles” of our field. In a presentation at NITOP 2020, Daniel Willingham noted that students learn surface facts rather than deeper principles because facts are easy to understand and will appear on tests. He believed that deeper thinking could be stimulated by framing lessons that invite problem solving. Focusing on the questions that drove classic studies (what was Stanley Milgram actually trying to figure out?) and using case-based and problem-based learning activities can energize a classroom.

A simple redo of how we ask in-class questions can also promote considerable curiosity. Ask a question with several alternatives. After students have answered, knock out one of the incorrect (but popular) alternatives and let them try again. Promote discussion as students work out the answer. As the alternatives are knocked out, you will hear the volume of the discussion go up as students argue for their favorite answer.

One of our favorite approaches is to start each lesson by asking students what questions they have about the topic. What do you need to know about memory? What do you want to know about psychological disorders? Then use their questions to frame your presentations and activities.

These approaches manage the issue of moderate confidence, but we still must address the matter of valuable learning. In psychology, this should be easy. Every topic we cover has personal relevance, but sometimes students need our help to make the connections. As Sue Frantz is fond of saying, “what does my neighbor the plumber need to know about action potentials?” If the answer is “nothing,” we might reconsider covering the material. With all due respect to Sue, we think her neighbor should know about action potentials if he is contemplating adjusting his neurochemistry with either recreational or prescription substances. In general, though, we need to make the “so-what” factor of our material very explicit.

William James, in his 1899 Talks to Teachers on Psychology, set lofty goals for us, including making students remember our class until their dying days. By harnessing students’ curiosity gaps and illustrating the everyday value of our field, we don’t guarantee that we’ll meet James’ criteria completely, but our students might start to put down the social media and pay attention.

References

James, W. (1899). Talks to teachers on psychology: And to students on some of life’s ideals. New York: Holt.

Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron, 88(3), 449–460. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010

Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98.

Pavlov, I.P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex (G. V. Anrep, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Willingham, D. (January, 2020). Teaching students to think critically about psychology. General Session presentation at NITOP, St. Petersburg, FL.

Authors' Bios

Laura Freberg. Laura Freberg is Professor of Psychology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She received her bachelors, masters, and PhD from UCLA and conducted her dissertation research with Robert Rescorla of Yale University. Freberg co-authors Discovering Psychology: The Science of Mind (3rd ed.) and authors Discovering Behavioral Neuroscience: An Introduction to Biological Psychology (4th ed.), both for Cengage, and is lead author on Research Methods in Psychological Science (2017) for Top Hat. Freberg is the Psychology Consultant for the New York Times InEducation program. She served as the 2018-2019 President of the Western Psychological Association.

Stephanie Cacioppo. Named a “Rising Star” by the Association for Psychological Science for her innovative and outstanding contributions to the science of psychology and woman’s health, Dr. Steph Cacioppo is the world authority on social brain dynamics and wellness. Her work focuses on the dynamics of emotions and social connections and their impact on brain health and human performance. The first female President of the Society for Social Neuroscience, Dr. Steph also served as the director of the Affective Science Center of Excellence at the Mamba Sports Academy and is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

By: Michelle Schmidt, Ph.D., Moravian College

More and more, teaching and learning is moving away from traditional methods and focusing instead on opportunities for students to engage outside of the classroom, work collaboratively, and be more engaged in the local community. Community-based learning is one pedagogy that allows students to use their research skills while serving the community (Ingman, 2016).  Community-based research allows students and community partners to collaboratively identify a research question, operationalize the variables, explore a research design and data collection approaches, analyze data, and disseminate the results (Mello-Goldner, 2019).

The benefits of students engaging in community-based research are underscored by the findings of the Council on Undergraduate Research, which reports that the benefits of undergraduate research include greater critical thinking, problem solving, and intellectual independence, as well as a deeper understanding of research methodology.

Given my interests in developmental psychology, undergraduate research, nonprofit organizations, and student-community engagement, I decided to try a community-based research project in my upper level developmental psychology seminar. Having used service-learning in my courses for 20 years, this seemed like a new and exciting way to engage students with the local community.

The theme of my seminar was stress and families. In the course, we typically spend a lot of time reading about at-risk youth and relevant social policy. Before I began teaching a recent iteration of this course, I became aware of a local YMCA’s interest in evaluating their summer campers’ experiences. The camp had been run for decades, but they never evaluated to determine if the camps were doing what they intended to do. It seemed to me that my seminar was relevant to summer camp for at-risk youth, and I might have a perfect match for helping the Y design a study of summer camp effectiveness. And so began the community partnership between my seminar students and a local nonprofit organization.

Over the course of the semester, 4 full-time YMCA staff partnered with the class, visiting and engaging with the class several times. Everyone started at the same place: Something about summer camp needed to be evaluated to determine if the campers were having a beneficial summer experience. Beyond that, everything had to be figured out. The Y staff described summer camp to the class, and the class described research on camp effectiveness to the Y staff. With time and effort, the students proposed what had perhaps been obvious all along, studying whether the local Y’s summer camp successfully advanced the 3 primary goals of camp: Achievement, Belonging, and Relationship Building. 

The students organized themselves into the three focus areas and launched their efforts to research these areas in relation to summer camp type experiences, paying attention to research methodologies along the way. With a shared Google spreadsheet, students worked individually, within their groups, and with the larger class to keep a log of their resources and progress. We devoted time in class each week for students to share their “leads” with the rest of the class. The end goal was a formal presentation of the proposed study with a how-to guide for the Y staff with each student having contributed to the design of that study but also writing an individual research paper on their own piece of the pie.

It worked! After 14 weeks, the class delivered a well-designed study that was grounded in the literature that the YMCA staff carried out a month after the class ended. Students reported numerous benefits of the community-based research partnership that can be organized around 4 themes:

The benefits for student learning and engagement were fabulous, but, as always, the course was not without its challenges:

But as the instructor, my takeaway was the same as my students: Rigorous, but worth it!

For those wishing to establish a community-based research project, I offer the following tips:

References

Council on Undergraduate Research (2020). Mission. https://www.cur.org/who/organization/mission/

Ingman B. C. (2016). The student experience of community-based research: An autoethnography.

Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 20, 62–89. https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/1293

Mello-Goldner, D. (2019). Community-based research as an alternative to traditional research

courses as a method promoting undergraduate publication. Frontiers in Psychology, 10,

10-12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01012 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01012/full

Michelle Schmidt is Professor of Psychology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA., where she has been on the faculty since 2000. Her teaching focuses on developmental psychology courses, research methods, and statistics. She is especially interested in research on and the practice of service learning and community-based research. Her scholarship focuses on attachment, friendship, and victimization. 

By: Brian C. Smith, Ph.D., Graceland University and Sal Meyers, Ph.D., Simpson College

We approach our work as teachers with the goal of improving student learning, both in our courses and – we hope – throughout the rest of our students’ lives. As psychologists, we know much about learning, including both strategies most likely to enhance learning (e.g., testing effect, distributed practice) as well as those less useful strategies most often used by students (e.g., highlighting; re-reading; Dunlosky et al., 2013). In this post, we shift our focus to the social aspect of learning. We argue that teacher empathy improves the quality of student-teacher interaction and leads to better learning.

We’ve previously defined teacher empathy as “the degree to which instructors work to deeply understand students’ personal and social situations, feel caring and concern in response to students’ positive and negative emotions, and communicate their understanding and caring to students through their behavior” (Meyers et al., 2019, p. 161). In understanding students’ social situations, we explicitly urge consideration of factors including race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

The cognitive understanding component of empathy might be viewed in part as a willingness to suspend negative attributions for students’ undesirable behaviors – or even lack of behavior. If a student misses class or doesn’t turn in a major assignment, pause before assuming that the student doesn’t care or is lazy. In order to afford college, students may spend 20 or more hours a week at a job. Students may juggle family responsibilities. They may experience fear of failure; it’s easier to not write a paper and believe that they could do it than to turn in a terrible paper that will evidence that they can’t do it. Students are subject to stereotype threat, or they may feel that they don’t belong (impostor syndrome, anyone?). In short, before making a negative dispositional attribution, listen to the student. For an example of changing attributions in a K-12 setting, see the experiment with 8th grade math teachers by Okonofua et al., (2016). Students whose math teachers practiced empathy (i.e. thought about non-pejorative reasons why students misbehaved, read positive student stories like “the teacher really listened to me”, and reflected on their practice) were only half as likely to be suspended from school as those whose teachers were in a control group.

Our understanding of students’ social and individual circumstances should contribute to an emotional response, which isn’t necessarily the same as the student’s. As our face-to-face courses became online courses, many students’ anxiety levels spiked. We felt and acknowledged that anxiety. Empathy also suggests that we show joy when students “get” a concept, or they mention something good happening in their lives.

We demonstrate our empathy through behaviors. What we do – whether one-on-one or with an entire class – communicates empathy. So too do our policies. Which raises the question – how do we demonstrate empathy?

Empathy can be communicated in the syllabus. When we randomly assigned college students to read syllabus excerpts, we found three things led students to perceive the instructor as more empathetic (Smith & Meyers, 2019):

1. Building in flexibility and second chances. You might provide students with a set number of virtual tokens that can be exchanged for the chance to revise an unsatisfactory paper or excuse an absence from class. You might give a cumulative final exam and, if the final exam grade is higher than a midterm exam grade, replace the lowest midterm exam grade with the final exam grade.
2. Providing a student-focused rationale for the policy. This lets students know that you understand their situation and considered it when creating your policy.
3. Using first-person. Sometimes instructors have very little flexibility with regard to policy (e.g. an accommodation statement). But even here, students perceive greater empathy when policies are preceded by the instructor’s point of view (e.g., “I strongly support the accommodation policy”).

What can you do to communicate empathy if you don’t have control over the syllabus?

1. Take the time to get to know your students by surveying them about who they are and what they bring to the class.
2. Use mail merge to send personalized email messages to students asking how they are, how much progress they have made on a large assignment, and whether they have any questions about course content.
3. Let students know that you do not expect them to already have all the skills they need to be successful in the course. Then provide resources so students can learn better study skills, stress management (e.g., meditation), support seeking, and self-control.
4. When working with an individual student, asking questions and active listening work well. We recommend reviewing and incorporating motivational interviewing strategies (Miller & Rollnick, 2012; North, 2017).

In short, we suggest that we as teachers invest the time and energy to know our students, to interact and to create policies in ways that demonstrate our understanding, and to acknowledge learners’ emotions. Please note that we do not lower our course standards. Instead, we keep the focus on students’ learning; we strive to act in ways that heighten the odds that students reach our learning goals. We suggest that empathy and other relationship-focused topics are especially important as students and faculty live with the continued uncertainty linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

References

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4–58.

Meyers, S.A., Rowell, K., Wells, M. & Smith, B.C. (2019) Teacher empathy: A model of empathy for teaching for student success. College Teaching, 67:3, 160–168, DOI: 10.1080/87567555.2019.1579699

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2012). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

North, R. A. (2017). Motivational interviewing for school counselors. Independently published through amazon.com.

Okonofua, J. A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G. M. 2016. Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in Half among Adolescents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (19): 5221–6. doi:10.1073/pnas.1523698113.

Smith, B.C. & Meyers, S.A. (2019, February). It’s in the syllabus: Policies’ effects on student perceptions of teacher empathy. Poster presented at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Portland, OR. https://osf.io/v86ng/

Dr. Brian C. Smith is Professor of Psychology at Graceland University, where he heads new faculty orientation and supports professional development. Dr. Sal Meyers is Professor of Psychology at Simpson College, where she served 12 years as the first director of faculty development. Sal and Brian frequently offer sessions at Lilly Conferences on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

By: Alison Jane Martingano, M.Phil, M.A., New School for Social Research

Students learn by getting their hands dirty. But while we all strive to keep our hands clean during COVID-19, it’s important to ensure that our teaching does not become sterile. Here, I share some of my favorite classroom activities and how I have translated them into an online format.

ICEBREAKERS AND CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS

As teachers, we tend to have a favorite icebreaker that we use at the beginning of every semester. Perhaps you ask your students to turn around and introduce themselves to the people next to them. Or maybe you ask them to get up and find someone in the classroom who shares their taste in music. These sorts of activities help students familiarize themselves with their peers and set the tone for classroom discussions.

My Favorite Activity: I like to begin with an icebreaker that prompts students to think about how they would test difficult psychological questions. I present a list of provoking statements such as “video games cause violence” and “democrats and republicans have different morals.” These statements are tailored to each class and also give a preview of the course content. I ask students to decide if they agree or disagree with each statement and find someone in the classroom who holds an opposing viewpoint. Students then sit with their new partners and I give them some time to get acquainted. I then ask the pairs to discuss what empirical evidence would speak to (if not resolve) the statement they disagree on.

Putting It Online: To recreate the feeling of getting up and walking around the classroom, I recommend using Online Town. This is a free website that allows students to control an avatar in a 2-D virtual classroom. When students “stand” their avatar near another person’s, the audio and video from their webcams will automatically sync, allowing them to talk to each other in pairs or small groups. When they have finished their conversation, they can simply “walk” away and talk to another group.

GROUP ACTIVITIES AND DISCUSSIONS

Group activities in the classroom help students consolidate the information they’ve been learning. This might involve pondering a discussion question about the topic or completing a worksheet together. Hearing other students rephrase and use information not only helps students who may not have understood it the first time, but also challenges able students to explain their thinking.

My Favorite Activity: I like to assign students to small groups and give each group member a different section of a longer reading. I ask my students to complete their sections of the reading, then share what they have read with their group members. Students then answer a set of questions. These questions are written in such a manner that they cannot be answered without sharing what each student knows.

Putting It Online: Breakout rooms in Zoom are invaluable for group activities. You can allow Zoom to automatically assign students to breakout rooms or choose who is in each group. As the host of the session, you can jump from one breakout room to another to see how your students are doing. Breakout groups can be disorienting for students because they suddenly have limited contact with you, so make sure you set a clear goal for their activity. I like to ask students to work together to answer questions in a Google document, which helps to give them focus during their discussion.

PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATIONS

There’s nothing quite like seeing a live demonstration in class. Students are far more likely to remember the time their professor showed them something rather than simply told them about it.

My Favorite Activity: I demonstrate classical conditioning using lemonade powder. I instruct students to place a little lemonade powder onto their tongues each time I ring the bell. The lemonade powder makes a small fizzing sensation on their tongue prompting salivation. In my experience, about 80% of students successfully condition themselves to salivate at the sound of the bell. Over time the conditioning wears off, demonstrating extinction. I can also demonstrate spontaneous recovery and use different tones and buzzers to demonstrate stimulus discrimination and stimulus generalization.

Putting It Online: Choose demonstrations that can be achieved by using household objects and be flexible with what is possible. No lemonade powder? Try a different food or drink or have students condition themselves by slapping their own thigh. For a variety of demonstrations, Zoom polls are a useful resource. You can ask students, “Did you feel a fizzing sensation when the bell rang?” Zoom will then calculate what percentage of students answer “yes.” Responding to polls keeps students engaged. Polls are one of the few things that are better online – no more counting how many hands are raised! In Zoom, polls need to be programmed in advance. To reduce your workload, you can reuse a poll with answers A, B, C, & D, and then write what each answer corresponds to on your PowerPoint slide or virtual whiteboard.  

RESEARCH PARTICIPATION

With so much psychological research now being conducted online, there are many online resources that can be integrated into your class to give students a taste of the research process.

My Favorite Activity: In a class on implicit bias, I ask students to take an online Implicit Association Test. After taking the test, we discuss their thoughts about the pros and cons of measuring implicit bias in this way. The test is available for free here. 

Putting It Online: Does your institution offer students the opportunity to take part in online research? If not, you can simulate the experience using public online resources: an online public goods game, poverty simulation, and questionnaire measures of the five factors of personality and morals. Make sure you give students the opportunity to share their experiences after completing online research studies.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES

With 24-hour news and social media, your students may be locked inside, but they are not cut-off from the world. Just as you do in the classroom, applying psychological theory to real-world examples is critical. None of us can be aware of every new development, so take advantage of the fact that a wealth of information is at your students’ fingertips and have them search for examples online.

My Favorite Activity: When teaching about shooter bias, there are all too many recent examples of unarmed black men being shot by police in the USA. I ask students to think of their own examples and devote time to discussing the extent to which shooter bias may have been relevant in any particular case. It is important to help students understand the complexities of real-world examples and not to use them simply to illustrate a definition without expansion.

Putting It Online: In an online class, you can give students 5 minutes to find an example online and then share these links with the class using the chat function in Zoom. You might ask them to find examples of conformity, obedience, dehumanization, etc. One of the perks of teaching online is that every student can submit a response via chat rather than only the most eager students who raise their hands. As the instructor, you can share your screen and click on a few of the students’ links while asking them to describe what they found. In this way you can make sure that every student is involved.

ASSIGNMENTS AND HOMEWORK

Despite your best efforts, there may be some classroom activities that simply do not translate well online. For these activities, consider assigning them as homework for students to complete with family or friends.

My Favorite Activity: After teaching about police interview techniques, I ask students to question a willing friend or family member to try to establish if they are lying. Students generally fail miserably at this task, leading to a discussion about the validity of such techniques.

Putting It Online: Many practical homework assignments can be submitted as videos rather than written assignments. I ask students to record their interview and post the video online. Alongside the video, they submit a short description about why they concluded their friend was lying or telling the truth, and whether they were correct. Students seem to enjoy this activity and it helps to bring the online classes into their households which helps strengthen their interest and commitment to completing the course. Students can also record themselves giving presentations using screen share on Zoom.

As online learning becomes more commonplace, there are many solutions to ensure the dynamic classroom experience is not lost. Classroom activities are a great way of keeping students engaged and break-up extensive lecture material. Just like you wouldn’t lecture for hours in a classroom without stopping for questions, debate or demonstration, make sure you add variety online too!

Preparation and planning online activities takes time. But it will be worth it when you hear a student explain the meaning of a psychological concept by saying: “Do you remember when we did….?”

Alison Jane Martingano is a Ph.D. candidate in the psychology department of the New School for Social Research. She specializes in social and personality psychology, with a particular interest in empathetic processes. Alison Jane holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in psychology from the New School for Social Research and a B.Sc. (hons) from the University of York. She is passionate about teaching and holds positions as an adjunct lecturer, teaching fellow, and guest faculty member at various higher education institutions.

By: Robin Hailstorks, Ph.D., American Psychological Association

The American Psychological Association (APA) has several resources for supporting quality teaching at all levels of the educational pipeline. I will focus primarily on resources for teaching at the undergraduate level. I will share several of these resources for your current and future use. There are two types of teaching aids that I will discuss in this blog post: policy documents and an assessment tool for enhancing teaching.

Perhaps the most important policy document I would like for you to be familiar with is the APA Guidelines for Undergraduate Psychology Majors: Version 2.0. (2013), herein Guidelines 2.0. This document presents five learning goals and outcomes for undergraduate psychology majors to achieve at both the foundational and bachelor’s levels. Although this policy document is aspirational, psychology teachers have the architecture to assist them with curriculum planning, teaching, and program review. As graduate students, this document is like a physician’s desk reference. Please be sure to have it readily available when planning to teach an existing or new course. Guidelines 2.0 outlines learning outcomes in a developmental framework that helps you think about appropriate teaching strategies to use in the classroom.

The APA Principles for Quality Undergraduate Education in Psychology (2011), herein Principles, is in its second iteration but and continues to be used as an important resource for teaching.  Although the Principles address the roles of academic administrators and policy makers in making certain that quality teaching is at the forefront of undergraduate education, I would like to call your attention to Principle 2 in particular, which states, “Faculty strive to become scientist-educators who are knowledgeable about and use the science of learning.” This principle includes eight recommendations that are presented to ensure quality teaching.

Project Assessment is an online repository of assessments that are aligned with each of the five learning goals in Guidelines 2.0. This resource allows psychology teachers to access, evaluate, and contribute to a database of resources that are dynamic and evolving. I am encouraging you to log in to Project Assessment to preview this site and to use one or two of these assessment tools in your classroom when you can do so. I am also encouraging you to contribute to this site by evaluating an assessment tool that you have used in your class so we can learn about your experience with this tool. Ultimately, this resource will include evaluations of every assessment in this repository!

Collectively, these policy documents and teaching resources will help you prepare for a successful teaching career at the undergraduate level. However, I believe they also will assist you with your professional career regardless of whether you teach full-time or not. For example, if you aspire to become an academic administrator, Principle 4 provides recommendations for quality teaching and learning. If you decide to become a policy maker, Principle 5 will assist you in understanding the importance of psychological literacy for improving lives. Regardless of your career goals, I hope you find this post useful.

References

American Psychological Association. (2011). Principles for quality undergraduate education in psychology. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/education/undergrad/principles.aspx

American Psychological Association. (2013). APA guidelines for the undergraduate psychology major: Version 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad/index.aspx

Dr. Robin Hailstorks is Director of Precollege and Undergraduate Education, Education Directorate, American Psychological Association.

By: Stephanie Richman, Ph.D., Baldwin Wallace University

One of my absolute favorite hobbies, and the reason my fiancé and I got together, is playing board games. I love to combine my passions, so of course I looked for a way to use board games in my teaching.

I created a first year seminar called "How to Spot a Liar," largely because I was interested in exploring the idea of using social deduction games in the classroom. Social deduction board games, defined by game designer and author Ted Alspach, are those "where the goal is dependent on figuring out information that isn't readily apparent and that involves discussion among players as one of the mechanics."

The content of "How to Spot a Liar" includes learning about why people lie and, importantly, how to spot when they are doing it. We learn about lie-detection methods from books written by CIA agents and articles written by psychologists or other behavioral experts. Then, students put the methods into practice through the games.

We started with a game called Werewolf, in which some players are Wolves, trying to eat the Villagers, and other players are Villagers, using their lie-spotting skills to hunt the Wolves. While there is an "official" board game, you don’t actually need any materials. It can be played with a deck of cards or just a moderator (i.e., the instructor). This is the simplest of the social deduction games and worked well to introduce students to this type of game. While some students were quiet at first, they quickly became engaged and interested in the game.

Next, we moved on to a game called Spyfall, in which one Spy tries to guess a location which all other players know (determined by the game mechanics), and the others, aware of the location, try to guess the Spy. Everyone asks and answers questions, trying to be specific enough to clear their name but not so specific that they will give the location away to the Spy. While this also has an "official" board game, there is an easy-to-use phone app, which all my students downloaded and used to play in class. I scheduled the class to begin playing this game just after learning about the verbal cues of lying, which fit very well with the game’s mechanics.

We also played Avalon and Two Rooms and a Boom, slightly more complex social deduction games, as students learned more about how to spot a liar.

I was always excited to hear claims of "That’s an exclusion qualifier!" or "Non-specific denial!" as students played, utilizing the skills they learned in the content part of the class. Course evaluation feedback for the four times I have taught this course has been positive, especially in regards to the games. Students report that, "The games actually helped in teaching us more about the class and the content." They also mentioned that the most effective learning activity in the course was "Werewolf," "Playing games," or "Playing deceptive board games with the entire class in groups."

However, you don’t have to teach a class based around board games in order to use them for teaching in your classroom! Many of the social deduction games mentioned (especially Werewolf and Spyfall) would be very effective for classes on body language, acting, or communication.

Further, social deduction games are not the only type of board games that are useful for classroom instruction. In fact, there are quite a lot of different genres and games that can be used. For example, in my Social Cognition course, an upper level psychology course about how people mentally represent social information, I use a game called Codenames to represent a challenging concept called Parallel Distributive Processing (PDP). PDP is a model of memory in which units (such as words or concepts like "mom" or "dove" or "house") are connected with facilitative and inhibitory links to each other. It is a challenging concept, but one I thought would be made simpler by using a board game.

In Codenames, two team leaders try to get their respective team members to guess words on a board based on a single word clue. The best clues can get people to associate multiple words together. However, to be successful at this game, you need to be aware of which words people will associate with other words or concepts – just like how they are arranged in your memory according to PDP.

Many of you may also be wondering if these games can be played remotely, given the temporary move to remote learning due to coronavirus (or because you regularly teach remotely). Good news – many board games are able to be played remotely and it is not much harder than doing so in person. Werewolf has a specific website that you can use to play over Video Chat. Spyfall can be done on a phone app, also usable over the internet. I would also direct you to this excellent Distance Gaming Guide, which includes all of the other games mentioned in this article, as well as many more.

Ultimately, I highly encourage you to use these games while teaching in your classroom or to try finding board games that work with your material. As far as I know, there aren’t any teaching-specific websites related to board games, but Board Game Geek is an excellent website to look up board games. I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have about using board games in your class. Good luck!

Dr. Stephanie B. Richman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Baldwin Wallace University. She teaches courses in Social Psychology, Research Methods, Close Relationships, How to Spot a Liar, and more. Her research focuses on rejection, self-expansion, and close relationships. She is currently combining her personal and research interests to conduct research on self-expansion in tabletop and live action gaming. In addition to gaming, she is passionate about inspiring others through her teaching and writing, which she explores in her blog.