Background: Psychology courses provide a good opportunity for instructors to teach students effective learning strategies integrated with content. Objective: This replication and extension study explored changes in students' self-reported use of learning strategies before and after a term paper assignment and examined the relationships between…

Background: Transfer students are a growing population of undergraduate psychology majors who are academically at-risk but often underserved by 4-year institutions. Objective: We describe a transfer learning community (TLC) for entering psychology transfer students and report its impact on participants social and academic integration and success.…

Background: Few studies have examined the effects of later class start times in college, even though developmentally driven sleep phase changes persist into the mid-20s. Objective: We hypothesized that sleepiness would be higher in an 8 a.m. versus 10 a.m. section of Introductory Psychology, and grades, engagement, enjoyment, attendance,…

Psychological misconceptions are common among students taking psychology courses. In this study, we show an association between student endorsement of misconceptions and two prevalent and well-researched lay beliefs about the human mind, specifically the belief in free will and dualism. This study also revisits and builds upon past research…

Background: Psychological misconceptions permeate our culture, with many people endorsing these erroneous beliefs. Objective: The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend previous findings that reported psychology knowledge and cognitive thinking style predict undergraduates' beliefs in psychological misconceptions. Method: Two hundred…

Background: Instructors and students are on a continuing quest to identify predictors of learning. Objective: This study examines the associations between self-reported exam score and study techniques among students in two courses, Introductory Psychology and Computer Science. Method: We used an online survey to measure the extent students (N =…

Research on team-based learning (TBL) generally supports its effectiveness over "traditional" lecture. In practice, however, lecturing rarely consists of teachers exclusively talking at their students, as many incorporate a variety of strategies to encourage active processing. This study compared an interactive lecture style with TBL on…

A transcript analysis by Freng, Webber, Blatter, Wing, and Scott found that methodology course performance and enrollment timing predicted grade point average in advanced psychology courses. The present study attempted to replicate and extend Freng et al. by using a larger sample and controlling for additional variables (methodology course…

The effects of offering and seizing optional learning opportunities rarely have been investigated. Thus, university instructors have no basis on which to decide whether offering optional learning opportunities to their students would be worth the effort and which students would seize and benefit from them. To target these questions, we designed a…

After explicit instruction on how to give possible bidirectional (two-way) causality explanations for a correlation, 240 students from eight sections of social psychology and research methods courses wrote "reverse causality" explanations on various test questions, creating a total of 882 answers. Averaging across multiple graded…

Students and instructors show moderate levels of agreement about the quality of day-to-day teaching. In the present study, we replicated and extended this finding by asking how correspondence between student and instructor ratings is moderated by time of semester and student demographic variables. Participants included 137 students and 5…

What do psychology doctorate programs require and prefer in their master's level applicants? Do the programs value students' graduate experiences during and postadmission? Doctoral programs' (n = 221) responses to an online survey showed that most required letters of recommendation, personal statements, Graduate Records Examination scores, and…

A 16-item lifelong learning scale (LLS), appropriate for college students and others, was evaluated using a sample of 575 college students. The scale demonstrated excellent reliability and was correlated with college grade point average (GPA), agreeableness, conscientiousness, and intellect/imagination. Scores were higher for those who had studied…

We tracked a sample of primarily Black psychology baccalaureates' advanced degree enrollments and completions and estimated the association of those outcomes with summer research experience by merging three data sets: (a) summer research program participants, (b) a comparison group of alumni, mostly without summer research, and (c) degree…

An increasing number of publishers offer online companion websites that students pay to access with the expectation that using these will significantly increase their grade. This research assessed the students' attitudes toward and the efficacy of components of MyPsychLab, a companion site for Introduction to Psychology. Students reported liking…