Recent research compared the use of case studies to online discussion boards to teach about anxiety disorders. The current study extends this research to mood disorders, reports pretest and posttest scores on four learning outcomes, and compares midterm exam scores from Fall 2016 and Fall 2017 when case studies and online discussion boards were…

This article describes two class activities that introduce the concept of data mining and very basic data mining analyses. Assessment data suggest that students learned some of the conceptual basics of data mining, understood some of the ethical concerns related to the practice, and were able to perform correlations via the Statistical Package for…

In this article, we describe several role-playing exercises on acculturation and relevant cultural adjustment processes that we incorporated into Tomcho and Foel's classroom activity on acculturation, and we report data that examine subsequent changes in students' responses on pretest and posttest measures shortly after the activity and present…

The current set of three studies further evaluates the validity and application of the Psychological Research Inventory of Concepts (PRIC). In Study 1, we administered the PRIC to a sample of introductory psychology students and online (Mechanical Turk) participants along with measures assessing theoretically related concepts. We found evidence of…

Introductory psychology students at a technical college, 2-year community college, and a regional university rated how important textbook chapters or topics were to them now and in the future and how interesting they were. Importance and interest ratings were highly correlated, and the whole course was rated of greater importance and interest than…

Across 4 years, 87 teaching assistants (TAs) completed measures designed to assess personal efficacy, teacher efficacy, and liking for teaching before (pretest) and after (posttest) a weeklong training program. Paired sample t tests revealed a significant increase in personal efficacy and liking for teaching, a significant positive correlation…

This study addressed the impact of a semester-long course called "Learning to Learn," an undergraduate psychology course designed to teach college students to be self-regulated learners. Results of pretesting and posttesting of 78 students with the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie,…

Educational psychologists find that prior knowledge influences new learning. We examined whether course achievement for introductory psychology students is facilitated or impaired by their prior knowledge of psychology. We administered a pretest exam to 422 students early in the semester and gathered subsequent exam scores and other measures of…

Psychology students frequently have misconceptions of basic concepts in operant conditioning. Prior classroom observations revealed that most students defined positive reinforcement as reward and equated negative reinforcement and punishment. Students also labeled positive reinforcement as rewarding good behavior and negative reinforcement as…