A Hub for Teaching Psychology

What is the best way to teach psychology? How should students study to learn? To date there has been no coordinated effort to examine these questions. Whereas a large body of pedagogical research on teaching and learning exists, I have found that the absolute majority of research is conducted within individual classes at different institutions. Furthermore, few studies test theoretically derived questions and not enough classroom research sufficiently translates and tests lab findings.

With backing from the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, Regan A. R. Gurung created an online resource designed to connect educational psychologists with the literature and tools necessary to conduct research on a larger scale.

The reasons for these shortcomings are clear. Relevant research is published in diverse areas. Many faculty do not have the time to fully explore the rich literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Interested faculty like me often lack the time, network, design expertise, or experience to conduct classroom research. The time to alleviate these problems has arrived.

Thanks to support from the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science, I have been able to design a new online resource to serve pedagogical researchers. The site helps coordinate scholarship on teaching and learning with a variety of tools and resources. It can also foster collaborations between researchers investigating the science of teaching and learning to catalyze further research on these topics.

The Hub for Introductory Psychology and Pedagogical Research (HIPPR) provides the following:

• Literature Central: A central clearinghouse for research on teaching Introduction to Psychology and pedagogy in general, providing research summaries from multiple disciplines to aid future research.
• Collaborator Finder: Instructors can find collaborators, faculty who have similar pedagogical questions, or instructors willing to volunteer their classes/students for testing of pedagogical interventions.
• Scales-n-More: A collection of questionnaires and surveys commonly used in pedagogical inquiry that are ready for use. A particularly handy resource for novice pedagogical researchers, these measures will also help ensure comparisons across samples.
• Future innovations will include a Data Repository (datasets for secondary analyses) and a Virtual File-Drawer (brief reports of unpublished studies that may prove helpful in the design of additional work).

You can learn more about HIPPR and the tools it offers here.