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Creating the Foundation for a Warm Classroom Climate
Although the course syllabus is often overlooked or undervalued as the first form of communication between students and their instructors, it plays an important role for both. For students, the syllabus communicates information about the
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A Brief Guide for Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking in Psychology
In my first year of college teaching, a student approached me one day after class and politely asked, “What did you mean by the word ‘evidence’?” I tried to hide my shock at what I
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Challenging Your Assumptions
Applied learning as a pedagogical technique has taken higher education by storm, and psychology is no exception. Applied learning programs are credit-bearing student-learning experiences that occur outside of the classroom, such as internships/practica, service-learning, independent
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Working With Undergraduate Research Assistants: Setting Up and Maintaining a Research Laboratory
Let us imagine two hypothetical psychology laboratories, in need of new research assistants. Dr. Eager and Dr. Careful are both new professors in psychology, and from the day they are hired, they begin receiving e-mails
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Confronting Psychological Misconceptions in the Classroom
“But, Dr. Jones, I’d always heard that opposites attract. Isn’t that true?” “Dr. Smith, yesterday I heard my political science professor talk about the American people’s schizophrenic attitude toward abortion. So doesn’t that mean that
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Mentoring in Directed Independent Study
Most of us can remember having had one or more good teachers during our education ― individuals who made learning fun, memorable, or easy. A lucky few of us, however, have had a mentor, a
