Many students, particularly underprepared students, struggle to identify the essential information in empirical articles. We describe a set of assignments for instructing general psychology students to dissect the structure of such articles. Students in General Psychology I read empirical articles and answered a set of general, factual questions…

As part of a final project for a general psychology course, students were required to play a game, either digital/video or on a board. Students selected their own games, and were asked to identify psychological principles in their game play. Topics included the brain, sensation and perception, human development, learning, motivation, intelligence,…

Identifying effective and time-efficient approaches to teaching students how to write from scholarly sources benefits students and instructors. Students in a general psychology course learned a concrete method to improve this type of synthesis writing. The intervention was brief, consisting of viewing an online tutorial outside of class and…

College success requires development of self-regulated learning skills. This study describes a self-regulated learning strategy intervention in a large general education Introductory Psychology course, focusing on the second exam. Students' reflection responses across five time periods were compared with exam performance. Increased self-regulated…

The purpose of this study was to empirically scrutinize Muis, Bendixen, and Haerle's (2006) Theory of Integrated Domains in Epistemology framework. Secondary, college, undergraduate, and graduate students completed self-reports designed to measure their domain-specific and domain-general epistemic beliefs for mathematics, psychology, and general…

This study describes the extent of which the use of quality formative assessment on lessons of a course involves the students as self-regulated learners. There is an increased interest among educational researchers to observe improvement of student self-regulation on learning. The predominant use of summative assessment remains a challenge to…

This study is concerned with the flow state as a high intrinsic motivation experience. Following Csikszentmihalyi's theoretical model (1990), we analyze in which contents within the social psychology subject, students experience more flow. Participants were Spanish college students from a general course on Social Psychology. They completed a diary…

Political, socio-economic, ideological matters of a new century set special requirements to immediate change of traditional approach to studying foreign languages. Academic mobility, integration in world scientific-educational space, creation of optimal educational system and programs allow efficiently solve the tasks aiming at qualitative…

In an effort to present multicultural content in a non-threatening and effective way, an intercollegiate, team-taught General Psychology course was sponsored by Nebraska Indian Community College (NICC), a rural college on a Native American reservation in Northeast Nebraska, and Metropolitan Community College (MCC), an urban college in Omaha. The…

We examined the relationship between the levels of sophistication (high-sophisticated and low-sophisticated) of students' domain general epistemic beliefs and an important component of students' critical thinking skills--their ability to evaluate arguments. Participants evaluated arguments and took an epistemic belief survey before recalling…

Because interdisciplinary thinking is critical to address complex issues, we created and evaluated an interdisciplinary team-taught undergraduate course on mental illness using the kaleidoscope approach. After grounding students in biology, psychology and sociology, we aimed to develop students' abilities to think interdisciplinarily and cultivate…

Student course performance and course evaluation were compared for two methods of teaching general psychology. The self-paced method consisted of a modified Keller Plan (PSI) arrangement in which students progressed through small instructional units at their own pace. The lecture/discussion method consisted of a modified form of the traditional…

Compiled as a guide for the beginning college teacher, this handbook covers a wide variety of issues relative to college teaching today. The book is based on four premises: (1) education should be guided by a democratic philosophy; (2) students are adults; (3) instructors can occasionally be wrong; and (4) goals of college teaching should include…

In recent years, there have been calls for researchers to report and interpret confidence intervals (CIs) rather than relying solely on p-values. Such reforms, however, may be hindered by a general lack of understanding of CIs and how to interpret them. In this study, we assessed conceptual knowledge of CIs in undergraduate and graduate psychology…

The current study shows the applications of both classical test theory (CTT) and item response theory (IRT) to the psychology data. The study discusses item level analyses of General Mattering Scale produced by the two theories as well as strengths and weaknesses of both measurement approaches. The survey consisted of a total of five Likert-type…