Background: Recent evidence suggests PechaKucha--a presentation style utilizing simplified visuals, narration, and rigid time constraints--may promote various learning outcomes and instructor goals better than traditional PowerPoint presentations. Objective: The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of students' PechaKucha compared…

Background: Multimedia creation and curation for assignments have the potential to engage students in deeper learning. Objective: This study explored whether the same homework assignments delivered in paper versus multimedia format resulted in different student experiences. Method: Introductory psychology students submitted either traditional…

Background: Research shows distributed practice enhances learning and skill development, but less is known about the effect on perceptions and attitudes toward the material being learned. Objective: This study examined whether distributed practice could improve performance and attitudes in statistics, a subject that students report finding…

Background: Although undergraduate psychology curriculum should cultivate performance-based skills to prepare students for helping professions, little work to date has addressed this standard. Objective: This research replicates the methods used in a previous study by examining pre-post changes in empathic communication skills and perceived…

Background: Access to professors willing and trained to teach courses related to specific ethnic groups may be difficult for many universities to provide. This may partially explain why many psychology departments do not offer undergraduate courses that focus on the unique perspectives of specific ethnic groups. Objective: This study offers…

Background: Researchers suggest benefits for cooperative learning, but often fail to control for choosing to engage cooperatively, ACT scores or early course performance. Objective: To observe the effects of choosing cooperative work on exam performance in an Introduction to Psychology Course, while controlling for early exam performance and ACT.…

Background: Student anxiety about statistics may lead to poorer learning outcomes. Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate an exercise designed to teach students in an introductory statistics class the principles of bivariate regression and to emphasize how statistical tools used by psychologists are also implemented in other fields.…

Background: Animations of scientific concepts may improve comprehension by explaining and visualizing the steps of complex processes, but unless they engage student interest in meaningful ways, their effectiveness as teaching tools is limited. We achieve this through a novel approach to animation design that includes the target audience…

Intercultural competence--the ability to successfully interact and communicate sensitively with members of other cultural groups--is an essential skill in multicultural societies and an increasingly globalized world. A quasi-experimental study revealed that completing a cross-cultural international psychology course increased college students'…

Background: Undergraduates may not use the most effective learning strategies, particularly those considered "desirable difficulties" such as spacing, elaboration, and testing ("SET"). Objective: This study examined knowledge-based, metacognitive, and behavioral outcomes from interventions designed to teach undergraduates about…

Interdisciplinary pedagogy can enhance Introduction to Psychology curricula. We developed an interdisciplinary project to make meaning in a learning community (LC) clustering Introduction to Psychology with Introduction to Criminal Justice. Our purpose is to describe the project as a model and report on students' evaluations of the project and…

Students majoring in psychology are often required or encouraged to have hands-on experience in the field. One way to gain experience is through an independent research experience (IRE); however, little is known about what IREs actually entail. In an effort to learn about students' IREs, we recruited 117 undergraduates from a Research I university…

Undergraduate research (UR) is a high-impact practice associated with many positive student outcomes. However, extending UR opportunities to all students is not practical for all psychology programs. Classroom-based UR experiences (CUREs) provide a scalable solution to this problem, but there is a paucity of empirically validated, authentic CUREs…

Two controversial topics related to the teaching of statistics to psychology students are (a) when to introduce statistical software and (b) which statistical software package to use. The current research looked at the use of statistical software in statistics classes from every university with a psychology program in Canada. Researchers collected…

American Psychological Association (APA)-style writing is an essential part of the undergraduate psychology curriculum. However, little is known about the effectiveness of specific techniques for instructing students on how to format APA-style citations and references. The current research compared the effectiveness of having students (N = 76)…