Program & Abstracts

Vishal Thakkar University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Graduate students are expected to learn to both write and review manuscripts, but there is seldom adequate instruction given on steps to produce a good review of someone else’s work. This term, I gave an explicit, brief lesson on critiquing study design. Additionally, I developed a new, engaging course assignment for my graduate students, in which they worked individually and reviewed a paper in their area of interest through the PsyArXiv pre-print server, as if they were a peer-reviewer for a scholarly journal. I will present data of student ratings of the assignment as well as student learning outcomes.

Brooke O. Breaux University of Louisiana at Lafayette My lower division college students were having difficulty understanding how to apply the information presented in their required readings and course lectures to their research proposal assignment, which is their most heavily weighted summative assessment. To help bridge this gap, I created in-class engagement activity assignments that allow me to target specific skills and concepts related to the development of their research proposal. I try to make these assignments positive formative experiences in which students are given the opportunity to work with their peers to answer difficult questions as well as earn points and receive timely feedback for these efforts.

Jennifer Samson Queens University of Charlotte Anyone else spend too much time grading students’ writing just for them to seemingly ignore all feedback and turn in second and even third drafts with the same errors? This presentation describes my adventures this year re-vamping assessment of methods students’ drafts to increase student feedback use and engagement in self-evaluation/meta-cognitive skills and make providing feedback more efficient, especially in light of an unexpected, extra-large cohort. I’ll discuss the use of self-evaluative reflections, one-on-one feedback meetings, where students score their drafts with me based on the criteria (instead of me providing written feedback), and implementation of professional style “reply to the reviewer” letters submitted with the final paper. Finally, I’ll describe lessons learned – what worked and what still needs work.

Andrea Sell, Nicole Talarico, Marissa Ericson California Lutheran University This presentation will explore transforming familiar games and icebreakers like charades, catchphrase, Pictionary, and snowball fight into spirited, active learning tools for statistics. Games are a form of active learning and, as such, can help reduce time in passive lecture, help students stay engaged, build a learning community, and increase memory retention (e.g., Kumar & Lightner, 2007; Davidson & Katapolis, 2022; Spanjaard et al., 2018; Hogan & Sathy, 2022). However, finding pre-made college-level games for statistics courses can be time-consuming, expensive and may not accurately fit a lesson’s specific learning objectives. In this presentation, we will talk about how to adapt pre-existing game paradigms to individual or course-specific learning objectives to suit the needs of the students.

Dina Gohar University of Michigan This experiment (N = 200) investigates whether a syllabus designed to facilitate a growth mindset can improve students’ perceptions of Research Methods, which many psychology majors dread. Compared to a conventional syllabus with the same requirements, students who read a growth-mindset based syllabus that used recursive assessment reported not only more of a growth mindset but also significantly less anxiety about and greater desire to take research methods, which was perceived as less challenging, too, especially for females. Additionally, students predicted significantly higher grades in the growth-mindset course and perceived its instructor to be significantly more qualified, reasonable, and nice. Thus, designing a syllabus to facilitate a growth mindset may be a simple and cost-effective way to improve enrollment in challenging courses like research methods, especially females.

Robert Kelley MiraCosta College SPSS is an advanced statistical software package. To scaffold student learning, I developed the www.P2L.io website, freely offering online statistics games that are short, focused, and provide immediate feedback. The SPSS games activities use screenshots (with permission) to simulate the use of SPSS and include video tutorials, presentation slides, and practice data sets. In tutorial mode, each step in the analysis is briefly covered and students are shown where to click. In game mode students have a limited number of hints to complete the activity (with some of the instructional scaffolding removed, to support their developing mastery). These activities support equity in the learning process, through a wide variety of instructional resources and scaffolding for students to learn SPSS.

Amanda Joyce Murray State University Do you have a hard time engaging your students with research-related or statistical content? Why not inject a little levity into your course through the use of memes and humor? This session will explore the ways in which memes, such as those in the Research Wahlberg or Study Ryan Gosling genres, can be used to capture student attention, clarify difficult concepts, and create visual imagery to help students remember tricky concepts. The session will explore how memes and other levity can be included in lectures, course activities, exams, and assignments, as well as how students can be encouraged to create their own humorous content to share with the class.

V.N. Vimal Rao, Eric Friedlander, Jax Mader University of Illinois; Saint Norbert College; Purdue University Inclusive contexts in a statistics or data science course should reflect current societal maxims and beliefs and move beyond gender measured as a binary variable. We will share three activities developed for an introductory statistics course at the secondary or post-secondary level (one lecture, one lab assignment, and one in-class activity). The activities are based on data sets that include a large number of non-cisgender individuals, with contexts and questions that focus on promoting gender inclusivity. The focus of this poster session will be on demonstrating and discussing how attendees can use these activities to foster inclusivity in their classrooms, along with details about the design and evaluation of these activities.

Pearl Chang Kennesaw State University One of the ways to increase student engagement in research-related courses is to deconstruct the perpetual fear surrounding this course. My research courses aim to provide students the opportunity to create a personalized, unique relationship through an authentic lens. Additionally, deconstructing fear and shifting students' mentality into embracing their authentic selves increases an internal locus of control. Fostering authenticity in the classroom enhances willingness and motivation to meaningfully engage in the material. It is speculated that students develop a personal meaning to research methodology when students perceive that the instructor role models authenticity. and shows confidence in students’ abilities. The didactic classroom is approached to include increasing students’ authentic selves as well as understanding how the research process impacts each of us at an individual level.

Jen Dyer-Seymour California State University, Monterey Bay It is when students grapple with all the challenges of designing a study that they can put all the pieces together that they learn in a research methods course. They should not get crushed when their ideas don't quite hit the mark. I want to share my ungraded midterm exam that asks students to design two research studies, one experimental and one correlational.

Brittney Bishop-Chrzanowski University of Missouri Research suggests that students better understand and remember what they learn if given the opportunity to engage with and think deeply about course material. One way to do this is through making connections and applying what they learn to new situations. This presentation will focus on a sequence of weekly learning activities - where each week's learning activity builds off the previous week's - that provide students with the skills to be producers of research. The nature of these weekly activities varies with the material being covered but includes group discussions and individual assignments.

Paula Marentette, Yajie Song, Seyma Yildirim-Erbasli University of Alberta—Augustana Campus; McGill University; Concordia University of Edmonton Reflection is an effective pedagogical practice focussed on making sense of one’s experiences (Boud et al., 1985; Kolb, 2014, Yilmaz & Keser, 2016). This presentation explores an online weekly reflection task in an introductory statistics course. Each week, students were given problems that required application of key concepts. After completing the problems, they were provided the solutions and explanations. In order to receive a passing grade, students answered three or four questions that encouraged them to reflect on their learning. Moreover, the instruction and evaluation in the following week can be adjusted based on the identified prevalent misconceptions from students’ reflections. Such practice helps students to identify misconceptions. Students recognized successful comprehension as well as opportunities to improve their learning strategies.

Tifani Fletcher West Liberty University Research methods and statistical thinking are important to integrate throughout the psychology program curriculum. Students benefit from the opportunity to apply, review and revise assignments and projects. In an upper-level course on learning, students can apply information from previous research methods and statistical courses in the form of a scaffolded behavior modification project. Students are guided through a single subject design research project that incorporates a literature review of empirically supported behavior modification treatments, graphing and interpreting baseline and treatment data, and overall evaluation of the project. Students have the option of continuing or revising their behavior modification project beyond the course as an independent study, which typically leads to a professional presentation of their research.