2023 Keynote Recordings
Dr. Morton Ann Gernsbacher
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Developing students’ critical thinking has long been the pursuit of higher education, dating from John Dewey’s (1910) classic How We Think through the Educational Policies Commission’s whitepaper, The Central Purpose of American Education. In the current day, scholars and laypeople alike believe the need for higher education to improve students’ critical thinking is even more pressing. Unfortunately, few college courses have been empirically documented to succeed at this goal. In this presentation, I will describe my Psychology Research Methods course, which is based on the following pedagogical principles: distributed (rather than massed) practice; active (rather than passive) learning; collaborative (rather than competitive) peer-engagement; daily interaction between each student and the instructor or a TA; universal design (rather than by request) accessibility; and open-access (rather than proprietary) materials. I will also present data demonstrating that this course succeeded in improving students’ critical thinking.
About the Speaker:
Morton Ann Gernsbacher is a Vilas Research Professor and the Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is an award-winning teacher, whose open-access, active-learning undergraduate courses were deemed APA’s 2018 Outstanding Educational Resource. In 1998, Gernsbacher received the Hilldale Award for Distinguished Professional Accomplishment, the highest award bestowed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty. She has served as editor-in-chief of the journal, Memory & Cognition, co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, associate editor of Cognitive Psychology and Language and Cognitive Process, and has served on numerous editorial boards.
Dr. Lisa Dierker
Wesleyan University
Passion-Driven Statistics is a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that has been implemented as a statistics course, a research methods course, a data science course, a capstone experience, and a summer research boot camp with students from a wide variety of academic settings. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the curriculum engages students in authentic projects with large, real-world data sets from the very first day! We focus on welcoming and empowering students to ask and answer questions they care about. As students engage in productive struggle in the context of their own original research, the instructor and peer mentors support each student individually through ample one-on-one mentoring. Together, we take students completely out of their comfort zone, and at the same time “love them through it” by creating an inviting classroom culture and an experience that gives them a safe and supportive space to “get it wrong before they get it right”, no matter their educational background or experience. https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/.
About the Speaker:
Lisa Dierker is a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University. With expertise in the application of innovative statistical methods, she has spent her career developing collaborative relationships across multiple disciplines. She has also shown an extremely strong commitment to teaching undergraduate courses in the areas of statistics and research methods, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, has developed an original project-based curriculum (https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/) aimed at increasing the number of students exposed to applied statistics. Her research has been supported through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Donaghue Medical Research Foundation, the Davis Educational Foundation and the McManus Charitable Trust.