​For a while now, I have noticed that students don’t seem to know how to take notes. When in class, they only focus on writing down what is on the PowerPoint slides, and they write this down as a word-for-word transcription. They do this even if the lectures slides are available on the LMS. This means that student may be unintentionally ignoring the message from the instructor. Those students are missing out on additional explanations and examples. Their lives could be more difficult when it comes time to study for the exam without that additional information.

​Every school I’ve been to since starting graduate school, I’ve been the instructor for research methods lab. It’s done a little differently at every place but generally functions with the same end goal in mind: give students experience with data collection (and maybe analysis) and writing a full APA style research report.

Here are some fun ideas I came up with for a social psychology class (with help from various sources, particularly conference presenters). While these are specific to my social psychology course, they could be easily adapted for other course content: ​

​When most people think of an immersive learning experience, they probably think of an internship or a field trip or maybe learning a foreign language via immersion (I.e., in the country of origin). While these experiences are immersive, students can also have immersive experiences without leaving the classroom.

​I’ve just wrapped up my third year as an assistant professor. Can you believe it? I almost can’t. I work at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC. We’re in the heart of downtown; campus is a gorgeous tree-filled oasis. It’s a small school; about 800 students, which was the size of my high school. Over the last few years, I’ve had some good and some less than desirable experiences. I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my time at WPU thus far and generate a list of pros and cons of working at a small, private liberal arts university.

The last year here at the Novice Professor has been a difficult one. We've experienced a lot of upheaval in our personal and academic lives. While we are still in the midst of a pandemic that seems to have no clear end in sight, we are forging ahead as best we can and hope that the new academic year can bring some much needed focus.  One of the ways we are refocusing our love of teaching and blogging about it is by introducing a new project, Course Studies. 

To introduce you to this project, I talked with our regular contributor Dr. Bob DuBois about where the idea came from and what you can expect from this new thing! We hope that you enjoy listening and we can't wait to share our first episode with you.

-Ciara Kidder 

​Most people have heard about the IQ test. Its popularity makes it an easy example for statistics classes. However, measuring something as vast as intelligence is difficult. In this post, I talk about how a podcast episode about intelligence testing can be used as an example of statistics and research methods in the real world.