Friday at STP: Quick Takes

​Next week, Jen and I will be posting about all the things we learned at the Annual Conference on the Teaching of Psychology this year in Phoenix. Here is a quick recap of the highlights from the session’s today (stay tuned next week for more details!)

​David Myer’s started the conference off with an excellent opening address. I live tweeted during it, but here are some of my favorite points:
 
We’ve all talked about fake news, the replication crisis, and the importance of making our students smart consumers of media (for more on this subject that is near and dear to my heart, see Blake Harvard’s post from this summer).  David talked about all of these things. But what I appreciated about his talk, was that he emphasized that we, as psychologists and educators, are skilled in letting data drive our decisions. Do we all have our own political opinions, religious beliefs, and biases? Yes, of course we do. But as scientists, we are trained to let the data speak for itself. 

You can find out more about David Myers here:
TalkPsych.com
DavidMyers.org
@DavidMyers

Getting on the Same Page: Aligning Student and Instructor Perceptions to Facilitate Learning in Methods Classes
David B. Strohmetz, Natalie J. Ciarocco, Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr.
 
As someone who hopes to teach research methods in the near future, I was super pumped for this talk. This talk featured recent research from the authors  regarding instructor and student perceptions of research methods. While most programs require Research Methods, this is a notoriously difficult class that students aren’t excited about and don’t value. Natalie Ciarocco emphasized that to combat this, we need to “go from being content based to being learner based.” But how can we do that? The big take-home message: Research Methods teaches students valuable skills that make our undergraduates marketable for careers directly after completing their bachelor’s degree. I have so much more I want to say about this (it was an excellent talk!), but you will have to wait till next week. 

Training for, Developing, and Piloting an OER Course in Psychology
Julie Lazzara, Alisa Beyer, Matthew Bloom
 
All of us at The Novice Professor are eager to get more involved with Open Education Resources. Julie, Alisa, and Matthew gave some great insight on how to develop useful and effective OER resources. They gave a ton of links and gave some great tips. As someone who hopes to become more involved with OER, and someday put together my own OER materials, I found the information insightful and instructive. Next week I will share more (including their links!), but for now, I wanted to leave you with this little tid-bit that stuck with me:
 
When we as instructors make changes to a course, we look to implement things (textbooks, assignments, lecture style, etc.) that improve learning outcomes. Making changes to our courses take time, and it is vital that those changes we make benefit our students in some way. As instructors, it is easy to focus on those benefits in terms of higher grades, improved course retention, or better evaluations. As far as I know, there hasn’t been much (if any) evidence that says OER improves learning outcomes. But it does save students money.
 
Matthew pointed out that it’s easy to think that because your textbook of choice may only cost $40, that this burden on the students isn’t monumental, meaning switching to OER would be more trouble than its worth. But many students aren’t just taking your class. Even if all their classes had $40 textbooks (which IMO is highly unlikely), that could still cost them a cool $200 at the beginning of the semester. For the undergraduate who is working part-time as a server to pay their living expenses, or the student who is working full-time to support their family, $200 may not be easy to come by. For me, that alone makes OER worth while.

Disciplinary Impact Through Non-Traditional Maker-Means: Conference Hosting, Blog Posts, Podcasts, and Social Media
R. Eric Landrum, Garth Neufeld, Regan A. R. Gurung, Anna Ropp
 
This talk was (for obvious reasons) of great interest to The Novice Professor. It was great to hear established faculty talk about how non-traditional means of professional and scholarly development can make a large impact. One of my favorite parts of this talk was about how these non-traditional means can be represented in a professional way (such as on a CV). Stay tuned for a future post where we at The Novice Professor discuss the specifics of this further, share our experiences for how we include our blogging on our CV, and discuss how blogging has influenced our careers.

You can get involved with the conversation in the comments below, or come by our PIE at NITOP 2019!

Written by Karly Schleicher