Tag Archives: conferences

STLHE Handout

Hello!

Hope to see you at our STLHE conference presentation today: “Contributions and experiences of teaching focused faculty in Canada: Results from a national survey” (CON1.11a at 11:10am in McCain 2116, Dalhousie University). Here’s our handout:

STLHE 2017 Conference Handout Rawn Fox (Final)

Tweet us your questions! @cdrawn @joannealisonfox #stlhe17 #con111a

Our Abstract…

CON1.11a – Contributions and Experiences of Teaching Focused Faculty in Canada: Results from a National Survey

Many Canadian institutions are implementing faculty positions that specialize in teaching, yet little scholarly understanding of these positions exists. We conducted the first national survey of Teaching Focused Faculty (TFF). Launched during STLHE 2015, we surveyed 251 TFF working in 18 institutions across seven Canadian provinces, representing a variety of disciplines and experience. TFF regularly engage in diverse scholarly activities spanning teaching, service, leadership, pedagogical and disciplinary research, and professional development. TFF value their positions more to the extent that they feel integrated as part of departmental and institutional cultures, feel fairly compensated, have clarity regarding promotion and tenure expectations, and participate in mentorship regarding teaching careers. We recommend that institutions continue to cultivate permanent TFF positions to offer positive career paths for people who contribute productively to the educational mission of universities. We offer best practice recommendations for institutions and departments.

SPSP Preconference 2016

Good morning! I’m delighted to report that I am the morning keynote speaker at SPSP’s Society for the Teaching of Psychology preconference!

My talk title is “How Would You Design a Social/Personality Psychology in Social Media Course? Bringing the Self into Focus” and it’s about how I answered that question for myself.

Here are some resources that might be of interest:

SMTs: Student Management Teams

This post is the latest in my annual series where I publically commit to share the evidence-based change I’m making to my teaching practice this year. (See last year’s post, where I shared rationale and resources on two-stage exams, which were awesome.)

What’s the idea?

A Student Management Team (SMT) is a small group of students (usually 3-5) that meets regularly throughout a course, and whose primary objective is to facilitate communication between the course instructor and the class. I first learned about SMTs at the Teaching Preconference at SPSP this past February, from a talk given by Jordan Troisi. He uses them to gather feedback on what’s working well and what isn’t, to gather ideas about potential changes, and sometimes to explain in detail why something can’t be changed. The SMT also creates, administers, and analyzes mid-course feedback, which springboards dialogue with the instructor. Overall, the SMT acts as a communication bridge between the rest of the class and the instructor.

Why am I interested?

Every major change I’ve made to my courses in the past 3-4 years has (a) increased the amount of peer-to-peer learning/interaction, and (b) implemented an evidence-based practice (see the impact of these on my teaching philosophy revision, here and here). Of all my courses, I think my introductory psychology courses (101 and 102) need the most attention. I see SMTs as an opportunity to work with motivated students to help me identify what changes are most needed and how we can implement them on a large scale.

Although most students rate these courses positively overall, I know that some of my 370 students (each term) feel overwhelmed, lost, stressed, and alone. To help somewhat, I have held a weekly Invitational Office Hour outside the classroom on Friday afternoons, and I have happily met many of my students face-to-face during that period. Some longstanding friendships among student attendees have even developed at those office hours! But I continue to struggle with the sheer size of my classes. How can I connect more students with each other more intentionally? How do I integrate more meaningful peer-to-peer interaction to help students learn while building community? I’m interested in hearing feedback from the SMT on these and other issues. I am also looking forward to building ongoing working relationships with a small cohort of students. My position is such that I don’t get many opportunities to mentor students (unlike, say, if I was running a research lab), so I’m excited by the idea of working closely with a few students to help me communicate with the many.

What evidence is there to support it?

Not as much as I’d ideally like to see, but as Jordan notes in his papers, it’s relatively new. I see no downsides to trying it at this point, and Jordan’s data suggest benefits not just to SMT members (Troisi, 2014), but also to the whole class (Troisi, 2015). I’m interested in adding a measure of relatedness, and seeing if his findings for autonomy hold with a class almost 15x larger (with, perhaps, 15x the need?).

Troisi, J. D. (2015). Student Management Teams increase college students’ feelings of autonomy in the classroom. College Teaching, 63, 83-89.

  • Shows that students enrolled in a course that had an SMT increased their sense of autonomy by the end of the course, but students in the same course (same instructor, same semester) without an SMT showed no change in their autonomy. In other words, students feel more in control of their outcomes if they have an SMT as a conduit (not just if they’re actually in the SMT). This paper uses the lens of Self Determination Theory (a major theory of motivation), and provides a nice introduction for non-psychologists who might be interested in using it to inform their teaching practice. (In a nutshell: highest motivation for tasks that meet competence, autonomy, and relatedness needs.)

Troisi, J. D. (2014). Making the grade and staying engaged: The influence of Student Management Teams on student classroom outcomes. Teaching of Psychology, 41, 99-103.

  • Shows benefits for the SMT members themselves. They perform better in the course than non-members (after controlling for incoming GPA), which seems partly due to increased engagement over the duration of the course.

Handelsman, M. M. (2012). Course evaluation for fun and profit: Student management teams. In J. Holmes, S. C. Baker, & J. R. Stowell (Eds.), Essays from e-xcellence in teaching, 11, 8–11. Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology website: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/eit2011/index.php

  • Anecdotal discussion of benefits, with description of how he has implemented it.
  • Free e-book!

Are you thinking of trying out SMTs? Let’s talk! Email me at cdrawn@psych.ubc.ca

I gave a talk, and here are the resources

I’m at the Vancouver International Conference on the Teaching of Psychology, and I’m giving a talk entitled, “Using integrated course design principles to promote meaningful learning in an innovative applied social psychology course.”

Here are some related resources:

My powerpoint slides

2012/2013 course syllabus and team assignment

Reflections on my student evaluations from 2012/2013

Fink’s Self-directed guide to designing courses for significant learning

Fink’s Creating significant learning experiences

Team Based Learning resources, including books, sample syllabi, videos, etc

Reflecting on APS

Last week I attended the Association for Psychological Science Convention for the first time, including the Society for the Teaching of Psychology  (STP) Teaching Preconference. I am grateful to STP for awarding me an Early Career Travel Grant to help me offset the cost of my flight all the way from Vancouver Canada to Washington DC.

One of my nerd-tastic highlights was seeing the actual apparatus Milgram used to examine obedience to authority back in the ’60s.

 

Beyond the obvious awesomeness depicted above, I can point to three key ways I benefited from attending this conference.

1. Networking

I have elaborated on how I went about networking in my previous post. Who I connected with was also critical. At the Teaching Preconference, I met two other research methods textbook authors, including the always-inspiring Beth Morling, and my US-Edition Cozby counterpart Scott Bates. Scott gave an insightful talk on how he is using the APA guidelines for psychology majors to steer his course (re)designs; it was fun to talk with him afterward about course design and how he came to work on the Cozby text too. Turns out both our stories share a similar right place/right time theme. Also, I was delighted to meet a fellow regional representative of the STP’s Early Career Psychologist Council, Ali O’Malley at Butler University.

For the rest of the conference, my networking opportunities were largely driven by Twitter conversations and chance encounters. For example, I happened to sit next to my UBC colleague Eric Eich during the good data practices symposium (see below). He’s the editor in chief of our field’s top journal, Psychological Science. Sitting next to him meant I met Bobbie Spellman, editor in chief of Perspectives On Psychological Science (PoPS). As speaker after speaker pointed to journal editors as the key to improving our field, it was interesting to consider their perspectives too. Tweeting regularly meant that people recognized me, I could learn what was happening in other symposia, and I had conversations in person and online that would not have been possible otherwise. Check out this Twitter feed for what was said by everyone using #aps2013dc.

2. Insight into Good Data Practices, Replicability, and Data Ethics

One of the major reasons I wanted to attend APS this year was the theme program on Building a Better Psychological Science. These speakers built on their contributions to a recent issue of PoPS focusing squarely on this topic.  It was fascinating to hear Daniel Kahneman recall his early days as a psychologist, during which he gave up on a line of research that seemed profitable but he couldn’t replicate to his high standards. Apparently, his own introspection on how he could have been so convinced his small sample studies would replicate became the basis for his later revolutionary and Nobel Prize-winning work with Amos Tversky. Seems to have been a good choice.

Collectively, this lengthy line-up of speakers helped me reconsider the big-picture costs of the way our field has under-valued exact replications in favour of conceptual replications, and how we’ve been chasing p-values below .05. The arguments weren’t really new, but packaging them together in this symposium was impactful for me. Now that I’m a textbook author preparing for my 2nd edition, I found myself constantly considering how we can help our 2nd year psych majors learn best practices. For example, why not include an ethics unit in a statistics course? There’s usually one in research methods… but why not stats too, dealing with data management and reporting and fraud? Also, I’ll be changing the way I discuss the value of exact replications in my next edition. In courses, we could require our students to submit their data and analyses along with their final papers, to be able to reward data archiving and get our students into the habit of submitting raw data to back up claims. So much to (re)consider…

Talking to colleagues about the teaching-related implications of the Good Data Practices symposium was a fascinating exercise. It seems obvious to me that we should be “raising” our majors on best practices, yet there was more variability in reactions to this idea than I had expected. Many colleagues seemed to have simply not considered implications at an undergraduate level, but agreed with me that it’s a good place to start. In a couple of cases, I was challenged about whether such efforts would have any effect. These challenges have compelled me to consider writing a why bother/how-to piece to submit for publication. (Oh summer, could you give me an extra month?)

3. Ideas for my classes

Throughout the entire conference and preconference, I had tons of ideas for my courses! I mentioned a few above regarding methods and stats. In addition, Laura King helped me re-think how I approach Personality Psychology in intro: “you wouldn’t spend a full day discussing phrenology in the biological psychology unit, so why spend a full day on Freud in the personality unit?” Wow. That hit home. I do incorporate modern science of personality in intro, but I will be making major changes to that unit next year.

In her preconference keynote address, Beth Morling offered a ton of specific ideas for intro and methods, centred on her priority of creating effective consumers of psychological research. Specifically, she promotes teaching students to identify the type of claim being made (frequency, association, or causal), and asking four questions about the validity of the study (construct, internal, external, statistical). Which of the four validities is most important depends on the type of claim. See her blog for a bevy of excellent examples. This consumer-oriented approach will inform how I teach methods in intro in particular, where I’m not training psych majors.

Talks by Scott Bates and Keith Stanovich prompted me to strongly consider changing my supplemental readings for research methods. In addition to his course design process, Bates offered a great resource on the purpose of APA style as an indicator of values in the discipline. This article dovetails with conversations a colleague and I have had about this very topic (Jaclyn Rea of our Arts Studies in Research and Writing department). I am strongly considering incorporating this discussion into methods this fall. Usually, I assign parts of Stanovich’s text How to Think about Psychology. I’ve always known it’s unpopular with many students due to its long-windedness and general lack of pedagogical features to help students learn from it. I value his ideas, which was why I’ve been assigning it for years, but the packaging just doesn’t compel my students to read it. I must say that hearing him speak convinced me that although his ideas are insightful he seems to have little sense of audience–a feature reflected in his book, too. Although I’ll still draw from and cite his book, I may be replacing those readings with the APA style article and some other big-picture perspectives on replicability/methods.

Another idea came to me at a talk by Jason Priem, who is promoting his altmetrics approach to measuring scholarly impact. I’d like to create a shareable library for each course in Zotero including all the papers I cite during class. Students can follow up on any article they want, and I can always find what I’ve cited. It’ll be a lot of work to set up, but once it’s there, it’ll be a rich resource that’s easy to update and share.

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What a fun exercise this was to reflect on my notes and memories from this conference! I highly recommend this process to anyone hoping to actually follow up on rich conference experiences. I am pleasantly surprised by how much I gained from going to APS. I had feared it would be just too big and overwhelming to extract anything meaningful, but that fear was wholly unfounded.

Thanks for reading. Have an experimint.