Professor of Cognitive Sciences
Course: Psych 9B / PSCI 11B – Psychology Fundamentals
What are the course demographics?
Psych 9B/Psci 11B is a large lecture course of mostly psychology majors, with about 450 people in the large lecture room BS3 1200. Many of the students are first-year or transfer students.
What is the general structure of the class?
This course uses a flipped classroom model, where the content delivery happens outside of the class, and the lecture time is dedicated to interactive activities.
Before class, the material is delivered by an electronic textbook published by Norton. The content is organized into several bi-weekly modules. Each module corresponds to a chapter in the textbook and requires the student to take pre-reading quiz, read that chapter, take a summative quiz, and then a test. All assessments are online.
During class, several activities ask the students to put into practice the content they have learned in the corresponding chapter. Interestingly, this class is a lecture on Tuesday and Thursday; however, half of the class comes on Tuesday and the other half on Thursday. The material in the Tuesday and Thursday classes are identical.
How do you make sure students are engaged?
Every lecture period has a lot of student participation. These range from easy activities like “Stand up if you’re from Southern California”, to more structured activities. Using PollEverywhere is an excellent and easy way to get student input and record student understanding.
What are some special features of your class?
The class includes Moments of Positive Psychology (MOPPs). These are evidence-based mindfulness exercises that are incorporated into the class discussion.
Does your class have any TAs or LAs?
Historically, the course has used TAs and LAs. However, the current course structure does not require them anymore. Students feel plenty engaged during the lecture period, and any remaining questions are answered via discussion boards.
How are assessments handled? Is academic integrity an issue?
Each bi-weekly module contains a pre-reading quiz, a chapter quiz, and a chapter test. All of these are Canvas quizzes that are automatically graded. These assessments allow open notes and collaboration with other students. Students can also re-take the assessments multiple times.
Academic integrity is not really an issue. If a student goes online to look up sources to get an answer, then they deserve a good grade in the class.
For the final exam, students can re-take any of the previous exams to increase their scores further.
What is the most logistically challenging part of the class?
Handling student emails in a large class can be a challenge. For this class, questions about pre-requisite materials and expectations are very common.
However, using browser plug-ins like TextBlaze allows you to create boiler text that can be easily inserted into emails or other online forums.
What advice do you have for engaging students in a large enrollment course?
First, design a course structure that makes it possible for a student to not be there if they don’t want to be. You can make learning conditions possible, but you can’t make them learn anything if they don’t genuinely want to.
Also, explicitly talk about the benefits (and some of the uncomfortable elements) around active learning. Students may not have a lot of experience with increased engagement expectations in class, so make it clear why these produce better learning opportunities and a more enjoyable course.