Parents September 23, 2019

The Motivation Paradox: How to encourage passion and joy in your children

Challenge and mastery are motivators. As adults, we become engaged in a topic or activity of interest and are motivated by our inherent pleasure. When we enjoy something, external reinforcements to learn more or work harder are unnecessary.

Unfortunately, many children are not afforded opportunities to make choices in their own lives. Highly scripted days within structured school environments and adult-led extracurricular activities leave little room for autonomy.

Kids are left feeling like out-of-control automatons progressing through the motions of life.

Undergraduate Students September 16, 2019

Story Telling with Data

Have you ever looked at a graph and found it more confusing than helpful? Maybe you were sitting in a lecture and found yourself lost trying to decipher what was going on instead of listening to the presentation? You’re not alone, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Data, when used and displayed correctly, should tell a story that everyone can understand – not just data scientists.

Pre K - 12 Teachers September 9, 2019

Teaching Advice from Exemplary High School Psychology Teachers

The literature on teaching excellence is abundant, and educational scholars have produced a robust body of research on best teaching practices at all educational levels.  While a healthy body of literature exists regarding teaching excellence in both psychology and teaching excellence at the secondary level, few sources are devoted to the combination of improving teaching excellence at the secondary level in psychology. To begin to fill this critical information void, the authors performed a qualitative analysis of each chapter written by a high school teacher who was included in the Society of the Teaching of Psychology’s (STP) series of five e-books titled The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography: Perspectives from Exemplary Psychology Teachers.

Undergraduate Teachers September 2, 2019

Scientific literacy: It’s not just the textbooks. Psychology students score higher, too

About 10 years ago, a colleague and I compared scientific literacy content in introductory science textbooks(Macias & Macias, 2009). We found that psychology textbooks dedicated an average of about 21 pages to such content; about three times the amount in biology texts and 10 times what was typical for physics and chemistry (see Figure 1). But, as we pointed out elsewhere, this textual advantage may not translate into variations in student knowledge (Macias & Macias, 2018). The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in students’ acquisition of scientific literacy.