I teach an undergraduate cognitive psychology class at Fontbonne University, and in Spring 2018 I used the Psychonomic Society’s featured content blog posts to make an assignment for my class.  I’m here to tell you that it went really well!

I had two main goals with this assignment:

1. I wanted to expose students to primary sources of research, to go beyond what they were learning from the textbook and classroom.
2. I wanted to show students that cognitive psychology is a living and breathing science (figuratively).

For my first goal, exposure to primary sources, it would be easy enough to just give students a PDF of a journal article and say “good luck.” But even with the practice they’ve gotten in other courses (e.g., research methods), deciphering a journal article is still a daunting task for students.  Even if they have a decent grasp of APA style, students can still get lost in the terminology and statistical details, and fail to see the forest for the trees.  I’d be a lousy teacher if I didn’t realize this.

And what about my second goal?  I wanted students to see that the research comes from somewhere, that it’s conducted and disseminated as part of a community of scholars, and that even though the peer-reviewed journal article is the gold standard, there are also other ways of communicating about the scientific process.

That’s where the Psychonomic Society’s featured content blog posts came in.  Since 2014, a team of digital editors under the leadership of Stephan Lewandowsky has written these blog posts to highlight and help explain articles from Psychonomic journals. These posts are perfect for the kind of assignment I wanted!  My plan was to have students read a blog post and the original journal article that went along with it, and then answer some questions about both.

First, I hand-picked 20 posts that I would let students choose from.  I tried to pick a good spread of different subject areas and blog authors.  I also looked for topics that clearly connected to things students had been learning in the cognitive psychology class.  Bill Stoeffler helped implement the new “learning groups” feature, which allowed us to make a page specifically for my assignment, which you can see here.

Students were able to browse the posts in that list and pick any one they wanted. Then, after reading both the post and journal article (in either order), they had to answer the following questions:

1. Give the names of the authors of the original journal article, and the year it was published.
2. In your own words, what was the research about?
3. What are some things that the featured content blog post did to help you understand the original article? Any thoughts on differences in the writing style of the blog post versus the style of the original article?
4. Write a few sentences connecting the research to something you’ve learned this semester in the cognitive psychology class.
5. Where do you think this line of research should go next?
6. What is something that was in the original article that was NOT in the blog post?
7. Write a paragraph that would add on to the blog post.
8. Any thoughts on how to improve this assignment?

Students submitted their answers to me via the online learning management system my university is currently using (Schoology).  This assignment was due at the end of the semester.  This was the first time I had tried something like this, and I’m happy to report that it was a success!

First, I was glad to see good variance in which posts students chose.  From the 20 options they were given, my class of 21 students chose 13 different posts written by 7 different blog authors.  (They might have been a bit biased toward choosing posts written by their instructor [me] back in his halcyon post-doc days.)

Second, their own summaries of what the research was about were concise and coherent (question 2), and they made thoughtful connections to topics they’d learned earlier in the course (question 4).  Three cheers for retrieval practice and elaborative encoding!

Most excitingly, students reported in question 3 that the blog posts really helped them engage with the journal articles.  Two-thirds of students emphasized the importance of language.  They mentioned the language of the blog posts (e.g., “familiar style of language,” “accessible everyday language,” “less complex words”) as contrasted with the language of the articles.  The following three responses speak for themselves.

• “When I first read the original journal I was left a little confused, but after reading the blog I fully understood the study and what was being tested. … I like how the blog understood that the average person may not be able to comprehend the original journals use of vocabulary.”
• “The featured content blog post helped me understand what the original article was even talking about. The original article was full of jargon and numbers that really had no meaning to me until I was able to read the featured content blog.”
• “The featured content blog was written in a way that anyone could connect to it. It used words and phrases that people use on an every day basis which helped it make more sense to someone that is not skilled in reading research articles. Writing in this way was not only easier to read but also made it more interesting to me as the reader.”

Students also reported that the framing provided by the blog posts helped them develop a focused and organized understanding of the research in the articles.

• “The featured content blog post helped to summarize the study and emphasize the truly important information.”
• “Also, the way that the blog post broke the study down and explained it made it easier for the reader to keep track of the different sample groups. The blog post also summarized the original post very well, and made the whole study come together.”

Two students noted that videos in the blog posts were particularly helpful to them (one showing cockatoo tool use, and another showing a detection response task).  The blog posts allow us to use a variety of methods to help readers understand exactly what the participants did in the original research.  As one student said: “The blog had bullet points of the  questions asked on the questionnaires.  Knowing what the participants were being asked helped me to understand better.”

This is not to say that students didn’t also appreciate the original articles.  Several of them explicitly said they saw the value of both the blog post and the article.

• “I believe that both the blog and the article were very well written as they both fully fulfill their different purposes. A blog is intended to catch someone’s attention with brief but important points, while a research article can offer the detailed information, explanations, data, and proof.”
• “The writing in the blog was more relaxed while the writing in the official article was more professional and went through as many details as possible. It makes sense in the official article because more details are needed to make sure that there are no misunderstandings and no mistakes that could have been passed over.”
• “I found both sources to be equally beneficial in terms of what I took away from both the blog post and the article.”

To use Vygotsky’s principles, the original articles were in the students’ zone of proximal development, and the blog posts provided the scaffolding they needed to understand the articles.  This is science communication and pedagogy (i.e., teaching) at their best!  I will certainly be using the featured blog posts again in next year’s cognitive psychology class.  And with our new “learning groups” feature, which lets you easily make your own custom reading list, I encourage you to use them for teaching too.

Anyone interested can contact the digital content editor to kickstart the process of turning Featured Content into featured teaching.