How can the Psychonomic Society’s publications and digital content help with teaching cognitive psychology?  With the “learning groups” feature! In Spring 2018 I used the featured content blog posts to make an assignment for my undergraduate cognitive psychology class at Fontbonne University, and it worked really well.  This post expands on an earlier one I made about the assignment. Essentially, students read one of the featured blog posts plus the original journal article that went along with it, and then answered some questions about both.

My first goal with the assignment was to expose students to primary sources of research, without them getting overwhelmed or hopelessly confused (a little bit of confusion is okay). Deciphering a journal article can be challenging for students, and the featured content blog posts were perfect to give them guidance.

My second goal was to help students see that research comes from an active 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.  To that end, I had students reflect on not just the content of what they read, but the medium itself (cf. McLuhan).

I selected 20 of the featured content posts for students to choose from. I thought about just letting them choose from all of the posts we’ve ever done, but that might have biased them toward the most recent ones (minimal scrolling), and I wanted to make sure the topics were clearly connected to material we had covered in the course.

Using the “learning groups” feature, I made a page specifically for my assignment, which you can see here.  Fewer options would probably work fine. But I’d wanted to cast a wide net the first time. From the 20 options they were given, my class of 21 students chose 13 different posts written by 7 different blog authors. That’s some healthy variance!

Below are the questions that students answered after reading their chosen blog post and the original article (in either order).  Students submitted their answers to me via the online learning management system my university is currently using (Schoology).

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?

I was pleased to see that students’ summaries of the research were concise and coherent (question 2), and that they made thoughtful connections to topics they’d learned earlier in the course (question 4).  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 responses speak for themselves.

• “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.”

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.”

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.  Making this assignment was enriching for me too, in my dual role of scientist and teacher.

What was student feedback about the assignment (question 8)?

• Several students expressed appreciation that they didn’t have to write a traditional essay for this assignment. I think the short response format lets students focus on engaging with what they’re reading, without the dread of composing of a full paper.  I liked using the question-and-answer format because it allowed me to more quickly see what students were thinking, without having to navigate the trappings of formally written papers.
• Several students also said that question 7 was the hardest, as they had trouble thinking of what to add on to the blog post. That’s fair enough, as a testament to the quality of the blog posts, and perhaps a sort of collaborative inhibition.  I wrote question 7 as a watered-down version of an idea for a more advanced assignment.

What are some ways this assignment could be modified?

• A more advanced assignment could be to have students choose a new original research article and write a blog post in the same form as the featured content posts. This would require students to not only understand the research, but also decide what are the most important parts of it to emphasize. For undergraduates, this might require more scaffolding, and perhaps a revision process.  For graduate students, it would be a great exercise in communicating research in widely accessible language.
• The featured content blog posts could be used to help students prepare a presentation in which they explain the original research to the rest of the class.
• There’s a tradeoff between providing choices and asking specific questions. I gave students a lot of choices for which blog post and article to pick, and thus my questions to them had to be fairly general yet still thought-provoking.  If I were to only assign one specific post and article, I could write more specific questions about, say, experimental design or theories being tested.
• This assignment was done at the end of the semester. But it could just as easily be done partway through the semester, as long as I make sure the topics in the posts/articles are things we have already covered by that point in class.
• Finally, I’ve thought more about my second goal with the assignment, to help students see that research comes from a professional community. I’d like to add a component (perhaps as a separate assignment) that has students visit an active online forum used by psychological scientists, such as the excellent PsychMAP group on Facebook.  There they can see the variety of conversations that researchers have about open science, teaching, publishing, ethics, methodological quandaries, and which statistics to use.  One idea would be to have students identify two different kinds of discussion threads (e.g., one seeking technical advice, and one discussing a broader issue).  Again, I would want students to reflect on the ideas in the threads, as well as the ways in which those ideas are communicated.

The internet age has changed the landscape of scientific discourse.  Let’s use the new tools we have, such as the Psychonomic Society’s “learning groups” feature, to show our students that exciting landscape.  Anyone interested can contact the digital content editor to kickstart the process of turning Featured Content into featured teaching. We are pleased that we already have one instructor lined up for the fall semester, Dr. Scott Gronlund from the University of Oklahoma.