Category: cognitive psychology

437. Impostor Phenomenon

Posted in cognitive psychology, diversity, emotion, engagement, equity, first-generation students, growth mindset, higher education, learning, motivation, teaching
March 18, 2026

Impostor phenomena can deter college students, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, from pursuing majors in STEM disciplines. In this episode, Sara Kien joins us to discuss strategies that can reduce imposter phenomena and reduce equity gaps in student success.

Sara is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northern Arizona University. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology and recently completed a masters degree in information and data science. Sara is an award winning educator with over 20 years of experience and the author of Data Science and AI in Psychology, an interactive eTextbook on data science, big data, and machine learning in psychology.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Impostor phenomena can deter college students, especially students from historically underrepresented groups, from pursuing majors in STEM disciplines. In this episode, we discuss strategies that one faculty member has used to reduce impostor phenomena and reduce equity gaps in student success.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Sara Kien. Sara is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northern Arizona University. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology and recently completed a masters degree in information and data science. Sara is an award winning educator with over 20 years of experience and the author of Data Science and AI in Psychology, an interactive eTextbook on data science, big data, and machine learning in psychology. Welcome Sara.

Sara: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

John: Thanks for joining us.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Sara, are you drinking tea with us today?

Sara: I am. I was so excited about this part of the podcast. This tea, I have to say, is pretty legit. I love tea, and I put time and effort into tea, yeah, so I was really excited about this. So my tea comes from a local company in the southwest called Old Barrel Tea Company, and so we have one of their flagship stores here in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is where Northern Arizona University is located. And so they just have a wide range of tea options. And so this tea today, I chose berry, and then I even have some special honey, like oak-infused honey added to this tea. And so I was just really excited to get my tea ready and to brag about my tea, and also to plug the Old Barrel Tea Company, because they’re fantastic. and the oak

John: And the oak-infused honey certainly fits with the old barrel, [LAUGHTER] nicely.

Sara: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, it sounds right up. John’s alley.

Sara: Wonderful.

Rebecca: Today I have Scottish Breakfast tea.

Sara: Hmmm

John: Good. I had that a couple times yesterday, but today I have a ginger peach green tea.

Sara: Oh yum.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your work addressing impostor phenomenon and your work in redesigning data science classes in psychology. What does the data suggest about the prevalence of impostor phenomenon among college students?

Sara: That’s a great question. It’s also a bit of a complicated question, because it really depends on how impostor phenomenon is measured, and it also really depends on the context. So just to provide a little background regarding this construct, impostor phenomenon, which is also commonly known as impostor syndrome… so I think a lot of folks will be familiar with that terminology… was actually coined in 1978 by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes as part of their work examining or investigating highly successful women who had a really difficult time internalizing their success. And so at that time, they coined the term impostor syndrome, and over the years, increasingly, the research has suggested that impostor syndrome, or now as we refer to it, impostor phenomenon is highly prevalent. It’s quite pervasive, actually, with recent findings suggesting that, in terms of just generalized impostor phenomenon, rates might be high as 80% in the population of individuals experiencing a sense of impostorism. And so what is impostor phenomenon? What are some of the defining features or characteristics? Currently the field identifies three elements. So the first is a really intense or chronic feeling of self doubt in spite of overwhelming evidence of achievement. So really just a belief that you’re a fraud. That’s really the heart of impostor, right? That I’m an impostor, that I’m a fraud, that I don’t belong here, that I’m here by accident. Everybody else belongs here, but I don’t. And so that second element, like that I’m here by accident, is discounting our success, or believing that our success is undeserved, and that we attribute our success to factors other than ability, so luck, for example, or maybe in the case of academics, a lenient professor. So I received an A in that course because my professor is really lenient and it’s just an easy course. Or I just worked harder than everyone else, but everybody else just has, like, natural ability that I lack. And again, I just really want to emphasize that it’s not just any feeling of self doubt, but really a feeling of self doubt in the face of conflicting evidence suggesting otherwise. So like in many cases, in spite of overwhelming achievement. And so how can we experience such levels of self doubt that contradicts the evidence, by discounting the evidence. And then the third element is just a fear of exposure. So if I’m a fraud and I don’t belong and I’m an impostor, then I’m just constantly sort of hyper vigilant about covering my tracks, and very concerned about being exposed as a fraud. As I mentioned, there’s recent evidence to suggest that rates of academic impostor phenomenon can be as high as 80% in the general population, and for this reason, recently, researchers have moved away from “impostor syndrome” as a relevant term to “impostor phenomenon,” because that level of prevalence really suggests potentially more systemic issues, rather than individual level factors. So syndrome suggests that there are issues at the level of the individual. In addition, it’s not a clinical diagnosis, syndrome really often refers to something that’s more clinical in nature. This is a common set of thoughts and feelings that are experienced by many individuals, quite commonly. With respect to academia, more specifically, the estimates for the prevalence of academic impostor phenomenon vary quite widely, again, often depending on how it’s measured. So, in some cases, the measurement might just include feelings of impostorism. But in other cases, measures might include all three defining elements that I mentioned earlier. And really one of the issues has been that within academia, or academics, more specifically, we haven’t had a relevant measure of academic impostor phenomenon. And so the evidence suggests that the rates range from maybe 20% to 50% or higher, depending on the degree program, depending on the context. And so in degree programs that tend to be more competitive, where there’s an emphasis on like hyper-productivity and the stakes are really high, like in medicine, for example, we see higher levels of impostorism. And again, that just highlights potentially systemic level issues, system level processes that are contributing to how individuals are experiencing their success and how they’re interpreting their experience within academia. So, fortunately, recently, some of my colleagues have developed an academic impostor phenomenon measure. So Valerie Todd and David Mcilroy published a validated measure of academic impostor phenomenon in 2025. Recently, as part of a joint effort within that collaborative team, we have been applying that specific measure in a program of research that’s examining academic impostor phenomenon. We’re very excited about the potential to examine rates of impostor phenomenon in the academic context, more specifically. And then in our case, as a research team, we’re all psychologists, so we’re starting with psychology majors and exploring rates of impostor phenomenon within the field of psychology. I guess one thing I could add, actually, before I say a little bit more about our program of research with respect to the validated measure that was recently developed by Todd and Mcilroy, that that measure is available for anybody who’s interested in the Journal of Current Psychology. And then the other thing I wanted to mention, in terms of addressing prevalence within academia and the call for a more validated measure, there’s an excellent review of the literature that was published in 2023 by Dana Ménard and Laura Chittle in the journal Review of Education. And so for anybody who’s interested in more details regarding prevalence and measurement, that’s a really excellent review.

Rebecca: It’s exciting to hear that there’s new measurement tools available, because even in casual conversation with students, in my context, it’s orientation for all the graduate students at our institution, they all easily say, “Yes, I know what that is. [LAUGHTER] I’ve had experience with that.” And when we bring it up and try to address it as a group, there’s a really high affect towards that in acknowledgement that that’s an important thing that we’re addressing in our orientation for these students.

Sara: Exactly. So that’s such a great point, because that actually leads to the next thing that I wanted to say. But just to address that specifically, as we’ve been developing this program of research, the number of students who are interested in getting involved in the research, either as participants or as undergraduate/graduate level researchers, or even just colleagues, like other faculty. So this is pervasive throughout academia, feelings of impostorism and self doubt. In spite of academic achievement. The number of individuals who want to get involved in this work really is quite overwhelming. For students. It’s very relevant, especially within the field of psychology, as I’m sure is the case in other fields, students really want to make a difference, and they’re very familiar with their experience and the experience of their peers, and they want to get involved in work that they think will be supportive and help to support wellbeing among their peers more generally. And the same is true for faculty. Of course, faculty care about student success and want to do everything they can to support students and so learning more about this phenomenon and the factors that predict this phenomenon, or intervention strategies and even to support their colleagues or even help to enhance their own wellbeing within the context of their career. It’s just really relevant. It’s very personally relevant for many folks in academia. So this research team includes Valerie Todd and David Mcilroy, who are both at institutions in the United Kingdom. So this is part of an international collaboration, but also Jennifer Coleman at Western New Mexico University and Ivette Merced at Irvine Valley College. We’ve started investigating rates or prevalence of impostor phenomenon among psych majors with this new tool, and what we found is that, as you just mentioned earlier, actually the majority of students report some level of impostor phenomenon. And then what’s also interesting with respect to prevalence, and so I mentioned that it’s a little complicated because it turns out it’s context specific. As part of this work, I’ve actually been leading one line of research in this larger program that’s focused on supporting students, supporting psych majors in more STEM-focused courses as a part of their psychology degree program. So we contextualized this tool to measure academic impostor phenomenon in relation to statistics, more specifically, or research methods more specifically, or psychology in general, in addition to the more generalized measure. And what we found is statistically significant differences in average scores of academic impostor phenomenon depending on context. For psych majors, academic impostor phenomenon in relation to statistics scoring significantly higher than other types of AIP. So again, what’s the prevalence? It really depends on how we measure it. It depends on the context, it depends on the domain, and we’re seeing like just a growing body of research and literature in this area. So I think it’ll be really interesting to continue exploring this question moving forward.

John: So you mentioned some ways in which it varies. You mentioned in statistics classes, for example, there seems to be higher rates. You mentioned earlier that in the more competitive fields, there seems to be more. What other factors seem to result in higher levels of impostorism.

Sara: So, in terms of the factors that predict impostorism, there are a few individual level factors, but we’re seeing increasingly that the individual level factors really interact with what’s happening more at the systems level, with systemic factors. Some predictors include some personality characteristics. There’s some evidence to suggest that neuroticism, for example, predicts impostor phenomenon more generally, as well as academic impostor phenomenon to the extent that that’s been measured in academic context. Perfectionism is strongly correlated with academic impostor phenomenon. We also see other correlates. So for example, academic impostor phenomenon, and impostor phenomenon more generally, is associated with mental health issues like depression and anxiety, psychological distress, burnout. But one thing to note here, in addressing these correlates and the factors that predict academic impostor phenomenon, is there’s really a lack of research that investigates causality. So it’s difficult to know, for example, whether feelings of impostor phenomenon give rise to perfectionism or lower self esteem, which is another correlate of impostor phenomenon, or whether lower self esteem and perfectionism predispose individuals to higher levels of impostor phenomenon. So it’s hard to discern the nature of that relationship, but some other factors as we start thinking about like, “Well, what’s happening at the individual level versus a more systemic level?” There’s been a body of work examining demographic differences in impostor phenomenon. So Kevin Cokley at the University of Texas at Austin has been studying impostor phenomenon in academic contexts for over 10 years, and has published some really interesting work in this area, and also in the area of mental health implications of impostor phenomenon. And again, that review that I mentioned earlier, the Ménard and Chittle review, published in 2023, does a really nice job of highlighting essentially what is intersectionality, or the interactive nature of individual level variables and what’s happening at the systems level. So with respect to demographic factors, a number of researchers have explored group differences between individuals who are historically minoritized in certain settings or pathways, and examined variability among those populations. And ultimately, the findings are mixed, with some research suggesting that there are group differences, for example, gender differences or differences based on race or ethnicity, while other research suggesting that there are no group differences. And so follow up research has revealed that with respect to group differences, the answer is, “it depends.” So, there aren’t just inherent differences in academic impostor phenomenon across demographic groups, with certain minoritized groups, for example, Women in Data Science focused degree programs or computer science focused degree programs. In the field of data science, for example, women only make up 20 to 25% of all data scientists. So in fields where women are historically minoritized or are underrepresented, we don’t necessarily see higher levels of academic impostor phenomenon among women. What matters is the context. So whether the context that women are in highlights those disparities. So is there evidence of racial discrimination or gender discrimination in these environments? Is there evidence of prejudice? Are there sufficient role models who can serve in a mentoring capacity for individuals who might be underrepresented within a particular industry or domain, and is there access to representation? In addition, often environments that are more competitive in nature tend to exacerbate impostor phenomenon for individuals who might be historically minoritized or underrepresented in certain domains. And so really, what the research suggests is that academic impostor phenomenon may serve as a mediator or a mechanism by which prejudice and discrimination underrepresentation, hyper productivity and competitiveness can impact mental health. So without that context, group differences in impostor phenomenon may be similar, but if you add those stressors, then we might see an exacerbation of impostor phenomenon, in the sense of: “I don’t belong here. I don’t belong. I don’t fit in. I don’t know how I got here. I’m at risk of being exposed for my lack of ability,” which then can have implications for mental health and for future outcomes.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about the prevalence and that it’s pretty common that people have some of these feelings. What are the consequences if students experience impostor phenomenon in their persistence?

Sara: The consequences can be widespread and cascading, unfortunately, and different people handle the experience of impostor phenomenon in different ways. Generally speaking, the research suggests that some of the most prevalent or pervasive kinds of consequences include effects on mental health… so, depression, anxiety, psychological distress, burnout. There is also a relationship with lower self esteem, lower academic self confidence or self efficacy, so your belief in your ability, which aligns well with those three elements of impostor phenomenon… maladaptive perfectionism, so a kind of perfectionism in which you set almost unattainable standards and goals which can exacerbate feelings of distress and burnout and exhaustion. And in turn, these mental health struggles can lead to unfortunate outcomes, for example, procrastination, like, how do we cope with these kinds of mental health issues, right? And how do we cope with these distressing thoughts and feelings related to self doubt? So procrastination, avoidance, and withdrawing can lead to delayed graduation. In the case of students, we might change degree programs. In the case of faculty, we might change careers. We might leave academia and pivot and pursue a different line of work. Sometimes students are at risk of dropping out. Another unfortunate outcome that can occur is a type of self sabotage, in which students become less risk taking because beliefs about their lack of ability, in other words, are less likely to pursue certain scholarship opportunities, or maybe less likely to pursue graduate school, or, in the case of professionals within academia, are less likely to pursue promotion. So that’s one kind of consequence or outcome, another outcome related to perfectionism. And then what we see also, in relation to certain personality traits like conscientiousness, is that we see on the flip side, some individuals compensate over-preparation, which can be a mechanism leading to exhaustion and burnout. So then again, we see, in terms of the impact on academic performance like GPA, the findings are mixed because many individuals who are experiencing impostor phenomenon overcompensate through over-preparation and perfectionism, so they’re still dealing with the mental health struggles associated with impostor phenomenon, but because of a fear of being exposed, they’re working harder than anyone else to try to hide what they perceive as their lack of ability. The language I’m using is like “t\They’re doing this, [LAUGHTER] you know, this is what they do,” but just as full disclosure, most of us are familiar with this phenomenon. So even for myself, on a daily basis, I’m challenged with feelings of impostorism. Even preparing for this podcast, I have a perception that there’s a certain level of expertise that I should be demonstrating as part of this podcast interview, have self doubt at times about my level of expertise and whether I can communicate effectively. For me, I fall on the more perfectionist side of the equation, so that I’m at risk of over-preparing and starting to feel self doubt about whether I can cover everything that I want to cover. A little later, we’ll talk about strategies and intervention for addressing feelings of impostor phenomenon. But I have to take a step back and recognize what’s happening and reframe my experience, and just to highlight that this is a common experience, and even for those of us, or maybe even especially for those of us who are conducting research in this area, we’re motivated by similar kinds of experiences that we’ve had that have impacted us throughout our educational journey or throughout our career. So with respect to students, for educators who really care about students and who are really student centered, it’s really important to consider the mental health struggles that they might be experiencing and the ways in which those could be impacting their performance in the classroom as a function of academic impostor phenomenon, including whether students participate in classroom discussions or how engaged they are in group work. If they are concerned about a sense of belonging, whether they belong, they might feel less comfortable sharing or engaging with other students, with their peers, and in particular, if they feel that there’s risk of being exposed as a fraud. So in many cases, a student who may seem withdrawn isn’t necessarily disinterested or uninterested in the course material, they might be dealing with significant feelings of self doubt, fear of exposure, that are leading to mental health struggles, all of which might be associated with their behavior in the classroom.

John: A while back, we interviewed Peter Arcidiacono, who was one of several authors of a study that looked at the attrition rates from students in STEM majors. In particular, what they found in the study was that women, on average, did better in introductory STEM courses, yet they were more likely to not pursue a major in it, even though they were interested in a major, in large part because of the lower grades received in STEM classes. Is it likely, perhaps, that impostorism may be one of the factors where the signal of lower grades in some disciplines may encourage some people to leave the discipline, especially if they’re already underrepresented in those areas.

Sara: Yeah, absolutely. impostor phenomenon could be one of probably several factors that are relevant, like one of the things that unfortunately occurs in more competitive degree programs, like STEM degree programs, a kind of a culture and environment where showing struggle can be penalized, where there’s additional pressure to maintain a perfect facade. If an individual is from a historically minoritized background with respect to that degree program or that domain, and is experiencing a fear of exposure for a lack of ability, may be less likely to reach out for support, may be less likely to engage in help seeking behaviors where they share openly about their concerns and their doubt and their struggle, and therefore are less likely to receive support, both in terms of mental health, but also academically. And then, as I mentioned earlier, what are the factors that predict persistence. What helps the student to be more likely to persist and to follow their interests and to follow their passion? Self efficacy is a strong correlate. So belief in your abilities, which is undermined by impostor phenomenon… faculty support which is less likely to occur if students are afraid of being exposed, and if the culture, as I mentioned, emphasizes projecting an image of success, so less likely to access faculty support if we feel penalized for sharing our struggles. Aso, you know, one major issue with respect to impostor phenomenon is that we don’t talk about it enough. It’s such a relief to hear that more institutions are introducing these discussions for incoming classes of students, because it’s not just what students can be doing, what faculty can be doing, but really what needs to be happening at the institutional level, where we’re normalizing impostor phenomenon so that students feel like they’re not alone in these experiences, and they feel more comfortable reaching out for support and sharing their struggles, especially in highly competitive contexts. For students who start to experience any type of failure, who are internalizing their failure, but failing to acknowledge their success and maybe even essentializing that failure as an indicator of lack of ability, those failures are pretty high-stakes situations. For those students, that’s an indicator of lack of ability that suggests that you’re not cut out for that field or that discipline. In those more competitive environments, it is the case that grades and research productivity and networking success are pretty high stakes, so early evidence of failure can feel catastrophic in those types of competitive environments where the stakes are so high. And again, if we had more opportunities to normalize the experience, more faculty support around these issues, potentially students would feel more comfortable reaching out and getting the support they need early. I really want to emphasize that it’s not students who are self selecting out. It’s really systemic, which is why, at an institutional level, we need to provide these supports. Without an institutional support system, it’s really the system pushing students out, especially students who are historically underrepresented, who maybe also feel lack of role models that they can reach out to, or lack of representation, which exacerbates their experience of impostor phenomenon.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about the importance of normalizing impostor phenomenon as a way of systemically starting to address some of these issues, because if more of us in leadership roles or in an educator role are also modeling that we experience this too, then it becomes less scary for a student to also admit those same experiences. What are some of the strategies that you’re using in your own classrooms, to start to mitigate the feelings of impostor phenomenon and the potential outcomes that can result?

Sara: That’s a great question. I feel like there are some strategies that I’ve been implementing for several years, and I also continue to improve in my ability to provide support in this area. Normalizing, as I mentioned, is a really important one, and we can also model our own impostor phenomenon experience in an effort to normalize. And what I find is that students experience great relief in learning that an individual who’s in a position that they might aspire towards also has experienced similar kinds of feelings. And really, what I found is that it helps to really open students up, and then students are more likely to share some of their own experiences of self doubt and concern. In my case, I’m teaching research methods and data science courses within the field of psychology, and the statistics and research methods courses for psych majors tend to be the most dreaded courses. And as a woman within the field of psychology, teaching data science, where women are underrepresented by and large (even in the subfield of quantitative psychology, at the upper levels, we see an under representation of women), I think it provides additional support for students with diverse gender identities to relate, in particular, to a role model who is underrepresented with respect to that particular domain or within that field or subfield. And so I do as much as I can to just share openly and honestly, to allow myself to be vulnerable in a public setting with students. For me personally, that’s required that I do my own work in addressing my feelings of self doubt and trying to understand the source of those feelings. Then that leads to the second highly effective strategy, which is cognitive restructuring or reframing. It’s quite normal to have thoughts and feelings related to self doubt, even if we understand the source of those thoughts and feelings, it’s still common for us to experience those thoughts and feelings, but we don’t necessarily need to attach ourselves to those thoughts and feelings. So reframing those experiences when we notice them can be highly effective, and there are a few different strategies for doing that. Mindfulness meditation is really helpful in becoming increasingly aware of automatic thoughts and emotions that arise, and becoming aware of those thoughts and emotions in a non-judgmental way. So mindfulness meditation is often a strategy that’s suggested in relation to cognitive reframing, but once we notice those thoughts and feelings, we can apply a new frame, for example, a growth-mindset frame. One thing I should emphasize is that there’s actually some evidence to suggest that the outcomes associated with impostor phenomenon are not necessarily negative, that there are actually some positive outcomes associated with impostor phenomenon. For many of us, if we experience feelings of self doubt, it can be a motivator. It can motivate us to learn more and grow in our abilities and to work harder. So when we experience feelings of self doubt, we can actually reframe even that impostor phenomenon from a growth-mindset perspective, like these feelings are just like my mind and body’s way of helping me to feel motivated. Of course, if they become maladaptive and start giving rise to depression and anxiety, then it’s important to start addressing those specific thoughts. More specifically, one example is if we’re feeling self doubt and concern about our ability in relation to any academic task or a particular academic course. Instead of identifying a specific end result that relates to social comparison, like I need to be at a particular level, we can reframe our experiences just in a perspective of growth. You know, I’m going to put effort into this activity that I care about, and my goal is to simply continue growing and developing in my experience, regardless of standards of success that are presented within a particular field or within a particular profession, so to reframe in terms of like interest and growth and effort, rather than essentialized abilities that have a particular end goal. One helpful approach to cognitive reframing is to reframe our thoughts and emotions in terms of growth mindset. So a growth mindset emphasizes effort and improvement, even in the face of failure as a function of effort. So really understanding that our abilities grow out of interest, passion and effort. In contrast, a perspective of traits or abilities as fixed suggests that these traits and abilities are innate, that we’re born with particular traits and abilities, so that failure reflects a lack of ability. Really, failure is an opportunity to continue to learn and grow, and imagine that we could continue to improve as a function of effort, even in the face of failure. So that would be an example of cognitive reframing in relation to growth mindset. And research has shown that growth mindset, in particular, is a really helpful approach to cognitive reframing.

John: Are there other things at the institutional level that can be done to reduce the impact of impostor phenomenon?

Sara: Yeah, and actually, I can say a few more things about instructor-level support. So in addition to normalizing and cognitive reframing, other approaches that are helpful that I also try to encourage in my own classroom include helping to support sense of belonging. So opportunities for students to work together in meaningful ways where they actually get to know each other and can support each other in accomplishing a challenge or a task is an effective way to help offset feelings of impostorism, but also to allow students opportunities for support among their peers. And as part of the research that I’ve been conducting in collaboration with my research team, we’ve actually started developing more formalized interventions that incorporate all of those elements, so normalizing, reframing, cognitive reframing, the value of faculty support and modeling, the relevance of role models that students can relate to, and increasing sense of belonging. We’re just currently launching a study that specifically examines the effectiveness of an intervention that includes all of those different elements. At the institutional level, some strategies can include integrating mental health support into the curriculum, increasing access to mental health support for students, normalizing at the departmental or institutional level, which is something we’ve already discussed, having those conversations for, like incoming cohorts of students. There’s research showing that faculty who have greater self efficacy in addressing diversity are more effective at addressing diversity in the classroom, and that can be particularly relevant for addressing impostor phenomenon that’s exacerbated among historically underrepresented students, students from racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation backgrounds that are not necessarily represented within their fields of interest. Some of the findings coming out of our teams include the importance of classroom comfort and faculty support, so normalizing and discussing these issues, not just at the level of student, but also among faculty, providing opportunities for faculty to learn and share about their own impostor experiences, so that they are better equipped to bring these kinds of strategies into the classroom or to have these kinds of conversations with students.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Sara: The focus for our research team, as I mentioned, is really to continue this intervention work, and members of our research team continue to offer workshops as well. We give talks and seminars related to impostor phenomenon that can help to support faculty and staff and students within academia as they address impostor phenomenon in their own lives, but also that offer strategies and tools and techniques that they can bring with them into their departments and into their classrooms. We want to continue to expand the research to include more diverse contexts, disciplines, and even more diverse institutions. So right now, we’re focused on psychology majors, but we are really looking forward to extending this research to other disciplines and other institutions. As I mentioned, it’s an international collaboration, and we’ve had a lot of interest among other faculty and researchers who want to join this effort. And so we really want to expand our research to include international contexts, and then to continue to develop workshops to support faculty training around academic impostor phenomenon. We’ve discussed the possibility of writing a book together that addresses, in particular, context specificity of impostor phenomenon. So one of the novel findings that we are bringing to the literature is the variability in academic impostor phenomenon in relation to even specific courses within a degree program, in relation to different contexts within a discipline. And so I think it’s really important to continue investigating intersectionality and the complexity of impostor phenomenon. Under what circumstances do particular contexts give rise to impostor phenomenon? So it’s not just like for whom, but for whom under what circumstances. And another element of that is, for whom, or under what circumstances, are particular strategies or interventions effective. So there probably won’t be a one-size-fits-all formula for helping to mitigate experiences of impostor phenomenon. The strategies that are effective will depend on for whom and under what circumstances the kind of impostor phenomenon that a student is experiencing. And so we’re really excited about really diving into the complexity of this phenomenon, of this construct.

Rebecca: We look forward to hearing where the research leads and your findings.

John: Thank you for joining us. This is an issue that clearly is affecting a lot of people. So getting more information out to other educators, I think, is going to be helpful.

Sara: I’m really grateful that you invited me to participate in this podcast. As I mentioned, I did some cognitive reframing for myself in preparation for this interview. And for me, one of the helpful thoughts and strategies was to just acknowledge that even if there’s some information that I really would like to cover that I forget, let’s say, or like, even if I’m not quite as comprehensive in addressing all of the relevant points that I would be really excited to share with you, that increasing awareness at any level is meaningful with respect to academic impostor phenomenon, because almost all of us experience it, and unfortunately, many of us experience it in isolation. So the more aware we are of the shared experience of self doubt, even in the face of high levels of achievement, I think the better equipped we’ll be to navigate our own educational and professional journeys in an informed way, in a way that will help us to maximize our true potential and pursue our passion and interest. I just really appreciate an opportunity to share some of this information, to have this dialog and this discussion. It really is my passion, in particular, to support students and to support psych majors in STEM related courses. So, thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Fred Llerena.

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420. Teaching from the Same Side

Posted in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, engagement, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, spaced practice, teaching, Uncategorized
November 19, 2025

Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode Michelle Miller joins us to discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode we discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press. Welcome back. Michelle.

Michelle: Hi, thanks. It’s great to be here. Thanks for the chance to speak with you today.

John: It’s great to talk to you. It’s been too long. Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking tea?

Michelle: I am not. I had all great intentions, and one thing led to another, and our time was upon us, and so I will be drinking a nice, tall glass of water

Rebecca: Again, the foundation of tea. I have Lady Grey today, John.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. So we invited you here today to discuss a workshop that you’ve been offering recently on teaching from the same side. What do you mean by teaching from the same side.

Michelle: So I want to just say right off the top here, it’s not like a formal framework or a theory or something like that, it’s really one resonant phrase that kept coming to the top of my mind to bring together a number of themes and ideas and even philosophies that I’m seeing converging out there in the world of higher education, pedagogy and course design. And so when I look at all the roots, I think of things like Pedagogy of Kindness, Cate Denial’s wonderful book and framework. I think about the idea of relentless welcome that was talked about in Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book, even some themes that come up from ungrading and alternative grading, all of which are feeding into this idea of: “Are there strategies? Are there practices that are essentially more adversarial than they need to be in our relationships with students and what might we try instead, and what can be some of the outcomes?” So those are some of the things that pulled together and have started again to come to the forefront of my mind as I’ve talked about this with faculty. So, teaching from the same side, itself, just the phrase, it’s also something that I wrote about in a newsletter issue from a couple of years back, and it keeps coming back to my mind, and I think it continues to resonate with readers of that newsletter. I think I got a lot more traction with readers that I have with some other ideas or themes or discussions that I’ve put out there in the past. That’s what got me thinking a little bit more about some fundamental realignments that can take place in our ideas about why students are taking our classes, our ability to meld those goals and find common ground with the goals that we have for them, and to even interrogate and question some practices that we may take for granted, even things like how we frame policies in our syllabus, what those policies even are, and how we think about drawing students into the concepts and material that we want to share with them as excited, engaged teachers ourselves.

John: It makes so much sense that we should share the same goals as our students, that we want our students to learn, and they want to learn. Yet a lot of faculty come into teaching with this adversarial approach. And Cate Denial talked about that in her book at the beginning, how she was encouraged to not trust students so much. And I remember getting a very similar induction into academia from colleagues. Why is an adversarial teaching approach or teaching relationship so common?

Michelle: Well, I really like how you talked about your formative experiences as a college instructor. And I think even for those of us like myself, where it’s: “ah, that was decades ago. How could that still be affecting me today?” But that’s what formative experiences do. They set us on a track, and they put us in a mindset that may be with us for a lot longer than we realize. So I think it’s really productive to think back, and I encourage faculty to do that as well. When I do get to talk to folks about this and work with them, I say, “Well, what were some of your early experiences, both as a student and as a budding, upcoming instructor?” And yes, like so many of us, I was told explicitly and implicitly at every turn, “Well, you got to keep an eye on those students. Your job is to choose the goals and the content and make the demands on the students.” We are the experts in the room. It makes sense that we would be leaders in that way. But then that turns into the sense of and you can absolutely expect that students don’t want that. I’ve heard different variations on: students just want the easy points, they want to check a box, they want to get a credential, go on to have a job and not intellectually engage. And so, hear that over and over and over, and you’re encouraged, and maybe it’s even valorized in certain cultures, certain departments, certain institutions, that the more you can push that onto students, the better instructor you are. And so I think many of us are questioning that, but we may not have some better ideas or anything concrete to replace it with, or we’re concerned what would happen if I changed this policy or took a different approach? And I’ll say that I also had an experience I’m just realizing now I’ve been thinking back to this experience. It was actually the very first time I ever taught a course as the instructor of record, and it was fraught with all kinds of stresses, as you might imagine [LAUGHTER], and there were definitely times when I felt that what I wanted was mismatched with what students wanted, and that we were on different sides, but it was long enough ago that I’m comfortable even sharing the particular conflict that happened. So I had a teaching assistant in this class, and the way it played out, the teaching assistant was about my same age, which was already kind of fraught enough, so I’m trying to navigate this relationship with him, and he is quite naturally trying to step up and be helpful and tell me what to do and what he thought I was frankly doing wrong in the course. And we had had a lot of student feedback coming in over and over that students, they weren’t happy with the course, but there was one thing in particular that they kind of wanted, and I looked, it was like, “Well, that’s an easy fix.” It just had to do with how many points and how fine grained of feedback they were getting on this one recurring assignment. I was like, “Well, we could do that if we change this midstream and it works better for everybody. Why not?” And my teaching assistant and I had a confrontation in my office. I mean, I remember it quite well. It w as the sort of where you’re both standing up on other sides of the desk and raising your voices at each other. And he said, flat out: “If you do this, regardless of what the change is, if you let those students know that they can ask you for something and that you’ll give in…” his words… “then you’ve lost it. The students are going to be in charge from here on out, and that’s going to be it for this semester. That is what will happen if you do this.” And I don’t see a good reason not to do it, and I’m going to try it, and we tried it. And what do you know? Students were happier and satisfied. We quit getting those same emails every single week, and it was fine. If anything, the level of respect and willingness to put forth productive effort improved. It didn’t go away. So I had the benefit of having that, but it’s something that I still had to tuck away and return to all these many years later and occasionally still do to remind myself that sometimes it’s a matter of just trying it. So even if we’re kind of dissatisfied with an older, adversarial philosophy, there are ways to experiment and find better approaches that meet our needs and our goals and our aspirations as the experts in the room, but also meet students’ needs a lot better.

Rebecca: We see a lot of examples where this us versus them relationship comes up. We see it on campuses, between faculty and administration, between students and faculty in a lot of different contexts. What’s the value of trying something different and not having this us versus them mindset.

Michelle: Well, the other really indelible experience and tipping point that I had around this does it have to be us versus them thought process was during remote emergency instruction. So during the pandemic itself, where that case, I think, like for so many of us, it wasn’t even a matter of like, well, maybe I could take something good and make it even better, that we could accrue benefits. I think we were in survival mode. I know I was. I had a handle on the technology. I think I was probably pretty well positioned, but I still had this experience, as many of us did in spring of 2020, going, “Oh, everything that I planned out and I was going to do and all the boxes I was going to check, because that’s what I always do, we can’t do that anymore.” And I just felt the ground fall out from underneath of me. I’m kind of going, Well, how do I choose? [LAUGHTER] And if we can only do some of these things and not a lot of the others, how can I make the right decisions, and part of it is realizing…[LAUGHTER] giving yourself a little bit of grace, and saying, “Well, you do the best you can, and not all the decisions are going to be right.” But I kept returning to that guiding beacon of, “why did students take this class in the first place?” None of us anticipated how it was going to play out when we all signed on for this. But what were the most important takeaways that they needed and wanted to get? And I just was like, “look, whatever the activity or learning objective was, if it aligns better with that, what brought them to the course in the first place? That’s what we’ll do, and other things are going to take the back burner or go away.” So I think that was one real benefit of when we know we need to revise something and not everything can happen, it can be a prioritization tool. But, what I sense is drawing in some of my fellow faculty to this is the idea of that better and more welcoming atmosphere and the possibility of taking more of our contact and conversations with students out of the realm of like the negotiation over points. “If you do this, I will give you that.” I don’t think any of us are really in teaching and getting inspired by conversations like that. sometimes they have to happen, but to have fewer of those and more of “I am struggling with the material. I’m worried about how this is turning out. I don’t know what to do next,” and me being able to step in and say, “Ah, I can help you,” because we are fundamentally on the same side. And even up to yesterday, when a student was asking me something kind of involved about a test grade, and could we do this? I had to take a breath, step back and say, “Okay, what moves her closer to the common goal of her learning about and getting excited about psychology, which is what we’re doing in intro to psych, and what would move her further away from that?” And yeah, more of a same-side solution, without getting too far into the weeds of what it was, I think we hit on something, and I saw a little bit of a light come up for her as well. Now, I think non-adversarial teaching approaches of different kinds are starting to make it into scholarship and teaching and learning and other sorts of literature. But here too, I want to be upfront and say, Hey, I don’t think that we can point to 20 research studies and five meta-analyses showing, well, if you tweak this one thing about your mindset or philosophy, that students are going to attain X, Y and Z. I hope it happens. But right now, I’m in that, to me, exciting and sometimes intimidating state of like, I think there’s something to this, but we just have to keep working working with it.

Rebecca: Minimally, maybe you’ll just be happier. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: …minimally happier as an instructor. Yes, that’s not about just saying anything goes or let’s always be buddy buddy, and I never want to have that conversation about your grades. It’s not that so much. I think it’s a matter of balance and realizing how even subtly telegraphing or communicating to students like, yeah, no, I said it was all about the learning, I mean that and the points, all that will shake out [LAUGHTER] in the end, and I’m actually willing to act accordingly and keep on that talking point. That really does start to make them step back and say, like, “Oh, actually, this is different, and I think I like it.”

John: Earlier you mentioned that so many of the discussions among faculty are with perceptions of declining student engagement, less student motivation, and students seeing education primarily as a means to a degree and checking off that box so they can move on to the next stage. And there are some surveys that indicate that students today see less connection between what they’re learning and their future lives and careers. Might the same-side approach help support an environment where it’s easier, perhaps, to motivate students,

Michelle: Right, so student motivation. And here too, it’s sometimes, even to this day, still like a little uncomfortable to me as a cognitive psychologist and one who comes from that tradition and sort of side of our psychology. But, as I frequently share about Minds Online. I realized just in the course of writing that first book, which is very cognitively oriented, we talk about memory, we talk about transfer of thinking skills and all this stuff. But I was like, “Oh, wait, if we don’t also talk about why students are doing all this great evidence-based [LAUGHTER] coursework in the first place, then why are we here?” So yeah, just acknowledging that, and reminding myself pretty much every day as an instructor that yes, I do have to think about this. So there is that perception. And I’m not, first of all going to necessarily just totally turn away from somebody else’s authentic experience and say, “This is what my students are telling me, but I respectfully also submit that when I really started reflecting on it, my experience, even recently with students, has not fit that mold of like, “Well, Professor, can’t you just not take up my time, give me my points and let me go on my merry way to a job.” I have students expressing a very diverse range of goals. Some have not formulated goals. They’re not trying to tick a box to get a job. They don’t know what the job is yet. They’re not even sure what credential they want to get. So I think in the right environment, if you know what to look for, and you’re primed to look for it, that you will see that students they do want to learn. Now do they always act in accordance with high intellectual ideals that we start the semester with? No, and I would submit that none of us do. It’s just not how human beings work. But there is a core and a well of authentic intrinsic engagement. But actions need to follow those ideals. So we talk about motivation. I do keep coming back to and frequently sharing with my fellow faculty two old good solid aspects of motivation theory that just seem to work time and again. And one of them is actually getting a lot of new air time as well, and sort of a revival of interest. So I can share those with you, and I’ll hit the real high spots of these. First of all, self-determination theory, our old friend… and all of the motivation theories, by the way too… they also really bring home an important point, which is not to think about motivation in terms of “you’re a motivated person,” or “you aren’t.” Motivation theory just really looks at the conditions of the environment and the setting, which is great news for us teachers, because students don’t have to walk in, just motivated people. They can respond to the cues and the incentives we give them. So self-determination theory is we’re more motivated when we have autonomy and choice in what we do, we have some sense of mastery, or that we’re getting better at what we’re learning, and there’s relatedness or social components, so somebody else out there cares [LAUGHTER] that I’m getting better at whatever this thing is. And I’ve just seen informally, but it’s a very strong impression that I have over the last few years of like scholarship of teaching and learning and learning and learning sciences research, lots of folks are discovering or rediscovering these principles and say, “Well, what happens if we actually bake these into, say, an online class? What happens to student achievement, especially around the autonomy and choice part?” And that’s one that too, that used to be really tough to do. I tried building all kinds of choices and saying, “Well, maybe students can be graded more on tests or weight their assignments more heavily.” I tried that many years ago, and it was so hard to do and track, and now, with better technology tools, we can say, “Why didn’t you pick this? This is your strength and you want to pursue it. Do that, or here’s a fork in the road, pick A or B.” So those things can really elicit just some basic, more motivated behavior. So there’s that, and then there’s always intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Lots of us say, like, you don’t have to just rely on intrinsic motivation and hope that it will be there. There’s ways to kind of promote that, and it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of all grade or other kinds of incentives. So I’ve been playing around with different ways to spark that intrinsic motivation, some sneaky ones that psychologists know about, and also some ones that I think lots of us hit on through our teaching experience, things like introducing surprise or asking students to predict, rather than always just telling them what the outcome is, so that can help build that over time.

Rebecca: Were there some sneaky ones you were going to share?

Michelle: Well, see how I did that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Is there a secret handshake or something needed for these?

Michelle: Oh, it is. It is, it walks a fine line between psychology and perhaps a little bit of manipulation, but people can decide if this is in their comfort zone or not. It has a terrible name, which is the “hypocrisy effect,” but has wonderful outcomes. So essentially, it’s a way to try to induce attitude change by getting people to act in accordance to what we’ve said or done before. So we all kind of naturally like to be consistent. If we say it, we tend to start to believe it over time. So there’s ways of doing this, essentially getting students to endorse or identify for themselves the value of either course features or things they’re learning about. Like I have a colleague here at NAU who, years back, was teaching a first-year seminar and it’s a pop culture topic. I won’t get too deep into what it was, but you might look at that and say, “Oh, sure, it’s inherently interesting.” Then again, students may look at it and say, “Well, maybe I should spend more time actually studying in this required chemistry class” or something. And maybe their families are even saying, like, “Why are you taking that?” So, right from the beginning, what he did is he asked students to write a letter home. I don’t know whether they sent it or not, but this is a classic technique to tap into this. So that was the assignment: write to your family and tell them why you’re taking a class in this thing that, on the face of it, might seem a little frivolous, and talk about the skills you’re going to acquire and how that’s going to help you in everything you’re going to do to make the most of your college education from here on out. So, that could be a way to spark authentic buy-in to: “Yeah, this is why I am actually going to put effort into this class,” or in my case, I hit on this with an assignment that does double duty, trying to get more investment in using class time and staking more of the grade on that without doing very traditional participation grading. So they do a reflection on what they’ve been learning over the last two weeks. And one of the prompts that’s in there does ask them like, “What’s your favorite learning?” and yeah, I’m leaning on them pretty heavily.[LAUGHTER] It’s a little heavy handed to say, “Tell me what you like.” But what does that do? You come up with something. I mean, students do have the option. If they’re like, “this is not doing it for me,” [LAUGHTER] I won’t take that personally, but most do find something. And it’s a good fit for intro to psych, because you do something totally different every week. There’s something for everybody [LAUGHTER] in this course. And so they’re the ones saying, “Well, here’s why learning about Pavlovian conditioning can really help you in your life. Here’s something I didn’t know about our sensory systems that was really insightful.” So instead of me always telling them, they’re telling me, and it should spark more engagement over time.

Rebecca: Good. I want you to get off the hook without the sneaky… [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Yes, knowing me as you do.

John: In our past discussions and much of your work, you usually focus on the cognitive side of learning, as you’ve mentioned, things like attention, memory, critical thinking. How might teaching from the same side support all of that?

Michelle: Well, I think that that’s just such an exciting perspective on this as well, and that’s something that I’ve really been challenging myself on lately too. Say, are these two separate things? So building in things like more retrieval practice, that active, effortful recall that we know is so much better than just the standard playbook of like, okay, you make a PowerPoint deck and explain it to me, and then I’ll take it home and reread it, which we know does not work really well from the knowledge perspective. Distributed spaced studying is sometimes harder to do as schedules get busy, and transfer and practice, this is hard stuff to actually get in there and keep practicing the skills, including with really messy, challenging problems. All that stuff is evidence-based. You know it works. I know it works. Our students, on the other hand, just they see the effort, or even some other facets of this that dissuade them from it. So the way I’ve been thinking of it lately is like, okay, so we finally have these evidence-based practices going mainstream. Like, really over the last 10 years, it’s this incredible success story with more people, podcast listeners, there’s all this great interest. So that’s wonderful, but maybe the next level is to put more into getting students to internalize those on their own. Because, after all, I mean, these are techniques that even if they’re not built into a class, if I know about them, I can probably bring them in as a student, or even if I’m not in a formal class, I’m in professional learning situation years after I’ve graduated, what better skill to have available to me than knowing how to break something down and say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to use some of these same principles.” And there’s some suggestions from the research literature that when students do have those good experiences and see it in action, that they actually do internalize it, even without anybody standing over them and saying, let’s do this. So I’m challenging myself to say, “Well, can I change my mindset from evidence-based practices, cognitive learning principles…?” These are not things just to do two students, say, “All right, I’ve applied this to you because I know it will help,” but also to say, “Hey, this is why it is the way it is, and isn’t it exciting? Let me bring you in.” And that might seem simple, and some of it does come down to transparency, this concept that many of your listeners may be familiar with, where we just quickly say, “Okay, here’s the assignment, but also here’s why it’s here, why it’s set up the way it is, and how it’s supposed to help you.” There is some research showing that that’s beneficial. Students will sit back and go, “Oh, okay, now I get it, and I’m more invested, and I’m on your side now as well to say I’m going to do this hard project and do it the way that you suggested.” So yeah. There is that. But I think also what I’ve facing up to myself is it’s not always just like, “Well, let me just explain to you a better way to do it, and then why won’t the students do it?“ And perhaps coming away is like, “Oh, they’re lazy. They don’t want to try something new, or they just aren’t listening to me.” Well, think of it in terms of risk. Students, by the time they’ve gotten to our classrooms, they are, of course, not blank slates, especially when it comes to their study techniques. If you talk to students for any length of time, you know that they’ve developed what they believe oftentimes are successful study approaches. And it’s a risk. So it’s really a risk-benefit calculation that our students may be engaging in to say, “Well, not only are you telling me to do this thing that’s hard, to close my book and quiz myself, but that’s going to take away from or replace something that’s worked before. Just because you’re telling me to do this, you want me to put my grades on the line [LAUGHTER] and throw out the thing that got me to here.” So when you see it in that way, you realize that there’s perhaps some different tactics and approaches. And here, some really esteemed cognitive psychologists have picked this up as really a challenge. So Mark McDaniel and his longtime collaborator, Gil Einstein, they’re known for a ton of different applied research findings and discoveries all over. And they stepped back and said, “Oh, wait a minute. This is an example of a dynamic that has been with us for some time in all branches of applied psychology, which is just knowing doesn’t transform behavior. Maybe folks out there are all eating their eight servings of vegetables and 30 minutes of exercise, doing everything we know we’re supposed to do, we don’t do it.” And there’s lots of reasons why, but Einstein and McDaniel said it’s still my sense is a work in progress, but they’ve put together a pretty detailed step-by-step program. They call it KBCP. So knowledge, belief, commitment, planning, I think, is what it stands for. But basically, you can get the sense here that it’s about not just “do your retrieval practice,” but also, “let me tell you about it, sure, inform you. But I’m not going to stop there. Let’s also do some demonstrations. Let’s try it with and without, and we can all see it in action.” So building that really authentic buy-in, and then encouraging students to get out there and try it in higher stake settings. So okay, what do you plan to do for that big exam you have in that other class? And let’s lay out a plan for that, and then come back and reflect and say, Well, did it work the way that I predicted it would [LAUGHTER] as the expert? And now, what do you want to do? So again, it’s something that I think is emerging, and their program is pretty detailed. So I don’t know that everybody’s going to go through that step by step, but the spirit of it is very much with me as a cognitively oriented instructor and researcher to say, “Okay, but how do you really reach people so that they are willing and excited to take it forward” and realizing that students, under the right circumstances, may do that, and that’s a much greater gift to them than just what you’re doing by designing a single class.

Rebecca: One of the key things of that model seems to be the idea, or from my experience, is that ability to achieve something and achieve that success and see it working, so that you then might be motivated to try it again. Thinking about any parent who has a kid that doesn’t like to practice stuff, but if they have some success in seeing that the practice helps them achieve something that they want to achieve, then they’re more likely to do it again.[LAUGHTER]

Michelle: It’s a competence piece. Now you’re putting it that way. Now I’m kind of seeing that connection. It’s the competence piece of SDT, and, yeah, as inspiration to stick with it and do the hard things. And when we’re on the same side, we have our techniques as parents who are also in the motivation business, but I have to feel like we are in a better position to do that when we can help celebrate and say, remember, we are in the same side. And here’s where it was difficult, but here’s where, yeah, you tried it and it worked, and let’s celebrate that win together from the same side.

Rebecca: You’ve mentioned a wide variety of cognitive practices. Can we think about what that looks like in practice?

Michelle: Yeah, and here’s where we can tap a little bit more into my other love within the field of psycholinguistics, but some of this is just basic communication principles as well. So as a piecing together and pulling from lots of different areas, how do we communicate that we are on the same side and establish that atmosphere of, frankly, trust and a non-adversarial approach to these things. Some of the things that have struck me as just, first of all, a lot of this work, a lot of the folks that I would consider to be my models, and the folks I’m looking up to here, they’ve talked about the syllabus as a starting point. So there’s lots and lots and lots of work out there. Sometimes, like, as the work builds up, it’s hard to synthesize, but a few threads that I’ve been pulling out. So anybody who has not read Kevin Gannon’s classic, I think, “How to Create a Syllabus” guide, it came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back. It was really, I think, one of the first clear, unambiguous, like “we need to do this and not that” in our syllabi, including calling into question, in a good way, a lot of the things that we have taken for granted, and I know I just copy pasted [LAUGHTER] semester after semester, including things like using all caps. It might come from a good intention of like, “this is important, I want you to see it.” But as Gannon so accurately points out, this is how we scream at each other online. And why do that? [LAUGHTER] and it’s just saying is there some other way to highlight what’s important? Or even, I had a faculty member say to me recently, she’s like, “Yeah, for all the complaining about, oh, students don’t read it, students don’t get it. Well, think about the policies we deal with. When do we look at them? …was when we need them.” So yes, absolutely, students should read the thing from top to bottom. This faculty member, she even sends out, pieces out, like relevant parts of it as reminders or announcements at the right times of the semester. So there’s other ways to emphasize besides just the all caps and Gannon also talks about is like, is there some way that your syllabus is kind of getting across that, not only here’s the things I don’t want you to do, but there’s no reasons for it other than I say so and it gets across this idea that “and I expect you to do all these bad things.” So playing around with ways of dialing that down. So syllabus warmth is another major concept, some interesting findings about how sensitive students are to that. And then lastly, I ran across, just in the last two years, a great article came out, maybe we put in the show notes. It was focused on STEM syllabi. And here they just took a very open approach, and they surveyed a variety of syllabi to say which of these seems more supportive and inviting and warm to students? And they have a great list that they laid out, including things like just phrasing things as we: we will, we are going to engage in these difficult topics, and here’s how we are going to do it, instead of students must… [LAUGHTER] which is what used to be in all of my syllabi, talking about challenge in positive ways. And here’s the resources that we want. And again, sometimes, yeah, it’s a good thing to have, like, “well, here’s the tutoring center.” But to say, “hey, successful students go to the tutoring center, and I promise you, [LAUGHTER] they will be supportive,” …some other way to do that and encouraging, very explicitly, that we do want students to come talk to us. So yeah, it’s like, well, I said what my office hours were, and now I’m sitting here, and why won’t students come talk to me? [LAUGHTER] And now I have several other alternative ways to schedule appointments, and I do give a little rah rah, but I also back up that verbiage with “and here’s even more access to me and all the ways to do it and in the circumstances under which you should do it.” So that’s one big starting point, is the syllabus. We can definitely get into a few others. But if you start there, I think a lot of other things will fall into line.

John: And we should mention we have a few past podcasts that address some of that. We’ll include some of the links in the show notes related to effective practices in creating that same side environment in the class using the syllabus.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think I’m hearing you say is that to be on the same side doesn’t mean we don’t hold boundaries, it’s just how we communicate those boundaries.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. And to pick up on that, run with that a little bit, that is now a really important part of my practice as well. While I’m going through the syllabus and cleaning it up and fixing it up, as far as tone, I’m also questioning the policies, so things like I’ve written about being pretty critical, and I don’t do anymore, the 10% per day deduction for deadlines. I handle deadlines very differently now, which is not to say I don’t have any or it’s anything goes, but I think it’s more the process of questioning it, of saying, “Well, which deadlines in this course are actually fixed, and have I explained that to students or mentioned it in any way to differentiate those where there is a firm deadline, like you really do have to get your discussion post in by Sunday night,” because, Haven’t we all been in an online discussion and somebody answers you three weeks later and we don’t actually have a conversation? Didn’t take forever, but that’s just a little bit of saying, “Yeah, it’s not just because I say so.” So yes, as we get into the substance of it, that is where we do have to think pretty deeply about what appropriate boundaries are. And just for the record, too, it doesn’t mean being buddy buddy, and we’re all friends with students at all times. I’m pretty formal in my interactions with students. That’s appropriate for my style and my persona. But I would challenge listeners, go back over a syllabus, as you’re planning for next semester, identify at least one thing to say, “Is there some way that this could be less harsh?” Perhaps even, as I mentioned, I have my little heuristics for saying, “Well, do I say yes or no?” Does it take the student closer to the learning goal or away from the learning goal? If it’s an assignment that’s intended to develop their skills, so it’s a formative assignment somewhere in the middle of the semester and it’s late, I mean, if the goal of that is to engage them in the learning and that’s why I worked so hard building in the first place. Well, if they’re five minutes past the deadline, don’t I still want them to do it, maybe I still want them to do it a week after the deadline. So with that learning and the shared goals and those shared ideals as the reorientation point, that’s what we can go through and do. So yes, it doesn’t mean throwing out grades, necessarily, unless you want to bring in ungrading for other reasons. It doesn’t mean that now we’re all completely informal, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any hard and fast boundaries in the course. But I’ve thought those through and not simply just transferred them over, because that’s what we always do, and if we don’t, students will take advantage of us.

John: One other thing that we’ve talked to you about in the past is the importance of learning students’ names. Could you just talk about that a little bit, and we’ll include a link to your book as well as the earlier podcast on the topic.

Michelle: Yeah. So I mean, I guess if we trace the whole evolution of how to get on the same side or begin that in our instruction. It starts with me thinking about my past and what do I believe is true about students, and then looking in at the overall policies and the objectives of the course, then getting into the communications, and then I’m in the classroom with them, and if it is a face-to-face class, one of the very best, often surprising to students, and effective ways to make a personalized classroom atmosphere is to know and use students’ names. And so that’s also something folks who’ve followed my writing or things I speak about know, that’s something that I’ve really been on a mission to do in my own practice, and to help others know how to do it as well. Now, that said, it’s very, very difficult. That’s one of the themes of the book. If folks see it right off the top, it’s like, and if you’re one of the many people who sidle up to me in various settings and go, “Oh my gosh, I have to tell you something. I’m not good at learning names,” like, okay, most of us are pretty bad at it. It takes effort, and that can be an effort that we model. I mean, even as I circulate around in my classroom, if it’s a big class, we’ve got little table tents with names, which is a great starting point, but I want to eventually know the names, [LAUGHTER] so I go around to the little groups during small group discussions, “Okay, turn your table tent over. I’m going to practice.” And they see me making mistakes. They see me putting effort into it, and see me struggling a little bit, which maybe also establishes a little bit of common ground there as well. But if we put in that effort, I guarantee you that not every student, not every time, but over time, you will see a definite trend towards students saying, “You know what? I think I will listen to what she’s saying about the value of this course. I will follow her advice when she says, ‘study it this way, not that way,’ even though my way is harder, I’m going to stick with it when times are tough. And yeah, I’ll do what she says and try to focus on the ultimate goal of learning and attaining what this class is all about, and not just about taking off points and making sure that I can just put in less effort.” So I think that that is definitely of a piece with the rest. And I hope that folks, whether it’s through the advice in my book, or a lot of other good advice out there, or their own techniques, will keep working to get a little bit better every single semester.

Rebecca: I think we have lots of opportunities now to think about how to work more from the same side, but we always end by asking: “What’s next?”

Michelle: What’s next? Well, I’m going to keep working with this idea and seeing how I can bring it into the classroom and keep an eye out for the great research that’s out there, and continue to share that in the newsletter that I put out to faculty and instructional designers and others who care about learning. I will be speaking about this or offering me an opportunity to be part of a workshop… upcoming POD conference. So for those for whom POD is part of their professional life, they might want to check that out. And I will be going into a new role that I’m excited to take on at my institution. It’s a co-directorship position where we’re going to be looking at AI in the curriculum and bringing some of the developments and robust debate in that side of instruction right now, it’s part of, I think, all of our lives, bringing that into my professional life at NAU as well.

John: Well, that’s an area where there’s so many interesting challenges and such a rapid pace of change. That should be an exciting thing to be working on.

Michelle: Yep, all the more reason to get on the same side, don’t you think?

Rebecca: Definitely, and you won’t be bored, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER] Lots of motivation to get involved in that work.

John: And I wish I could make it to the POD thing, but I’m going to be at the OLC Conference, which, unfortunately, is at the same time this year.

Michelle: That’s how it shakes out some years. We make our choices the best we can.

Rebecca: Well, thanks again for joining us, and hopefully we’ll get to talk to you again soon. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Michelle. Again, it’s always great talking to you, and I also hope we get to talk very soon.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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365. Learning Students’ Names

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, names, teaching
October 30, 2024

Learning students’ names can be a challenging, but important, component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to discuss evidence-based strategies for learning students’ names.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University.  She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Her newest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can will be released in November from the University of Oklahoma Press. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Learning students’ names can be a challenging, but important, component of inclusive teaching. In this episode, we explore evidence-based strategies for learning students’ names.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Her newest book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can will be released in November from the University of Oklahoma Press. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Thanks. It’s great to be here again.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking some tea?

Michelle: I am drinking water.

Rebecca: I think that’s a good way to be spending the afternoon, for sure. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking an oolong tea today.

Rebecca: That sounds nice. John. I just have a standard English breakfast today John.

John: That sounds exciting. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s super exciting in my tea cup today. [LAUGHTER]

John: So we’ve invited you here, Michelle, to talk about your newest book on learning names. Pretty much all professional development workshops and activities emphasize the importance of getting to know your students’ names. Why is learning names and the pronunciation of those names such an important part of inclusive teaching practice.

Michelle: Well, this is something that I think, like you all have probably noticed, as well, you do see this advice over and over again, and it’s especially been prominent and some of the latest, really important works that have been so impactful in inclusive teaching. So there are a lot of facets to that, I think, especially in a diverse society, such as we have here in the United States, names are such a core part of our identity, and it can be such a positive and it’s a little sad, but it’s also unexpected for many of our students that instructors will put forth the effort and attend to things like correct pronunciation. Now the dark side of this is not doing so can be very non-inclusive. So without kind of belaboring it too much, there are lots of unfortunate examples out there where a faculty member decided not to try or say, “Ah, I don’t think I can say that” or repeatedly gets the name or something about the person’s identity wrong over the course of the semester. So that’s a very off putting thing to students. And to me, I also think of this more globally as part of a real shift in mindset or attitude about our teaching in higher education, I know what I came up with was this idea that teaching is so just kind of performative, and it’s almost like there’s this plexiglass wall in between you and the students who are out there, maybe in some dark auditorium. And to the extent that I got any teaching training, that’s really what I was trained in many, many years ago. Now it’s great that we’re seeing more of us in higher education really challenging that and saying, “No, this is a two-way street, teaching is about engaging students and treating them as individuals.” And yet, I think some of those old misconceptions do run deep. So as a way of individuating, really making a compelling way to reach out to students and individually creating a sense of belonging, a great demonstration that you know who I am and that you do care about that when you’re going to use my name and use it correctly, and because of the very real risks we’ve seen when people do get names, unfortunately, quite wrong in their teaching.

Rebecca: I know for me that when I see former students or colleagues out and about, I often recognize them, can remember stories or instances in class, can have a great conversation with them, and often cannot remember their name, [LAUGHTER] but certainly can remember all of this other information about them. Why? Why can I remember their name? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Why? Right. And John, I don’t know if you can relate to that. [LAUGHTER] I know that I can. And here’s the funny thing, I love being a cognitive psychologist, because we do deal with these weird, paradoxical things. And I’ll just informally observe, having been in this field for three decades or so, that there really is this tendency to think that it’s just you. We like to compare our insides to other people’s outsides and so on. We don’t see all the mistakes and missteps that go on with other people. But this really does play out in the field of memory, and especially in the area of names. So, I like to say, and I think I observe in this new book, this is something that, if you’re a cognitive psychologist, you will eventually have people come up to you and say, “I have to share something. [LAUGHTER] This is so weird, but I have a hard time with names. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t do it.” And as cognitive psychologists, we kind of go, “Don’t worry, I can actually really reassure you with that, because this is one of the problems that we have a really good handle on.” So I will say that that the book Moon Walking with Einstein that came out a few years back. He’s not a psychologist, but he does a great job of explaining, among a lot of other things in memory, what you’re describing, of like, “Oh my gosh, once it’s the name, why can’t I remember this? But I have this constellation of other memorable facts that I can tap about the person. What’s going on?” And we call this the Baker-baker effect, like Baker with a capital B and baker with a small b. Just going back to this amazing series of studies that were carried out decades ago showing that really, yes, even when you take the same exact word like Baker, if you say, “Oh, here’s Rebecca, and she’s an avid baker,” I’m gonna remember that next week. I might remember that always when I see you, I might say, “Oh, how’s the sourdough coming?” [LAUGHTER] But if I say this is Rebecca Baker, and she likes to crochet in her spare time, all of a sudden, what happens to that word Baker? And without kind of getting too far into the theory of it here on the podcast today, yeah, all of that other knowledge, basically, there’s a lot of redundancy built into that system. One thing triggers another. Like, if I know that somebody is, say, a potter, I can picture them in the studio. I can ask what sorts of things they like to make, say, “Well, where did you learn to do that?” If your name is Potter, that’s very arbitrary, and there’s not a whole lot else we can back it up or support it once you go to retrieve that information. So this set of studies just made incredible waves when it came out. We just were like, “Wow, we actually have a handle on this problem, and it connects to this everyday experience.” So yes, names are uniquely disadvantaged in the process of encoding, storage and retrieval, which means that for most of us, we really do have a difficult time with them.

John: I know a lot of faculty are hesitant about using names because they worry about making mistakes. Is that a very good approach?

Michelle: Well, let me just reassure folks out there that if they’re worried about making mistakes, you’re going to, that will happen. [LAUGHTER] So just right off the bat, that is one of those arenas of life where we have to go, “Yeah, this is just going to mean some awkwardness,” and it might seem easier on the surface, just not to try, say young man in the gray shirt in the third row for the entire semester and figure that’ll all go away, but that does come at a real cost. So professors are worried about making mistakes. In the book, I do give a lot of techniques, of course, to try to get it right the first time, but a lot of this also comes down to getting out ahead of the problem. And again, as part of the process that I lay out, it really does start with forming that habit of, hey, if a name is coming on the scene, if I’m in a social situation, yeah, a lot is going on. If I’m meeting my class for the first time and students are coming up and introducing themselves, there’s a million things going on in my head, but I need to carve out that space and attention to say, Okay, time to really pay attention to this name. And I joke that you’ll mess up. But of course, socially speaking, it’s a lot easier to mess up and get corrected on the first couple of attempts than when it’s already December, the first in the fall semester, and now you’re trying and you’re going back and saying, wait a minute, I’m not sure if I got that. So mistakes can be anticipated. They can be managed. And I really do want to normalize faculty trying, trying anyway.

Rebecca: Are there some particular activities that a faculty member might use in a class to help learn student names and help other students learn each other’s names in class?

Michelle: So fundamentally, I mean, what I like to use to summarize it, it’s maybe not the best mnemonic in the world, but ASAR: attend, say, associate, retrieve. So there’s lots of different ways to take those fundamental aspects of name learning and incorporate them into classrooms. As I was just mentioning, it really does start with attention, like so much in learning, if we’re not immediately alert to and focused on what we’re trying to learn, we’re not going to pick up very much and there’s no tape loop in the head that you can just rewind five minutes back and go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s what she said.” That’s not going to happen. So using students’ names, so saying a name, for lots of psycholinguistic reasons, it’s not enough just to hear the name. And that’s another fallacy that we think that “Oh, she said her name, I’ve got it.” No, you really do need to pronounce it to have the best chance of recall. And association, this is sort of when I always say this, it has parentheses around it, this is sort of the optional step. We learn the little mnemonics like, “Oh, they look like such and such a celebrity with the same name.” And that can work, but it can also be problematic. You don’t have to do that, but definitely retrieving. So that’s part of the saying as well. So say it back immediately. Great comment, Kayla, and then later on, as the individuals walking out, I say, “Have a good weekend, Kayla.” So both of those things, that spaced retrieval, that saying of the name, and immediately having that part switch on, and that habit kick in when she introduces herself for the first time, that can be the basis for a lot of activities. Now I also have a good structured icebreaker that I use, where we go around the room, and I have a way of kind of slowing down the introduction process. There’s a little bit more small talk involved. That gives me time to covertly [LAUGHTER] rehearse, retrieve, and also gives me a nice context to use the names. Then I go back around, and sometimes I can get them all right, and that’s very memorable for students. And I’d like to encourage faculty to think of ways you can use that to then pivot to, say, an early semester or first-day activity. In my research methods class, I might say, “Oh, I actually remembered all your names, or my hypothesis about how I did that. And let’s talk about how to test that.” Look, we’re already designing research in my graduate teaching practicum course. I do it, and then tell them a little bit more about the techniques, and then say, “Okay, let’s introspect about how that made you feel as a student on this first day, versus if I had not done that.” And that gets them in already thinking about the perspective taking that. I think, that is really going to be a good part of their teaching education. Ao lots of different ways, as long as you’ve got those basic building blocks in there.

John: So how could this process scale to larger classes? For those who teach classes that perhaps have hundreds of students in them?

Michelle: And that is an absolutely relevant question, I’ll say, coming from the discipline of psychology, which typically has really high enrollments than others, I can definitely picture faculty saying, “Well, great. This is fabulous if I’m sitting in an eight person seminar, but I teach chemistry, and there’s 200 students out there.” So just kind of arbitrarily saying, well, 75, 100 that’s kind of what I think of when I think big class. This is probably not the place to try a go around the room and I’ll try to memorize everybody’s names at a go. It would just kind of take too long. And I will say that I’ve had a pretty spectacular fail too, and I got a little over my skis and told a class of 70. “I’m going to memorize all your names,” and that was just a bit of overload for me as well. However, there’s some great research out there I reference a lot in the book. Kaitlyn Cooper and colleagues, a fantastic study of name learning and usage in a large stem type foundational course, and there they lean pretty heavily on a technique that I think many of us are familiar with, but maybe haven’t used to its full extent, which is table tents. [LAUGHTER] And I bring in heavy paper card stock, and I dropped a lot of money on some stickers at the Michael’s craft store, just so people can really personalize these, and that makes them more likely to bring them back. And I make it kind of the norm that you’ve got your name and it’s on your desk, and you might think, “Oh, well, that solves the whole issue.” No, you still have to really consciously remember them. And if you’re gonna really go for it, you can be using those tents to, again, kind of mentally rehearse or quiz yourself at any downtime during class. So that research as well, in those large classes, showed that even when less than 100% of the students’ names were actually learned, even a relatively low proportion were learned, that makes an outsized impression on students, so they may have a very positive impression. They may even think that the professor knows their name, when maybe they’re not one of the people who’s known, but it did make a measurable impact. So something is better than nothing. I know as faculty, we don’t always like to go for partial credit or anything less than an A plus, but getting 10%, getting 20%, and maybe upping that percentage with each semester as your skills grow. That’s a really positive trajectory. And in those large classes as well, I try to say, well, the students who I think we all have, who like to come up at the beginning or the end, they’ve got questions. If you’re one of those students, I’m definitely going to know your name. And not exclusively those students, but there too, and this is a big improvement over my very first semesters of teaching, where even those students were hit or miss for me.

Rebecca: So I know that earlier you mentioned some covert rehearsal [LAUGHTER] that you were doing in class. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing. What does your process look like in class when you have your classes?

Michelle: Well, I’m definitely using anything that’s what most of us would consider, nice, strong, active learning types of practices. So things like small groups. Well, I’m already circulating, as I think most of us do, to talk to folks, and in that small group too, if I haven’t gotten their name down, I can say, “Oh, and that’s a great point. And what was your name again?” It’s an appropriate area where I can do that, and I’ve got sort of a small, manageable chunk right there. I’ve got maybe three to five students, and maybe when I’m done talking to that one group, like, “oh, okay,” covertly, or maybe I’ll just say, “Okay, let me make sure that I got everybody’s names while I’m over here.” So that’s sort of piggybacking. Classroom assessment techniques… I love to have folks write down a question on the index card at the end of class, and hand it in, for example. And here you go. Here’s a ready made opportunity to look at the card, put the card away, then look up and say, “Oh, thanks, John. Have a great day.” So all those things. Now, I do have a pretty structured icebreaker type of activity as well, as I was kind of referencing. It does involve, what I think is already a very good way of having students introduce each other. This can be too time consuming if it’s more than about 40 people, I find. So students are tasked with groups of two or three. We’re going to go around and introduce not yourself, but your partner. Because if I’m introducing myself, I’m just worrying about what I’m going to say, and then I’m rehashing what I said, instead of paying any attention to anybody else. And so there’s maybe about five minutes where they have a little exchange to get just enough information from their conversation partner to be able to, when their turn comes around, say, “Hey, this is Jean, and she’s a skier, and she’s majoring in sociology.” And then Jean gets to do that for me. And that’s all great, but that gives me just enough time to do that rehearsal where I’m kind of looking around the room, I’m starting at the beginning, okay, whose name was this, whose name was this, and doing that covert rehearsal, and I do some overt rehearsal too, because again, just like with any other small groups, once let’s say a table’s worth of folks have all had their turn. Now’s my time to go around and say, “Thank you so much Jean, thanks so much. Michelle. Hey. Great to hear from you, John,” and so on. So there’s a little bit of overt retrieval and rehearsal, and also that’s how I’m using my few seconds of time [LAUGHTER] in between people and while folks are talking to each other. So yeah, that’s how that can look. And you can either set it up, if you’re really daring, you can say, “I’m going to try to remember everybody’s names.” But here again, you don’t have to do that, even if you just have that introduction. And you think, “Oh, man, I got a little bit lost about midway through the class. I think I maybe only got about two thirds.” Then you don’t go around and try to show off with the whole group. You say, “that was wonderful.” And then you go on to whatever you were going to do. So yeah, that’s how that can look and again, if you’re already doing an icebreaker, you’re already got introductions, why not leverage that to learn names?

John: And while in a large class, you couldn’t do that for the whole class and have everyone introduce themself to the class, one thing that I was just thinking as you said that, is perhaps it could be done where people pair off and then they introduce themselves to another group after that. So at least students get to know the students around them, because in my experience with large classes is that, in general, once students pick a seat that first day, they’re going to be sitting in that same seat for the rest of the semester. So if at least they get to know the people around them, it’s forming a bit of a local community at least. And I think getting them to know each other’s names is kind of helpful, too, in addition to us learning their names,

Michelle: I love that idea of like your little neighborhood, your street, [LAUGHTER] within a larger class and students. I think, would respond to that. It’s a relatable thing, we can kind of laugh about and say, “Yeah, these are your people who you’ll probably be around,” but yeah, here too, they don’t have to memorize 99 names in order to really get a head start on whoever is around them. And that way they can, if they choose to, they can use the names in discussion you’re modeling that. And so I think it takes us in a positive direction.

Rebecca: I know one strategy that I’ve used for pronunciation was to have students record their name slowly… I asked them to do it slowly… and then to provide some sort of way to help with pronunciation. So I provide my own name, and I suggested the way to pronounce my last name with a rhyme with another word, so that people could figure out how to pronounce my name, and then had them do the same thing, and then I could go back to the recordings for the names I was struggling with and that really helped.

Michelle: Yeah, the technology tools are there. And here’s another thing that we can leverage with sometimes not a massive investment of effort, and so that fits into the idea, too, that you have to kind of get it right from the beginning. It’s not the sort of thing where, after the fact, you can go home and fix it. And so new apps and new avenues come along all the time, and I think we do settle on our own favorites and the recording your own name, I think also can help fill in for some of the shortcomings of what are still really useful tools. I mean, there are other tools out there that are databases of the typical pronunciations of names globally. So I’ve leaned on those and found them very helpful. But it always helps to go back to the source, and if the student is pronouncing it themselves, that’s great. So if this can become part of our beginning of semester kind of routine, as it sounds like it has been for you, again, this is going to set us off on a really great path, and will reap benefits for when things get a lot busier later in the semester.

John: You also talk in your book about having students learn pronouns. Is this process for learning pronouns similar or different from the process of learning names?

Michelle: And pretty soon after I got with my editorial team on this book, they made a really compelling case that this was something to cover as well. And I’m being transparent about that, not because I don’t think it’s an important issue, it tremendously is, but again, as the psycholinguistics of memory person, I go, “Oh no, no, that’s a different process,” which in theory, it really, really is. And again, without breaking down the theory in too much detail, here, basically when we use a pronoun that’s the result of sort of an algorithm that our brain is running just really, really quickly. I mean, we’re talking a language production and comprehension operate on a thousandths of a second time frames. It’s incredibly mind blowingly fast, and we’re usually quite accurate at it. So this program is running when you’re putting your sentences together to make sure that all the pieces and parts go together. So instead of retrieving something like “this is Mary Potter” from my long term memory, I’m doing this matching job before that sentence comes out of my vocal track to make sure it all hangs together, verbs and the number agreement and all that, and pronouns are part of that. Now the complication is that those algorithms, which do operate largely out of our conscious awareness and control, they are tapping into long- term memory representations, and in the case of pronouns and gendered pronouns, it’s tapping into my concept of that person’s gender. So it’s not the sort of thing we reflect on every day, but I have to have all of that set up appropriately in my long-term memory. If I don’t have that person’s gender really correctly encoded, whatever that means for me, then those algorithms are going to misfire. That is what’s going to happen. So you’re not set up for failure the way that you are in retrieving proper names. The problems tend to happen at a different point in the process, but the end result is very, very similar. If I’m not correctly gendering an individual in my classes, that is a real affront to their identity, their belonging, and I’m off to a very bad start as far as including them, which is not to say folks who talk about pronouns in other contexts, healthcare and so on, as far as we can tell the available surveys of say, LGBTQ+ youth, there’s some surveys out there and they say trying and correcting yourself is better than just sort of checking out of the whole issue altogether. So you can apologize, you can move on. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a big red flag that something is off about your understanding of that person’s gender identity. So that’s a little bit of what’s going on behind the scenes, challenging, but in a different way, and also something that we can take positive steps to do better, in slightly different ways, but in ways that we can put an effort into it and come up with a better result.

Rebecca: We’ve focused a lot of our conversation around names on verbal communication, but of course, there’s a lot of written communication that we have with students, sometimes in emails, but also we have learning management systems where there’s the ability to do bulk emails, where there’s sometimes the ability to have some personalization and things in those bulk emails as well. I can imagine, maybe, that having some personalization in those bulk emails and things could also be equally as important in creating a sense of inclusion. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Michelle: Wow, this is such a good idea. I mean, I’m kind of going, I wish I thought of that before I put the book to press, because that’s another variation on this theme. No, it’s not cognitively the same as standing at a cocktail party and going, “Oh no, what’s this guy’s name?” but that proactive spirit of, I want to make this seem as personal as possible. Now, if it’s done with, say, a bulk emailing program, I mean, here’s the thing, I think that there’s sort of a big group of techniques and usual outcomes that sort of hang together. And it strikes me that this is sort of a part and parcel of that, of these personalization and belongingness interventions that I’ve kind of seen and occasionally tried myself over the years. So I would predict pretty good results with that. I would predict that that is going to be better than an email with no such personalization. And the reasons are because in these other, again, very similar of a piece, kind of interventions where say I send emails saying, “Oh, I noticed your test score improved. Hey, congratulations. And if you need anything, come approach me” or “I noticed that your test score was maybe not all you’d hoped it would be, and here’s some resources.” Students typically report that they know that you didn’t sit down and personally pen that missive to every single person. They know that you did it some kind of batching, or maybe your TA did it, and at the same time they appreciate it. So something does not have to be a handwritten, engraved personal invitation in order to trigger some of those same positive sort of belongingness. So I would say absolutely, and folks out there who might be trying that do some SOTL on it, see what students thought, see what the impacts were, [LAUGHTER] flip a coin and randomly decide. I’d love to read more work on that.

Rebecca: I think the one bummer about some of our LMS’s is that there’s not the ability to insert in a nickname that you know that the student likes to be called, because that would allow us to make those mail merge like things a little more accurate.

Michelle: Right. And I mean, in all serious it’s true. It’s easy to look and say, “Well, I’m teaching in an LMS. There’s a standard picture. Here’s their name.” But yes, we don’t always go by the name that’s with the Registrar and consider the effect on inclusion for a student who’s been repeatedly called one thing when they go by their middle name or a different name altogether. People don’t always look like they’re photographs. So technology is a huge help when we use it to shore up what we’re not good at, but it’s not the answer in and of itself.

John: In terms of names and the connection of names to identity, there’s this thing called a “cocktail party effect” that we talked about actually on an earlier podcast.

Michelle: Yeah.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about the cocktail party effect and why it has that sort of an impact?

Michelle: Oh, gosh, yes. This is one that was discovered so many years ago, and it’s still incredibly relevant in cognitive psychology, we’re still sitting back and going, “Whoa. It’s amazing your brain does this.” So the name itself is kind of a giveaway that it was discovered a long time ago, back when people had things called cocktail parties and got together in person. But really, any time that you’re sitting there and there could be all kinds of background noise, you’re focused on one thing, or maybe your conversation partner, but if your name gets said anywhere in your hearing range, you notice it… which is wild, just sort of on a philosophical level… because it really does mean that we’re processing what we call a pre-attentional level. So there’s like somebody listening in all the time to go, “Oh, hey, is your name mentioned?” And others explain it by saying that your name is at this incredibly low kind of threshold. So it’s sort of on this hair trigger, that it doesn’t need much input to immediately burst through and make it into your conscious awareness. So it absolutely demonstrates the incredible power that your own name acquires. Babies in their first couple months of life, I believe, they start preferentially attending to their own names, and so there is that. You can even duplicate this, as I’ve done in some of my classroom demonstrations, you can duplicate this in vision as well. So it’s also been found that if you’re focused on one area of a visual array, reading one thing or looking for one thing, you filter out everything else. But if I drop your name somewhere on the screen, you’re gonna see it. So yes, your brain treats your name like it’s just gold. It is definitely very, very privileged. And it also shows, I think, the role of attention here. So I’m always banging the drum for attention and the importance for learning and problem solving and just about everything else interesting that we do with our minds and our brains. And so your retentional systems, too, are in on the act going, “Okay, I’m monitoring for this one thing,” so no wonder it makes such a tremendous impact when this faculty member who I just met five minutes ago is actually saying this to me, either in class or on my way out the door. I’m hardwired to notice that, and it’s hardwired to make that impact.

Rebecca: Well, as you know, Michelle, we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Michelle: Well, what’s next is I’m completing a much anticipated sabbatical year, which I’m very, very grateful for having, and what am I going to be working on next? I currently have another book length project out there. I’m a little coy about saying a lot about it, since it’s still at that early stage, but I will say that it’s about attention, and perhaps a little bit of a broader audience that I’ve written for in the past. So stay tuned. Seems like every week somebody publishes a book about attention, but this one has been a long time in the making, and I think I do have a unique perspective, which I think will appeal to perhaps a lot of folks who listen to this podcast. So I’ve got that… running a few other research studies on everything from flash cards to metacognition, and as we do on sabbatical, hoping to get a few of those wrapped up and out the door.

Rebecca: Well, I know we’ll be paying attention, [LAUGHTER] Michelle.

John: Yes, we will focus our attention, and we’re hoping to talk to you about this new project whenever you’re ready to discuss it.

Michelle: Ah, thanks so much.

Rebecca: Thanks, Michelle,

John: Thank you. Michelle, it’s great talking to you always.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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358. Essentials of the New Science of Learning

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, reflective practice, retrieval practice, spaced practice, stereotype threat, teaching
September 11, 2024

Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, we explore a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Todd, what do you got today?

Todd: Oh, today I have a white ginger pear.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: Very nice. And I am drinking something similar, a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I’ve got Cardamon Cinnamon.

John: Nice.

John: We were just talking to you a few months ago about your last most recent book, but we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest most recent book of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of The Essentials of the New Science of Learning: The Power of Learning in Harmony with Your Brain.

Todd: When I worked on The New Science of Learning: Learning in Harmony with Your Brain, that book, its third edition has gotten up to be about 265 pages, and the book was actually written for students. It is still for students, but when it started, the whole concept of this book is it would be used as kind of an ancillary text in a class. And a friend of mine out in California used it in a community college in a developmental math class, and they found, actually, when they used the book in the class, that the attrition rate went down. And for developmental math, that’s a very important concept. In fact, the students who did pass for the next semester, the students who had learned about the science of learning, that attrition rate was even further down. So it’s helped out a lot. The problem is, once it gets up to 265 pages, you can’t use it as kind of an ancillary book. You know, “Read this chapter, it’ll take you 10 minutes.” The New Science of Learning is built more to be like a primary book for a first-year seminar course. So this book, being The Essentials, allowed me to come back and add some new things about AI and a few other things. Is kind of a streamlined version of that that can be used in a class, so that you could say to your students, for instance, “Hey, on Wednesday, make sure you read the chapter on sleep,” and then you talk about the content. When Wednesday comes along, you spend five minutes talking about sleep, what did you learn? And then you move on with the content. And that’s how you can infuse it in the class.

Rebecca: Why isn’t this material taught to students earlier in their education process.

Todd: Aaaah… this is a question that we’ve talked about before with other kinds of science of learning things. It’s frustrating. I take the breath because it’s frustrating. It’s funny, across country, if you ask students two questions: “do you like to learn?” and “do you like school?” you tend to find that the students will say yes to both those questions until they hit right about third grade. In third grade, we start picking up some of the testing and really focusing more on content, and at that point, we start telling students, you need to learn these things, but we don’t tell them how. There just is this assumption that because people are learners, that they can learn it. But learning out of a book is very artificial in terms of how we evolved. So the concept is students should be taught that, and I really believe they should be taught that starting in about third grade. And could you imagine a student that comes into college that has spent eight or nine years learning how to learn along with the content that they have? I think it would be amazing, but typically not done, so it should really be done as soon as they get to college and as quickly as possible. And it doesn’t matter who I talk to. I have talked to students from all kinds of disciplines. I’ve talked to students in medical schools, nursing programs, a lot of the health professions, they do a ton of content really fast. I’ve talked to students in philosophy and history and psychology, and almost invariably, people will come up afterwards and say, “Why doesn’t anybody teach us this stuff?” And so the students see value in it too. We get focused on content, and we don’t tend to do it.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, Todd, that you’re saying that there’s a wide range of people that are hungry for this information because before we were recording, I was doing graduate student orientation. I was talking to a couple of MBA students who had been out in the field, into their career 10 years, coming back to school, and I had embedded some of this kind of information in their online orientation. They said, “Oh yeah, I watched this TED talk that you had included [LAUGHTER] about the science of learning, and it was really great. It was so interesting.” And I had included that study from Michelle Miller.

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: And he had read it, and it was fascinating. He’s like, “I was so surprised that I didn’t know some of this stuff.” So we’re talking about it at lunch today, and they were all talking about, “Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m so glad you included that.” But it just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter who our learners are. They’re really hungry for this information, and it’s really valuable to them.

Todd: Yeah, I will say quickly, in terms of the book that a lot of this is drawn from, which is The New Science of Learning, the full version of it that I have at the end is, if you find this valuable, or if you’d like to just ask other questions, I put my email address in there and just send me an email. And I got an email like, three weeks ago from a student who’s going into a health professions field, and he’s going in as a post grad. I mean, he’s going in as a master’s student, and they’re all required to read that book coming into the class, so it’s at any level. In fact, faculty find a lot of the stuff new and interesting to them, so we should teach it to everybody. Somebody should write a book about it.

Rebecca: Huh.

John: And fortunately, you have.

Todd: Hey, [LAUGHTER] me and a couple other people have too.[LAUGHTER]

John: So you mostly focus on effective learning strategies and how students can use the time more efficiently in learning. You also provide a lot of other advice to students about challenges that might arise for different students or students in different categories. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other advice you provide in addition to those directly related to learning?

Todd: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that I think are really important. There’s a chapter on how we learn and a chapter on how we remember things, which learning and memory are separate, and those talk about the structures and the way we do that, but there’s so many other things that come into play, and a lot of things from social psychology. Everybody talks about cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, but if a person understands exactly how to learn. If you’re really, really frustrated at the time you’re trying to learn, it doesn’t matter the actual cognitive structures, because the social part of it just wipes that out. And so things like microaggressions, how we perceive other people and how we interact with other people, has a huge impact on learning. Stereotype threat, whenever we get in a situation, if we’ve got a person who is a minority within a class. So it could be a male in a nursing program with mostly women. It could be in some discipline that has mostly men with a woman. It could be a student from an underrepresented group. When there’s an individual there that doesn’t typically come into the play, they’re under this pressure all the time that if they do poorly, then it reflects on “Well, maybe men can’t do nursing,” and so there’s extra pressure on them, and they tend to struggle with that. And things like imposter syndrome, almost everybody I’ve talked to at some point or another says that I don’t feel like I really belong, or I don’t feel like I know as much as other people think I know. And so those types of things, along with goal setting and dealing with or helping people who are working. I mean, what happens when you’re trying to work? Huge proportion of our students now work part time, but there’s a large portion also that work full time in addition to being full-time students. So a lot of those things can be drawn into this whole concept, and all those things are in the book.

Rebecca: One of the topics that you discuss is managing cognitive load. Can you talk about some of the recommendations you make related to this?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is one of the foundational things. And if you’re a listener and do not understand what cognitive load is, one of the best things you can do is get up to speed on that a little bit. A place to start, I always say, is Wikipedia. And if there was a motto that I would throw in there, it would be Wikipedia, great place to start, and a hideous place to finish. And I just want to point that out there, because there’s some stuff you can get pretty quickly. But here’s the thing with cognitive load, is it basically boils down to there’s only so much information your brain can process at any given time. And if you try to do too much, then it pretty much shuts down enough in one area so that it can process a different area. Be a little bit like if you’re putting together an IKEA bookshelf for the very first time, and your significant other comes into the room and says, “Hey, where do you want to have lunch?” And you may very well say, “Not right now,” and your brain’s just full with all of these parts and how things are supposed to fit together. Once you put 10, 15 IKEA bookcases together, you could carry on a conversation with somebody else while you’re doing it. And that’s an all cognitive load issue. The first time you do something, it is taxing, and it takes extra energy for your brain to sort out all the pieces. But the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And this is why, as an expert, you have to be careful. Because as an expert, I might say to my students, read this article, this 10-page article, and I might read that 10-page article very, very quickly, because I’ve read this kind of stuff over and over and over again, but the novice is going to take way more time because it’s their first time doing it. So we can talk to students about the fact that this is going to be hard when you start, and then as you do it, more and more, it’ll be easier, and that’s a cognitive load issue. As you actually work on things as combinations, as things come together, you build what are called schemas, and those are like scripts that all come together, and as you activate a whole schema, then that’s just there. If I go golfing, I don’t have to think about every little piece of that. Or if I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how hard I turn the wheel and turning on a turn signal and everything else. I have a schema for being in a car and the types of things you do. So as we practice and go through these things, that’s the cognitive load issue. There’s going to be heavy cognitive load, which we have to be cognizant of, and then, as we do it, it becomes easier. And then there’s another piece to this. Is if there’s things in your environment that don’t help you to learn, but they take up cognitive energy, so a conversation by people on the other side of the room, pretty much everybody in here listening this has probably, at some point been reading something, and people are talking, and you either say, “Excuse me, could you quit talking?” Or you pack up and go someplace else. If you’re reading a hard article, that will happen. If you’re reading something like a novel, people can be all over the room talking, and you don’t care. That’s a cognitive load issue. Hard article, high cognitive load, an easy thing, lower cognitive load. This is one I will jump in there and say, too, this is an area that AI has me very concerned. Because as you start anything, you start at the foundational level, and it’s challenging, but as you work with it over and over again, it becomes less and less challenging, then you can move up to more complex things. If AI is doing the simple foundational stuff for us, then we don’t develop that base that allows us to kind of automatically process something, so that we can move to a higher, more complicated thing and then practice that and go to a higher, more complicated thing. If AI is doing a chunk of it, we don’t ever develop the base of it. And so I’m concerned with respect to cognitive load development and how AI might come into play with that, but that’s the two-minute version of a topic that we spend two or three class periods on [LAUGHTER] in a course in psychology.

John: One of the many other topics you address in this book is metacognition. Why is developing metacognition so important? And what are some strategies that students can use to increase their metacognition?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is huge. Metacognition is right in there next to it. And metacognition basically boils down to knowing how much you know, knowing how much you’re thinking about something. It’s the process of thinking about the process, and we often don’t do that. It’s actually kind of fascinating when you chat with people, is they’ll engage in a behavior and not think anything about what they’re doing. So we fall into patterns. And so I’ve had students for years that will come in and say, “You know, Dr Z, I’ve read the chapter like four times and I’m still struggling.” And I’ll say, “Well, why did you read it four times?” It’s like, “Well, I need to to learn it.” “Isn’t there any other way you could learn it?” And as I’m asking these questions, I’m trying to bring up a metacognitive concept of let’s reflect on your learning process. If you’re struggling with the material when you read it, it may very well be that two, or three, four more times… In fact, research has shown that you’re probably not going to learn anymore, because if you’re not paying attention to your cognitive functioning, you may very well be reading while you’re daydreaming about something else. And the reason I mention that is that that is not being aware of your processing of information. So again, something that all of us have done, you finish reading a chapter of a book, or you finish reading an article, and just as you get to the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, my word,the entire time I was thinking about bacon or lunch of some kind.” And if that’s the case, you’ve just wasted that time. So for metacognition, it’s kind of thinking about how you’re studying, evaluating it, to what extent are you successful When you sit down and study for an hour, and if you quiz yourself, do you know more or don’t you? So practicing with that, thinking about while you’re studying, what’s going well and what’s not going well. If you’re frustrated in your surroundings and you’re having trouble processing, then you can make changes. If you don’t think about it, you can’t and then also thinking back. So after I take a test or after I study, I can think what went well and what didn’t go well. And that’s all kind of metacognitive things that, because of the way we live, we just don’t tend to do them. And so you know people who will repeat the same pattern over and over and over again, and we use phrases like, “You’ve done this four times, it’s always failed. What were you thinking?” And when we say “What were you thinking?” we’re actually asking a person, to what extent are you engaging in metacognition. But quite frankly, the “What were you thinking?” it’s such an automatic statement that it really doesn’t pertain to thinking.

Rebecca: Feel like a next interesting leap might be to talk about the myth of learning styles, which is something that people often cycle through and say often as well, like, “I’m a visual learner, and this isn’t in a visual style, so I can’t possibly learn it.” And this is something that you address in your book as well.

Todd: Yeah, I think foundationally, first of all, for anybody listening, I’m pretty sure you probably know about learning styles, but if you don’t, there’s a whole concept out there by Neil Fleming came up with this in terms of the learning styles index. And essentially, you take 13,14 quiz questions and you answer these questions, and based on how you answer them, you’re categorized as typically, either a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner. A couple of foundational things. Number one, anytime there’s some kind of a test that you can take on Facebook or online or in a quiz book or someplace or even somebody reading 13 items to you, and that’s supposed to tell you how you function as a human being. We’re way more complex than that. Psychologists will ask hundreds of questions to come up with a response that says based on the hundreds of questions that we have, all these validated questions, we believe you will tend to do this. Now, think about that for a second. That’s after a whole battery of tests. They’re saying we think you tend to do this, which has got a lot of hedging in it, which is different than 13 items, “Oh, you’re a visual learner.” So keep in mind that it doesn’t work that way. Number two is that there’s nobody who scores like every item is all on visual or every item is on kinesthetic. If you tend to answer, let’s just say 40% of your answers are on visual learning, and 30% are on auditory learning and 30% are on kinesthetic learning, you’d get categorized as a visual learner because that had the highest percentage. But really it’s a 40-30-30. Why wouldn’t you be categorized as all three? But boxes are easier to deal with, so the learning styles has lots of concepts behind it. Research will also indicate or show you pretty quickly if you read through this stuff, it’s just not how learning works. I would just love to say this, because I don’t want to just say learning styles isn’t good. Here’s the concept Is basically the best way to learn is to practice with the material in a way in which you want to retrieve it. If you want to actually dance, the best way to learn is kinesthetically, by dancing. You might get some auditory or visual information of here’s what the pose looks like, but by and large, you’re going to want to dance. If you’re going to want to be able to recognize certain kind of prints from Monet versus Manet or somebody else in painting, then probably the best thing to do is look at a lot of paintings. Visual would make sense there. Semantic learning, if you want to remember something, you’re probably going to want to read it or hear about it, and so you want to practice it in the way you’re going to retrieve it. The reason people love this concept of learning styles is people love to take quizzes that put them into boxes. I don’t get this, but people take quizzes all the time. Here’s 10 ways to determine what kind of a spouse you are, or five things you can do to figure out what kind of parent you are. We love to do those. And the problem is that learning styles comes along and people think that’s how I learn. And based on what you said at the beginning, Rebecca, when a student says, “You don’t use many images and I’m a visual learner, therefore I can’t learn from you,” they won’t learn from you. But they won’t learn from you because they’re a visual learner, they won’t learn from you because in their head they’re thinking, I can’t learn from you. And when your brain is processing, “I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this.” there is so much cognitive load dealing with the fact you can’t learn it there’s no room for learning. So if you think of yourself as a visual learner, I would say, just think about it in terms of you like to use visual things to help you to learn, but there’s a lot of other ways that you can learn as well.

John: Going back to an earlier location in your book, one of the things you talk about as a suggestion for students is that they avoid dichotomous thinking, and you also add in a discussion in the essentials book of generative AI. So this is kind of a mashup of those two concepts. But will the use of generative AI be helpful or harmful for student learning?

Todd: Yes, [LAUGHTER] yeah, the dichotomous thinking, I will say, just to address that very quickly, is that whole concept is that it’s the weakest kind of thinking. It’s basically you put somebody in a box and you don’t have to deal with them anymore, because this is them. That person’s a very aggressive individual. Everything gets interpreted as aggressive because that’s who they are. We don’t stop and think about on a given day, maybe a lot of bad things have happened; on a different day, maybe good things happen. So maybe they tend to be more aggressive, but they’re not just yes/no, you are/you’re not. So AI… people have asked multiple times, is this terrible or is this good? I tell you, everything has nuances. So the bad side, I do think AI is going to be really tricky for us, because humans, in fact, all organisms, will take the easiest route we can. In many respects, we should. If we are going to work and it’s five miles away and there’s a car in the driveway, taking the car makes a lot of sense. So I should take the easy way. However, there’s going to be times when I’m going to want to be physiologically in good shape. I might need to run. I might want to walk up a flight of stairs. I might just want to live for a while, in which case I should work on helping my heart to be better. And the human body is fantastic, and the more you push something, the more it will develop. And so I love to ask students, for instance, I’ll say, “Anybody in here run or jog?” And a whole bunch of hands will go up, and I’ll say, “Why? You got cars. You should just take a car.” And somebody will say, “Well, yeah, but I want to be healthier.” I’ll say, “Perfect. Let’s talk AI for a minute.” For AI, if we let the AI do all the things for us, then we don’t develop those things. And so if I’m taking a poetry class and I just keep having AI write the poems, write the poems, write the poems. It can do it. I can edit them, but I’m not going to learn how to write and how to express myself. And so the issue we’re going to have is, if we don’t learn how to do those things, especially at the beginning level, kind of the cognitive load thing, we’re not going to be able to do them when it’s more complicated. So I think we have to be very careful of that. And for faculty, I think we have to be very careful about focusing on things like academic misconduct. Yes, there are students who will use AI to cheat, but students didn’t start cheating because AI came along. Based on the culture in your classroom, the rapport you have with your students will make a huge difference in the extent to which students will engage in academically honest behaviors. So anyway, those types of things, we’ll watch out for. The good side, there are so many things that this is going to be able to use for good. For instance, we know from study after study after study that the more you practice at something, the better you become. And we have said, I have said for years too, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to somebody else, if you don’t have a family member or a roommate, that you can teach it to, then teach it to a dog, teach it to a sofa, just teach it. And the concept there is, the more you explain something, the better you get at it. AI is beautiful for this, because it can work with you. Actually, I tried something recently I thought was so much fun. I told AI, and the scenario in my head was, I’m a student in a psychology class, and I just learned the routes of persuasion by Cialdini, and now I have to remember how this persuasion all works. Well, one of the best ways to do that is to practice with it. And so I fired up ChatGPT and the prompt I gave it was, “Hey, how about if we do a role play? I’m going to be a car salesman, and you’re going to be in the market to buy a car. You do have enough money, you could buy today, but you want to be a little cautious, because you want to get input from your family, and you want to make sure you get a good value and get the kind of car you want. So overall, if I really can sell you, you’ll buy, but otherwise you’re going to wait. What do you think?” And then ChatGPT typed out, “This sounds like fun. Can you show me some vans?” And so then I said, “This is a van,” and I started to sell it. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I could use all my different persuasion techniques that I learned, and ChatGPT kept asking me questions back. So I’d say this van has something about scarcity. Here’s a good one for scarcity. It’s one of the principles to persuade people. I said, “Whis is the last van on the lot. And so ChatGPT said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I’m really interested in the van. Is there a possibility of getting another one if this one sells before I actually sign the paper?” And now what ChatGPT has just done is to see if they could reduce that concept of basically a quantity issue of scarcity. If this is the only van, a human would basically say, “Oh no, it’s the only van. I better get it before somebody else does,” so with ChaGPT, it says, “Can you get another one from a different lot?” And if I said, “Yep”, then the scarcity goes down a little bit. So then I have to think, “Oh, how can I bring scarcity back in a different way? It’s on sale, but the sale is going to end at the end of this week, so we’re going to have to make a decision fast… that scarcity in a sense of we don’t have much time. And so the point is that I role played with ChatGPT for about 20 minutes on these principles of persuasion. We’ll be able to do that. We’ll be able to do simulations. We’ll be able to do repetition. I can say to ChatGPT, and I’ve done this one. “Give me 10 multiple choice questions about metacognition for a student in a second-year college course, and the course is on the basics of cognition.” The better prompts you lay out there, the better it will do. It asked me multiple choice questions. And the last one I’ll mention for this, because there’s so many different ways you could do it, I actually gave it a definition of metacognition. I wrote out kind of what it is, and then I just put it in ChatGPT, and I said, if I answered a question of “What is metacognition?” with this response, and I was a senior in a cognitive psych course, because it’s different from being a first-year student, but it’s going to give you feedback: “If I’m a senior in a cognitive psych course, what grade would I get?” And I purposely made it bad, and it said you would get an “F” on this. And then I said, “Why?” And it explained a couple reasons why. And then I rewrote it, one of the best responses I could possibly dream up. And then ChatGPT said, “this is a good solid A minus.” And I said, “Why is this an A minus?” And it pointed out that I hadn’t done very much on the reflective component. And I thought, “hmm, alright, I did miss that piece.” And so when I can practice quiz questions like that, I can have it ask me multiple choice questions. And much like Khan Academy, when Sal Khan came up with Khan Academy, he said, one of the things that students love about this is you can go and watch the same video four or five times, and it doesn’t get frustrated with you. ChatGPT, you can struggle with learning a concept, it’s never going to get frustrated with you because you’re struggling. Whereas a human might say, in their head, it’s like, “Oh my word. You should have gotten this by now.” So I know that was a very long answer. It’s a huge, huge issue in education right now, but we can’t be focused on the academic misconduct side of it. We really need to be focusing on how can we use it to instill deeper learning?

Rebecca: That’s a nice transition to one of the other topics that you have in your book, which is maybe something that faculty might be interested in knowing is in your book, [LAUGHTER] which is that you advise students to spend two hours outside of class for every hour they spent in class, which is definitely an expectation, I think, that many faculty have, but it’s not always conveyed to students. I know I mention it to students, [LAUGHTER] but can you talk a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, so I put it in there, and it was funny because it was a section I put in the book, and one of the reviewers looked at it and said, “Why did you put this in here? And then it was funny because the editor was reading the book and said, “I love the fact that you put the breakdown in there about how much you should study and how much time you should commit, because people don’t normally know this stuff.” And so I put it in there because I think people struggle with this, and for students to understand, if it’s a course that requires extra work and things, if it’s a three-credit hour course, you’re expected to do two hours outside for every hour inside. This is the way the system was built up. So a three-credit hour class is going to take you about nine hours a week. The three hours in class, then the two-to-one ratio will give you six hours outside of class. This is why, if you take 12 to 13 credit hours, or 13 to 14 credit hours, it’s considered full time, because 13 credit hours would put you up around 39 hours total, when you put all the hours together, and that’s a full-time deal. And by the way, just so I don’t forget this, or I put it off to the side, if it’s an activity course, something you wouldn’t do anything outside, that’s why a one-credit hour class might meet for three hours, like a jogging class or something, racquetball class, because there’s not outside work. The two-to-one ratio kind of thing, all of that’s done in class. So that kind of gives you a sense of how much you should be studying. Here’s the tricky spot, nobody does it. I shouldn’t say nobody, very few people do it. The reason is that a lot of students can get by with studying less than two hours outside for every hour inside class. And when students will say they don’t need to, or faculty will say they don’t do it, and people focus on the fact that, “Well, you know, students don’t really have to spend that much time.” I love to respond with, oh, so they all are getting 100% on their quizzes and tests and perfect papers, right? And to that, we say, “Well, not really.” System’s set up that you expect a lot of B’s and C’s and D’s. Well, what if you spent two hours outside for every hour inside? It would be a very different thing. But the problem again, is, “Whew, if students are not spending the two hours outside for every hour inside, and then you are, then it seemed like you’re taking more time, and you feel like, why am I spending all this time when they’re not?” And so we look to other people, and unfortunately, we don’t do that. But I can tell you, for students, if you do actually sit down and study for two hours outside of class, for every hour inside class, and do it before the class period. When you walk in, you already know material there. You understand the foundation of it. And if the instructor is doing a good job, they’re pushing you and showing you connections and everything, you can process that because you have the material. If you walk into class after skimming a Chapter, you don’t have the foundational material to make the classroom more effective for a learning situation.

John: I was really happy to see that advice there, because I tell students the same thing, and they always seem really, really surprised. Or in an online class if you tell them they should expect to spend nine hours there, there’s often an even larger surprise, because they think it’ll take as much time as what they spend in high school, which is often zero outside of class and with an online class, zero doesn’t work very well, especially. So I’m glad you included that. But one of the other things you include in your book in terms of advice to students is you talk about various fallacies, and one of those is a sunk cost fallacy, which is something that we talk about quite a bit in economics, especially behavioral economists. So could you talk a little bit about this fallacy and how it might affect students?

Todd: Yeah, sunk cost is something that I always covered in psychology, because I love the concept, psychological concept. It’s really important a sunk cost basically just simply means, how much energy or resources have you put into a course of action. That’s basically it. How much have you sunk into this thing? The problem is for humans, is we overestimate the value of that. If you’ve worked on a paper for six hours and it turns out you’re heading in the wrong direction, best thing you can do is pitch the paper and just start over. But people say, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve put six hours in on this. I must be able to salvage something of it.” And I watched a woman on television years ago, and I think it was Ukrainian eggs. It was when they hollow out the eggs, you get the insides out, and you cut half of it away, so you’re dealing with, like a little half of a shell. And they do these beautiful, intricate things inside the shell. And she pointed out, she said, “If you ever drop one of those, the best thing you can do is stomp on it,” because if you drop it and it cracks, you try to fix it, and you spend so much time trying to fix it, because the sunk cost is, “I’ve already put hours into this,” then you waste a lot of time trying to fix it, your better bet is just to throw it away and start over.” And that’s why she said stomp on it, so you’re not tempted to do that. So in your work, we’ll do this all the time. We try things, and we get all this investment… we might be in a class that’s just we’re flunking the class, and this is always hard, and you always want to always talk to an advisor if any students are listening, or tell your students always talk to an advisor before you ever drop a class, because it can have ramifications, especially if it drops you down to part-time status. But if you are going to flunk class, the best thing you can do is just stop working in that class. Take the F if you’re past the drop period, and just focus your energy somewhere else. And students will often say, “but yeah, but I’ve already put so much time in this.” And when I was teaching intro psychology, this is a particular one is students would come in with like, 50% average and come into the final, and I’d say, it doesn’t matter, you’d need a 98% to get a passing grade. You’re going to get an F. And the students say, “Well, yeah, but I put so much energy this I’m going to try” and I’ll say “If you’ve averaged 50, you’re not going to score above an A plus. It’s just not going to work. Take your time and study for your other classes and then come back and take this class next semester.” So we do this a lot. We have people who will stay in relationships because they’ve been in relationships for a while. So it’s like, I’m gonna hang in there when, you know, maybe it’s the end of the relationship. We’ll have people that put so much money into a car they’re gonna keep driving it. It might come to a point you just need to get rid of the car. So sometimes we’ll chase a course of action because we put so much money into it. The one thing I do want to point out, though, that’s important, is that sometimes sunk cost is very helpful. So if we’re in a job, for instance, that we’ve been in for five years, and we run into a really rough spot, we might say, “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m working my way up in this. I’ve got a lot invested. I’m going to stick this out.” A relationship’s another good example. Relationships do have rough times. And if you have been dating someone or married to somebody for a period of time, then it’s like, “I’m going to get through this because I have so much invested.” So a sunk cost can help you if down the road, it’s a good thing to stay in, but you’d be tempted to leave. College is a good example. I mean, junior year, a lot of people would quit, but it’s like, “I’ve already got three years in, I’m going to finish.” But at other times, we’ve got so much in, and it’s time to cut it loose. And this is the part where I love to tell people, when I was an undergraduate, I was a criminal justice major at first, and then I switched over and double majored with psychology, and then I ended up with a psych major and a criminal justice minor and a sociology minor, and I am one class short of having a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And every time I tell that, there are people in the group that says “You should just take that class,” and I’d say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, because you’re one class short, you’ve got all that invested.” And to that, I get to say, “At my age, I’m getting close to retirement age. I’m never going to work as a police officer. I don’t even think those credits would count. But even so, what I did is I got to a point where I thought, is it worth it for me to spend a semester to finish this when I don’t believe it’s anything I will ever do. I worked with a police department for a short period of time. At the end, decided I just didn’t want to go that route. There’s no reason to finish that.” But even listening today, if I tell you, in an entire bachelor’s degree, I just need one more three-credit hour class, the inclinations to say, “Well, you should take it.” That’s a sunk cost.

Rebecca: As I’ve been listening to you talk today and thinking about the things in your book, and I was also thinking about a lot of the things that some of our faculty panelists said at our graduate orientation, I was very happy that a lot of those things aligned. That’s always good. And one of the things that came up actually at orientation was the recommendation from one of our panelists to really think about some wellness things like sleep and exercise. And that’s something that came up and eating well, which is something that is in your book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having adequate sleep and engaging in exercise that you talk about in your book?

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, because when I’m talking to students, especially, if there’s quite a bit of material, there’s invariably somebody will say: “So if there’s just one thing I should really work on, we’ve talked about the testing effect, practicing over and over and quizzing yourself. We’ve talked about things like interleaving, where you mix materials together, or spaced learning, where you space it out. And for memories, is to practice over and over types of things, and to say, “Which one should I really focus on?” I said “sleep.” The best thing you can do to be better at learning is to make sure you have a good chunk of sleep. Not only as a restful person, do you process information faster, but while you’re sleeping, you actually consolidate memories. You could study all day long, all through the night. Take a quiz, and you’ve all done this at some point, do okay on the quiz, because that’s right during the learning period, come back a week later, or final exam, for sure, and it’s like none of it’s there. Well, it’s because after you learned it, you never slept, which allows your brain to consolidate it. We actually now know that different stages of sleep will consolidate certain semantic like meaningful things. A different stage of sleep will solidify and consolidate repetition, like movement, so the kinesthetic things. So the physiology of what your brain does is really important. By the way. I was just reading something the other day too. I can’t cite it here, because I didn’t know I’d be talking about it, but it talked about the correlation between low levels of sleep and later cognitive decline, because while you sleep, the brain kind of flushes out all of the toxins, so to speak, and all the stuff it doesn’t need. It consolidates the stuff that’s important. It gets rid of the rest. And if you don’t sleep, a lot of that becomes muddled across time. And so sleep, physiologically, is just an amazing thing for you. And so that’s a really, really important thing. Exercise is another one. Regular aerobic exercise is just good for the learning process. I had a student that told me one time… it was funny, we were chatting about this… and said he does the best learning during basketball season when they’re exercising all the time. Coach makes them sleep an adequate amount, because it impacts your play, of course, and if it impacts your play. It probably impacts your learning too, right? So the concept there is that he said he always did better during basketball season because he was sleeping better and exercising better. Eating is the same thing. We know that simple sugars are not as good as complex carbohydrates. There’s actually ways that we can process this in terms of memory, and it doesn’t take very much liquid at all. If you get dehydrated, a little bit of dehydration, you have cognitive decline. In fact, it’s funny, because if you talk to somebody who is a health professional and you say, late in the day, “Man, I’m just confused and really having trouble processing things,” one of the first things that will ask you is, “How much did you drink today?” So it does have an impact on that. So, adequate hydration, not too much, but the right amount there, good nutrition, sleeping and exercise, those are four ways right there that you can actually impact your learning of material in classes… oh, and your health. I’d like to point out too that it’s one of those things that’s got the best side effect there is: it’s really good for learning and it’s also good for living.

Rebecca: One of the key tips that came up from our students and our faculty was to actually schedule some of those to make sure you’re doing those things.

Todd: Oh, totally. Yeah, eating too, I have to admit for myself, especially when it’s hot out. I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I can eat breakfast and work outside in the yard, come in, drink a little bit, go back out, sit down and read a book and do some stuff, and realize at eight o’clock at night’s like, “Oh my word. I didn’t eat today,” and so I’m suddenly hungry, but then it’s late, so you’re eating at eight, nine o’clock, which is not ideal. But if you schedule it while you’re busy, and stick to it. If you’ve got it scheduled, you’re gonna eat at one o’clock or noon, and the bell rings summarize where you’re at, go eat, and then come back and then pick it up from there. Because if you think “I’ll just finish this section and then I’ll eat,” there’s been lots of study through the years that says that’s not as good as stopping, noting where you are and then coming back for most people.

John: And one of the things you talk about in your book is scheduling. And you also suggest there that you include a little bit of slack, because things don’t always take the amount of time that you anticipate. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, I kind of laugh about this one, because, yeah, people are hideous at estimates. Almost everybody is. But I will tell you, folks with ADHD are particularly bad at it. And part of the issue you run into with ADHD is it’s not just that you’re distracted, is that you’re thinking to yourself, I will do this task, it will take like, 40 minutes, and then I’ll go do this other task. When I got tested for ADHD, after three questions, like, we’re good, we know exactly where we’re at. Anybody who knows me says you don’t need any kind of test. We’ve known that for years. I wish somebody had told me 10 years ago. But the reason I mentioned this is that I’m working really hard at some metacognitive kind of process of estimating how long it’s going to take me to do something. I set off the block of time. When the timer goes off, then I think about: “What did I do? What worked well? What didn’t work well?” That process takes seconds to do, by the way, it’s like, okay, “did it work or didn’t work?” And then if it does work, I think about what I did to kind of set that up. And if it doesn’t, I think about that. But I will tell you that I will often start out with a to do list of 10 items, and I’m sure that I’ll be done by noon, and so by 6pm I’ve gotten through three of them, and I still have seven to go. So I put those seven on my to do list for the next day, and then, because I am a super genius… I always use that phrase whenever I follow it with something that’s not super geniusy… but I’ll take those seven items and I’ll just put them on the to do list with another 10 items, and then I got 17 items that I’m going to do tomorrow, because that’s going to be easy to get through them. I’ll just do them really fast, and then I get through like five things. As you practice at that, you can actually practice at estimating how long things will take you, put it into a schedule. I did this was an intro psych class. It was one of the most impactful things I’ve done. Is the teacher had us keep track of one week in one-hour blocks. Like, if you sleep for eight hours, you block off and say, I slept. But then if you read, you put a block in for reading, and while you’re awake during the day, he had us doing metacognitive exercises too. You estimate how much do you think you’ll get done? How well did you do? And then you just put a grade in the block. So if it’s going to be I’m going to read the to read this chapter in this two hours, and I get through half of the chapter in the two hours. And I’ve done this other stuff, I get like, a D. And what I found was that I’m very effective in the morning, from about 6 am until about 10 am I can cram through… oh, it’s just so good. And then I find out that from about 2 to 4 pm I’m just awful. I have enough extrovertness in me that if I’m talking to somebody, it’s fine, but if I sit down to read something or work at something, it doesn’t work. So I schedule these things in. So I’m kind of coming back to the schedule, but I schedule these things in, but also try to make estimates of how long things will take. I will finish with this, tell your students, or ask your students, I guess, at the beginning of the semester to keep track of, as they read the first couple pages in every book, jot down, after five pages, how long did it take you, and figure out the average amount of time it takes you per page. Because students don’t understand this, and they’re not good at estimating their time. And I’ve had students before who are going to tell me, for the final exam, they’re going to reread all the chapters. And I say, how long is that going to take you? And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” And I’ll say, “The exam’s tomorrow. What do you think it’s going to be?” And students will tell me that they thought they could read a chapter in an hour, or the whole book in like six hours. And then they find out that their average is eight minutes a page, and say, “Alright, well, at eight minutes a page, you’re not going to read a chapter of 35 to 40 pages in an hour.” But the point is, it may be that you have a novel in English class that you average one minute a page. You might have a physics book where you average 20 minutes per page, and you might have a philosophy book where you average five minutes a page. If you know that, you can make some estimates. And so talk to your students about making those estimates. But rolling that all together, kind of figuring out estimates on how long things are going to take, and keep working at it, and then using metacognitive strategies to think about when it’s going well and not going well. And I’m still working at how to do this.

John: And that issue of cascading to do lists, one of the things I found is that there’s a lot of to do apps that you can put on your smartphone, and when the list gets too long, just start another one.

Rebecca: That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, there’s a great strategy that I really do like. You list the really important things as A’s and then B’s and then C’s. And the one strategy I read one time was great. It says, Put all your things on the list, put down your A’s, your B’s, and your C’s, and then delete all your C’s. [LAUGHTER] And so it’s that same kind of a thing as at the end of the day, they’re not going to get done, just pitch them. But yeah, we put too many things on the list. I’m trying right now. Actually, I’ve reframed it in my head, and I’m desperately trying to put down the amount of stuff that I think that I can get done by noon, and I still block off eight until 6pm but I put my to do list thinking this can get done at noon. If I get done at noon, you know what? I’m only gonna work a half a day. And when I’m better at it, I’ll probably put more items on the list. But for right now, yesterday, I still was working till 8 pm on my stuff that should have been done by noon. An another little tip I’ll give you… I’m getting better at some of these… I always make up my to do list now just before I go to bed, when I’m as tired as I can be during the day, because if you make a to do list in the morning when you’re feeling really full of energy, then you’re very optimistic. If you do it when you’re exhausted, it’s a little closer. [LAUGHTER]

John: I believe that behavioral economists refer to this phenomenon of underestimating the amount of time required for a task as the planning fallacy, and I believe that I’ve heard that the people who are most productive underestimate the amount of time required by more than other people tend to, otherwise they’d never undertake many of the tasks that they engage in. There was a Freakonomics episode on it that I just listened to recently.

Rebecca: In my design class, I have students keep time sheets for their projects and things, and that helps them become more aware of how long it takes them to do different parts of projects, so that if they were to take on freelance work or whatever, they have more of an idea of how long it actually takes them to do things, so that they could more adequately charge for work if they were to do that.

Todd: Rebecca, that’s a really, really important skill to teach them, because you could make up your mind you want to have a design company or a landscaping company, whatever it is, and if you’re hideous at estimating time, you’ll be out of business very quickly. When you explain to somebody, “Yeah, I’ll cut your loan on every week, and I’ll only charge you $20 because I think it’s going to take 10 minutes,” and then it turns out it takes two hours. You can’t stay in business like that. So I think that’s a great skill. See, we started out with the why don’t we teach these cognitive things early? This is one of those that you are doing, which is great. Teach them how to think about time.

Rebecca: Well, we could talk about really important things we could teach students all day long, but we do need to pay attention to our time, which we are not always good at doing. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Todd: Probably just the last items on my to do list is next, [LAUGHTER] but right after that, I’m working on a couple things. So one of them is a book on lecturing and active learning. The research does not say that the active learning is more effective than lecturing. The research is very clear that says, when you combine the two, lecturing with active learning, it’s more effective than lecturing alone. So I’m working on a book that’s balancing the two. And then the other one is, I’ve really become pretty passionate lately about people that are not built for the way the educational system’s built. I love to use the phrase that education is kind of built for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. I’ve got that in the book, and actually in a couple of the book. And the idea is in class when the teacher says, “Could somebody tell me…” there’s hands going up before you actually get to the end of this question even from some people, individuals who think really fast, who are okay if they’re wrong, they’re taking a shot at it, and they’re extroverted in that they like to really have the energy to be around people. If you’re not one of those individuals, you’re actually at a disadvantage all the way through the educational system whenever something’s run like that. And so the other thing I’m working on right now is, how do we help the individuals who are shy, who are on the autism spectrum, who maybe have depressive episodes, individuals with food insecurity, housing insecurity, all these types of individuals who walk into a classroom and when they do really well, it’s because they’re doing so much more work. I should be careful. I don’t want to discount the people who are working hard in the classroom, but there’s individuals who are working way harder than other individuals, and there’s got to be a way to balance that a little bit. That’s what I’m working on now too.

Rebecca: Sound like really important, interesting projects.

John: And will those both be ready this year, or [LAUGHTER] will it take a little bit longer for those?

Todd: Probably Tuesday, I think… maybe Thursday. It’s interesting. I will say that I really love writing. It’s obvious, I’ve got several books out now. But I work with an editor. I have my own editor that I’ve hired now, and the reason I did that is because I’m not an editor. And what I used to do on books is I would write something and I would spend more time trying to edit it and get it to sound right than I was actually writing. And so the reason that I’m kind of cranking books out right now is I write it, I send it off to my editor, my editor reads it, comes back to me and says,” I like what you did here, but you might want to change that.” And then I just zip into the next thing. So it takes me about four months to write a book now. And so I would suspect that we will see one of those heading off… well, it won’t be too long.

Rebecca: Must be there on the early part of that list, that stuff before noon.

Todd: When I mentioned that keeping track of the day, it’s a really, really important thing. It’s because, yup, that’s exactly what it is. My writing time tends to be between 7am and 10am and then all my committee meetings are in the afternoons.

Rebecca: Prioritize.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like recording this show. Huh, look at this, 3:46 pm… Ha! Right, between two and four.

Rebecca: I did notice that. I was making that note,

Todd: Uh huh, I knew you were. Boy, we should do this sometime at 10 am You wouldn’t believe how fired up I am the.

Rebecca: Alright, but that’s when I prioritize my writing and doing stuff too.

John: We always enjoy talking to you, and we’re very much looking forward to talking to you about those next books as those approach,

Todd: I always love coming to this program. I get to sip my tea, which is always good, and chat with two of my favorite pod people.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Todd.

Todd: Thanks for inviting me.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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293. Study Like a Champ

Posted in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, evidence-based practices, first-generation, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, learning science, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, self-regulated learning, sleep, teaching
June 14, 2023

The study strategies that most students use may be helpful in passing high-stakes assessments, but do not generally support long-term recall of fundamental concepts. In this episode, Regan Gurung and John Dunlosky join us to discuss a new resource they have created that is designed to help students develop more efficient study strategies and improve their metacognitive and self-regulatory skills.

Show Notes

  • Hacker, D. J., Dunlosky, J., & Graesser, A. C. (Eds.). (1998). Metacognition in educational theory and practice. Routledge.
  • Gurung, Regan and J. Dunlosky (2023). Study Like a Champ: The Psychology-Based Guide to “Grade A” Study Habits. American Psychological Association.
  • Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Transcript

John: The study strategies that most students use may be helpful in passing high-stakes assessments, but do not generally support long-term recall of fundamental concepts. In this episode, we discuss a new resource designed to help students develop more efficient study strategies and improve their metacognitive and self-regulatory skills.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Regan Gurung and John Dunlosky. Regan is a social psychologist and is an associate vice provost and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, He is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed articles and has co-authored or co-edited 15 books. John is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Director of the Science of Learning and Education Center at Kent State University. He co-authored the first textbook on metacognition and has edited several volumes on education. Regan and John are the co-authors of Study Like a Champ, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association. Welcome, John and welcome back, Regan!

Regan: Thank you.

John D.: It’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Regan, are you drinking tea?

Regan: Just water because it is a scorcher here in Oregon. So water, and lots of it.

Rebecca: Hydration is important. How about you, John?

John D.: No tea for me for about five years, I used to really be addicted to oolong. And now I’ve gone full espresso. [LAUGHTER] Water for me today too. It’s a little bit late for espresso on the East Coast.

John: And I have an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, John, you’re really pumping up the caffeine today. Also on the East Coast,

John: My day started at 5:30 this morning…

Rebecca: So did mine.

John: …and it’s going to be going really late. We’re in the midst of grading here, we’re recording this a little bit earlier than it will be released. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Study like a Champ. What prompted you to create this book?

Regan: So both of us have been teaching for a long time, both of us do research on teaching and learning. And I think both of us really like taking stuff from the lab and testing it in the classroom. And, I think, as passionate teachers, we noticed that we knew the stuff, we knew what students should be doing, we told our students what they should be doing. We even tried to design our classes in that way. But clearly, we needed to do more of it. And the impetus behind this book was let’s put these expert tips in the hands of students everywhere. We didn’t want it to be just those students who had teachers like us who talked about studying, we want it to be in student hands. And that’s where it came from, specifically driven by the fact that even though there’s some really neat stuff out there on learning, very little of that, if any, is written to the student. And that’s something right from the get go when John and I first talked, we agreed that this would be in a voice that would speak directly to students.

John D.: Absolutely. In fact, I think that was the main impetus because of all the wonderful books and volumes out there on learning sciences. And just too many of them, I think, appropriately so written for teachers. And often they tend to be a little bit fact listing because of that. In other words, I’m going to tell teachers everything there is to know about learning, which can be overwhelming. And what Regan and I wanted to do is kind of find the most effective and best little snapshots of the learning sciences to share with students, the things that we think will move the needle the quickest, so to speak. So by no means do we tell students everything there is to know about the learning sciences, but we hope we tell them the best stories to get you back onto the learning track, so to speak.

Rebecca: So you begin your book by discussing a variety of widely believed learning myths. Can you talk about a couple of these myths?

John D.: Sure, one of the biggest and I really don’t think this holds true for college students, but K through 12, definitely, it’s just the myth of learning styles. So, we all have learning preferences. I certainly have preferences. I wish my instructors would sing to me all the time and do my learning through music. It’s just that’s not going to help me learn calculus, and so forth, where really hard work needs to be done. So it’s natural to accept a myth like that, because it makes everyone feel good. It really can also undermine learning because it makes us want to do things that are more aligned with our preferences, but sometimes misaligned with most effective practices. So that’s kind of one learning myth, which I hope, in 10 years, if we were to have this discussion again, it would not come up because it was completely dispelled. But there are a variety of others too, that I think can undermine student success too.

Regan: And I think something else, that we really tried to put ourselves in students’ shoes, and we built on what our students said to us. And another one I wanted to highlight in response to that question is so often I think our students think that learning is up to us, if they have a good teacher they learn. If they have a bad teacher, they won’t learn. And undoubtedly, teacher effectiveness is important, but it’s also up to the student. The student has to do something, the student has to take accountability. And early on in chapter one, we show that at least half of the variance half of the accountability for learning is in the student hands. Teachers are also responsible, but really, if a student isn’t doing their bit, then learning is not going to happen. And now once you are ready to do your bit, well the rest of the book tells you what to do. But you’ve got to realize that don’t just sit back and go “Come on teach. Do your magic.” We all like doing our magic. But we can do all the magic in the world if you are not joining us in this adventure, and I’m thinking adventure a lot, because Zelda Stairs of the Kingdom just got released recently, and my household seems to be quite into it. So yeah, join us on the adventure.

John D.: Absolutely. Let me just jump in with one other learning myth that really gets me, and it literally gets me, because I fall prey to the same thing. That’s if you’re struggling, you’re not learning because it’s frustrating. And I often try to pick up new skills, I’m teaching myself to play the guitar now. And I struggle, and I get frustrated, I want to throw my guitar down because things aren’t happening. And I have to remind myself that sometimes it’s the struggling when you’re doing the most learning. And if we could allow students to realize that if you’re not struggling, you actually may not be learning, and that you should embrace the challenges, the hurdles that are in front of you. And it turns out, some of those hurdles are embracing the most effective learning techniques, which produce struggles in learning, but yet also produce the best long-term outcomes. Whereas other ways to prepare for classes and so forth, the way I’d like to teach myself to play guitar, makes it seem very easy. But then there’s really no progress being made. And if there’s any method I could really want to undermine, that would be a major one, that sometimes struggling is a good thing, not all the time, and it’s up to the students and the instructors to figure out is this a good struggle or bad struggle and how to correct that.

John: Those times when we try to give students desirable difficulties, they often find those to be somewhat undesirable. And I often get comments in my course evaluations that “he’s making us learn it ourselves.” And my response is always “Well, I can’t really learn it for you, I can give you the tools, I can give you resources, I can help you learn this material, but ultimately, you have to do the learning.” Going back just a little bit to your comment, John, about learning styles, I had a discussion in an online class, which is mostly upper-level students. And about three quarters of the students in my class were very strongly convinced of that myth of learning styles. So it hasn’t gone away. We hope it ma, but it is very pervasive, certainly in K through 12, where they’re regularly testing it, but some of the students have mentioned that they’ve been tested here at the college in some of their classes. And it’s again, really frustrating to see that, but it’s pretty pervasive.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was struck too, John, when you were talking about both learning styles and the struggle, because as I was working with mostly graduate students this semester, I had those exact conversations with those students. But it may have been the first time that they’ve really come up with some barriers that they faced in learning, and really had to reassess how they were working towards their goals.

John D.: Absolutely, and nothing but utmost compassion for students and sympathy, because in many ways, the experiences they had before college allowed them to use ineffective strategies and still get by. So things didn’t seem like a struggle, the difficulty now, the first time, then you hit a struggle, when you really have to change strategies or techniques, you may not realize what to do. It might seem frustrating and overwhelming, when in fact, now’s the time when the real learning begins.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I think sometimes when the subject matters new, as well as the strategies are new, students can immediately feel a little cognitive overload. [LAUGHTER]

JOHN D. Absolutely.

John: And part of that I think may be related to how they’re often taught throughout their whole career. In general, much of the advice they get in elementary and secondary schools, and sometimes in college, encourages them to adopt strategies that may not be that effective. Often, people still use high-stakes exams. And people don’t do a lot of interleaved practice or spaced practice, which are things you talk about really nicely in your book. And the incentive structure for students is perhaps to favor things that align well with short-term recall without that longer term learning. And your book can help, if we can get students doing this, but it seems to me like we also have to do a bit more work and getting faculty to adopt some techniques that may encourage students to use techniques that are more effective. Might this be something we could build into our classes a little bit?

Regan: Actually the riff over a couple of different things you said, John, I think there are two things going on here. One is, a lot of the issues that we run into with our students are actually pretty easy to pinpoint. And that is high school. And when I say high school, I’m not saying “Oh, high school teachers,” I’m saying the whole high school environment. One of my favorite examples is the syllabus. Many of us college and university faculty complain that students don’t read the syllabus, and I had a great conversation with my 17 year old. I was talking about the syllabus and he said, “Yeah, the syllabus is useless.” I said, “Excuse me?” and he said, “Here’s what we do with the syllabus. We spend a whole day, a whole day, reading through every word on the syllabus, but the syllabus is not really designed to help us learn.” And I looked at his syllabus. And sure enough, the syllabi he had didn’t really map on to the best practices that many of us listening employ. And I could completely see why he had that whole. “Yeah, I’m not going to read the syllabus when I get to college. I said, “And of course, you will now,” but it was a great conversation where I really got to see the mindset. And I think that’s just one example, where a lot of this happened, where it’s like, let’s see, what have they just been used to? Then add on top of that, how learning changed during remote learning. That’s another whole mix to the whole issue. And then, add one more, the misinterpretation of, I think, learning styles. Before we started this call, we were joking about the fact that our book is now in an audio version. Now, because it’s an audio version, does it mean the auditory learners will be better than those….? No, it just means that sometimes when you want to listen to something that works well, other times reading something works better. So it’s not this whole “Oh, look, there’s this one modality and I’m a person of this one modality.” And I think that preference that John D. so nicely used… it’s preference, right? …and we have preferences. But let’s also not forget the take home message of that Pashler et. al 2008 study, which is the more styles that you use…. And here’s where it goes back to desirable difficulties, mixing it up, is actually better for learning, no matter what your preference may be.

Rebecca: Oh, but mixing it up is so uncomfortable. [LAUGHTER]

John D.: It makes things a lot more difficult, right? One advice I would give too, that my teaching has changed dramatically, as I’ve gotten more into learning sciences. And at least for someone who teaches, I hate to say this, a non-essential course course that I love and courses that I love for undergrads, I realized I was teaching them too much. So I put them into almost a defensive mode, where the only way to prepare, because they were overwhelmed, is to cram as much as they could and hope to pass the exam because it was a tsunami of information. So over the years, I’ve followed the model, less is more, it’s up to me as the instructor to figure out what is really essential, and how to give them just as little as possible to make their experience as large as possible. So that they then can use the techniques to learn the content well enough so that they can keep that content with them a lot longer period of time. So it’s really kind of changing styles. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I’m teaching chemistry to pre meds, and you need to know chemistry, then you need a different approach, because there’s a lot to learn, it’s difficult, and aspects of our book really focus on how to meet those challenges too. And I think students, just like instructors, need to pick and choose where they want their battles, you don’t have to ace everything as a student, but decide what you really want to do well at, and then use the most effective practices to nail it as you work forward toward a long career and lifelong learning.

John: One of the things you include early in your book is a list of what research finds to be effective and what research finds to be ineffective, side by side, which for faculty use could be really helpful except for some degree of similarity between those two lists. Could you just talk a little bit about that.

John D.: I like to think about it, as much as I’ve not talked about it like this, as more or less effective versus effective and ineffective. And I’m not gonna like reference to that table necessarily, but let me talk about one that I badmouth a lot, which is highlighting as a learning strategy. And like Sharpie has not contacted me with a lawsuit or something because it sounds like I don’t want people to have highlighters. And what we mean by less effective as a learning strategy here is, is that using a highlighter is just the beginning of a learning adventure and not the end of it. So there are great uses of a highlighter of rereading material, of these things that really don’t lead to a great deal of learning, because they kind of are the stepping off point or the catapult for learning, so to speak. So is using a highlighter ineffective for learning? Absolutely, it doesn’t help you learn the content that well. But what I recommend to students: to highlight everything they want to learn as kind of a different approach to that strategy, so that they then apply the most effective strategies in learning it. Yes. So as much as we kind of play off ineffective to effective, it’s more like every strategy in its right place. And some strategies that can be generally ineffective for very specific uses might be relatively good, and what I think Regan and I try to do, because it’s way too much to think about if you’re not a learning scientist, like one exactly show us the specialty strategy, but we try to focus on are just strategies that students could learn just more generally to do well in any particular content. So kind of low hanging fruit, so to speak, where you don’t have to be a learning scientist to make decisions about which specialty strategy to use in every place. But here’s some kind of fail-proof strategies that can help you anywhere.

Regan: I want to actually say there’s that flipside too and John, this is something you asked about earlier when you talked about teachers changing what they do, and I think John D, and I joke about the companion volume to this is Teach Like a Champion. But I think the nice thing about that table of high utility and low utility strategies is that it’s not just the student who needs to be aware of the fact that some are high and low. But I think we take it further to say why are some of those high and low, and then here’s the key companion piece, which is, we hope that instructors reading this can also take those tips, and be ready to share different options with the students. Because I know both John and I have compared notes on this, when a student comes to our office after an exam who’s not thrilled with their score, who has not scored well, we both do some pretty intensive. “Alright, so tell me exactly what you do.” Just that conversation is so important. We both ask to see their notes. And of course, every once in a while a student says I don’t take notes. Well, let’s start right there. And that’s why we have a whole chapter on note taking, and why take notes and how to take notes. But I think that’s exactly it, is so many of us. and I’ll say us, not just our students, so many of us are so used to doing things just one way that we’re not ready. And we don’t look enough about is this really working or not. And I think that’s what we really push with a lot of very real examples ripped from the headlines of our lives, as it were, where we talk about, look, this is what somebody’s tried, and here’s what they did wrong. And here’s how they can make it better.

Rebecca: I wanted to talk a little bit about that chapter on notetaking. Faculty often make the observation that students don’t take effective notes, but then don’t necessarily respond by teaching students how to take notes or giving them some strategies to improve that skill. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that finally might show students or offer students to take more effective notes?

John D.: Absolutely. So the one thing that I would recommend highly is that if we all agree that taking notes in its own right is not where the learning occurs. And in fact, research comparing people who take notes versus who don’t take notes typically showed no differences between the two. Now, the key is, when you look at these studies carefully, you’ll realize the folks who took the notes, and who didn’t take notes do equally poorly. So it’s not like they do equally well. So the notes are a artifact that in many cases students can use to really learn the content well. So the question is, how do you get all the correct and appropriate information into those notes? So one thing that teachers can do, that research shows really helps well, it’s just flag important content, literally tell students “Okay, time to take notes, this is critical, I need you to know this.” One of my favorite statements, ”The next thing I say, will be on the exam.” [LAUGHTER] And see how many people start taking notes. Now, of course, I would love to see notes that are embellished with examples, with questions, and so forth. But at least getting the rudimentary content down there as an artifact, so students have it to utilize as they’re preparing is so important, or having teams of students take notes and share those things as well is also good. So I think for teachers to be compassionate, but also to help your students sometimes identify what’s most important, by speaking louder by saying, “Hey, this is really critical.” Sometimes I have to even flag it to not only just critical, but it’s going to be an exam, you’d think those two things meant the same thing, but sometimes students need a little help. I think it’s important, and there’s nothing wrong with telegraphing what is most important in your class. In fact, let me restate that. There’s everything not right about not telegraphing. Now, try to parse that. But what I’m saying is, we should be telling the students what they need to learn, how we’re going to test them on it, what we’re going to test on, and allow them to meet those successes. And I think good note taking, and helping students take notes by telegraphing what should be in there, can be very useful, in my own experience, and at least some of the research too.

Regan: Notice what else is in there. If we do want students to take good notes, we don’t want to be talking extremely fast. We want to make sure we have pauses, we want to make sure our slides, to the extent we use them, are not so packed with information that either they want to copy it all down or they get it all as a handout so they don’t have to, but there are all these nuances. And I want to go right back to that finding about the students who take notes and the students who don’t take notes. The bigger issue is what are you doing with those notes? I think far often students just think about it as “I’m going to record what the instructor said.” Well, you’ve got to go back and revise them. You’ve got to go back and check and see if your understanding is right. You need to review them. The issue is, I think, when people take notes, they’re not doing enough with those notes. And there are ways where we can talk about how to take better notes and they’re not. When I teach 100, or intro level classes, every once in a while, I will stop, and I do this during the first week, I will stop. And I’ll say, “Alright, here’s a reality check. If you took good notes, you should have the following. How many of you have it in your notes?” And I do that a couple of different times that first week or the first two weeks to get into that habit of you should be taking notes, you should be doing something about it. I also want to say something that didn’t make it into that chapter on note taking, but it’s gone up another shot, because I’ve seen this so often, in the last year and a half or two years, students taking photographs of the slides. Reality check, people, that’s not taking notes, taking a photograph of a slide is not taking notes. But I think in some students’ minds they’ve taken notes, just more effectively. And there are studies now rolling out that show that the photograph slides versus note taking versus controlled no notes. that the photographs and no notetaking is doing the worst on quizzes. But I think that’s something else we’ve got to take up” how you take notes is important and taking a photograph is not it.

John D.: Let me spin back to something that Regan said that I think is great, too, as far as helping students develop better notes, I begin, and I know Regan does this as well, every class with a no-stakes quiz. And I use that for a variety of different reasons, some of which we talk about in our book, but one of them is first try to answer the quiz multiple choice question without the alternatives from memory. And if you got it from memory, that’s important, because that’s going to help you learn. And then if you don’t get it from memory, now see if you can answer using your notes from the last class. And if they can’t answer the question using their notes, we have issues. So they’re not taking complete notes, they don’t understand their notes, or the issue could be with me. Occasionally, I look at the notes and realize, “Oh, my goodness, I must have said something wrong last class, because everybody’s notes are incorrect.” [LAUGHTER] And if everyone’s notes are incorrect, the source of the error is probably me. So it’s a way to help students understand that the notes are the vehicle to understand the content that we really want them to learn. And there’s ways to reinforce that through no-stakes quizzes, and so forth to help them understand that what we’re doing in the classroom is providing all the scaffolding to help them succeed.

John: One of the things you emphasize early in the book, and throughout the book is the importance of students developing their metacognition as well as their self-regulation skills. Could you talk a little bit about why that’s important, because I think that’s something that’s not emphasized enough throughout their educational experience,

John D.: I’m gonna just focus on one aspect of our particular viewpoint on self regulation, and then I’ll let Regan go with the more fun stuff. I want students to really succeed in school and in college. But quite frankly, as a college educator, I want students to succeed in life after they leave here. And one of the most important skills that anyone can learn is time management, that’s about self regulation. And believe it or not, I have actually students tell me, it’s like, “Well, I know, managing my time and developing plans, that’s just not my cup of tea.” (speaking of teaching for tea). But it absolutely should be, because effective people develop goals, plan on how to get them, and manage their time to get there. So if students can take something from this book that I think is highly valuable about self regulation is to look at our examples and our encouragement and inspiration to manage your time, make goals and plans, and develop a time management strategy that works well for you. Because that’s ultimately going to lay the foundations for a successful use of other strategies we discuss in the book, but also for a highly successful life, whether it be success in your job, your hobbies, raising a family, or whatever, successful people manage their time and self regulate. That’s something that we really do push in the book, and some of it’s not necessarily metacognition, per se, but it’s about really taking ownership of your life and deciding how to get things done effectively. So time management, for me is so important aspect of this book.

Regan: I think whenever you think about self regulation, I really try to stress two elements of it on one hand, especially think about metacognition is the: “What do you know? Do you know this stuff?” And there’s that whole “Am I ready for this exam? Do I really understand this concept? Do I know how to do this?” That’s the classic metacognition, but even more broadly, when we talk about plan and monitor and assess your knowledge, that’s, I think, really important as well. And of course, the tips such as retrieval practice is great for the assessment too and to assess yourself. But I think I love the way John talks about time management because when we talk about self regulation, a big issue that I hear from students a lot is where those two things interact, not being able to regulate how they use their time, especially when it comes to social media. And students will say to me, “Yep, I start scrolling Tik Tok, and before I know it’s an hour later. Well, that’s a basic self-regulation issue. That’s a time management issue. That’s a planning issue. And I think in our planning chapter, we recognize this and we tell students “Look, it’s okay to enjoy social media. But guess what? Plan your social media timr. So it’s not like you’re saying, I’m not going to use social media. Be real. If that’s what you enjoy, sure, look at some social media, but plan it out, allocate time for your social media, just like you allocate time for your work so that everything fits into your schedule.”

Rebecca: Allocating time, it feels like have a lot of conversations with students about that on a regular basis.

John D.: Oh yeah.

John: Are there other topics you’d like to emphasize about your book that we haven’t touched on yet?

Regan: Well, I think one thing that if you’ll notice, the last chapter in our book is all about things that, for the longest time, nobody thought related to studying: sleeping, eating, physical activity. But I think that is just so important. That is so important. And gosh, I know, I don’t think I ever shared this with John. But sometimes I almost played with putting that chapter first. We did put it at the end, because I think it’s really important. But I think most students don’t realize how those life things interact. And I think for those of us who read up on higher education, there’s just so much written about burnout among students, among faculty, and all of that relates to those things we talk about in the last chapter. It’s prioritizing sleep and prioritizing good eating and prioritizing physical activity, prioritizing just getting out and getting some air. And some of my favorite comments that I get back from students… it happens a lot when I teach health psych… but even otherwise, where they will say, “you know, yeah, I caught myself scrolling, I went outside for a walk, and it was just five minutes, but I came back and I could tackle things better.” And I think, people, it’s 360 degrees of living is what we’ve got to practice.

John D.: And I love that Regan. Because obviously, we saved the best for last with that chapter. But, come on, to do all these things. It’s a time-management issue. If I’m going to work, all of this in, how can I do so so I have enough time for play and I have enough time for work, which are two important aspects of life. So, totally agree.

Rebecca: Well, they always wrap up by asking: what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

John D.: Wow, that’s a big question. And what’s next, I would say for me, the strategies that I think are most effective, that work the best, unfortunately, have also been investigated the least, because they’re difficult to investigate, they involve multiple sessions for students to engage the same material, and so forth. So as someone who was kind of born and raised in a laboratory, either my own lab or laboratory of the classroom, what I’d love to see is just much more evidence-based research focused on further understanding, not only what works best, but how students can engage in the best practice in the most efficient way. So it’s balancing both an understanding of wanting students to obtain their learning objectives, but also understanding that they want to do so effectively and efficiently. Because there’s so many aspects to life beyond just school. So I’m always going to say more research, although I could totally understand some would say more application too, but I’m gonna go what’s next is some more research and all these really effective techniques and how to use them more effectively.

Regan: And it’s that last part, John, that is what’s exciting me right now, I’ve been learning a lot more about the whole field of implementation science, which is just because something is effective, and something is efficacious, what are the factors that influence its implementation? …because whether it’s a student reading our book and trying to implement our recommendations, or a faculty member, instructor, teacher listening to us and trying to implement what we’re saying, there are still nuances, there are still contextual factors. And I think we’re just getting better at intentionally and systematically teasing apart what some of those issues with implementation are. And for me, that’s been pretty exciting. I was fortunate to read a lot of a fellow Oregon State University, new PhD, Dr. Rachel Schweitzer, who’s done a lot of this work on implementation science, and some of her ideas. I’d love to be able to test them in my class, to dovetail with continuing research on study techniques and how to make it happen more,

Rebecca: Some really important stuff that needs to happen, for sure.

John: And thank you for this book and all the other research and work that you’ve done in support of improving student learning.

John D.: Thanks for having us on.

Regan: Thanks so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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289. The Cognition-Motivation Connection

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, emotion, engagement, evidence-based practices, experiential learning, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, motivation, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
May 17, 2023

Emotions can have both positive and negative impacts on learning. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to explore the relationships that exist between emotions and learning.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University.  She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a co-editor, with James Lang, of the superb West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning.

Show Notes

  • Miller, Michelle (2023). “Revisiting the cognition-motivation connection: What the latest research says about engaging students in the work of learning.”  March 3.
  • Miller, Michelle (2022). “Ungrading Light: 4 Simple Ways to Ease the Spotlight off Points.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. August 2.
  • Remind
  • Transparency in Teaching and Learning (TILT)
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3), 219–224.
  • Abel, M., & Bäuml, K. H. T. (2020). Would you like to learn more? Retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying. Cognition, 201, 104316.
  • McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2020). Training learning strategies to promote self-regulation and transfer: The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1363-1381.
  • Miller, Michelle (2019). Attention Matters. Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 86. June 19.
  • Michelle Miller’s R3 Newsletter
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s Once More, With Feeling substack
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.

Transcript

John: Emotions can have both positive and negative impacts on learning. In this episode, we explore the relationships that exist between emotions and learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a co-editor, with James Lang, of the superb West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here today.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Michelle, do you have some tea?

Michelle: Well, not exactly. I’ve started hydrating with fruity water today. So, I’ve got my water jug and I’m working on it.

John: And I have just a little bit of a peppermint-spearmint tea blend here. And the reason is just a little bit as this is our third podcast of the day today. So I didn’t have a chance in between them to go back to my office and get some new tea or some new hot water. So I do have a little bit to get us started here.

Rebecca: A tiny bit left from my pot of blue sapphire tea.

John: …which is much more colorful.

Rebecca: It is, but not in my cup, only in the pot.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your March 3 blog post, addressing the relationship between cognition and emotion. In general, how is cognition influenced by emotion,

Michelle: I’ve been interested in this connection for a while and watching the evolution from within my field of cognitive psychology and kind of moving away from the approach that I came up with when I was just starting out as a graduate student, which is I recall was this kind of oil and water conception of cognition and emotion that here on the one side, we’ve got thought processes, we’ve got memory, and so on. And on the other side [LAUGHTER], we’ve got the emotions and so on. And we’re just going to really work from in our subfield to try to get our arms around just these cognitive processes, and don’t worry about the rest of it. And now, I think that most cognitive psychology theorists in the field would say that, yeah, our cognitive processes are definitely shaped by and infused by what’s going on kind of over in the emotional processing systems of our mind and in our brain. And if I had to describe, just from my own perspective, what I see is a change over time and an evolution in our field, we’ve kind of gone from really talking about parts of the mind in this very compartmentalized modular way, where different parts do different things pretty much independently. And now you see more discussion of how these different parts have interplay with each other, how they give what I would think of as a sort of a soft input to other subsystems, or even set some constraints on what those other systems are doing without totally determining them. So I think we are moving into this more nuanced view of how those two things work together. So that, yeah, our emotions affect what we believe, they also serve as a way to almost elevate or suppress different aspects of what we’re processing so we might remember things in a particular way, or think about them in a particular way. And it’s neat to me too, as somebody in the field, because I look and I see clinical psychologists, the people in the area of psychology who work on how do we help people in therapy and help people with different disorders and challenges. They’ve known this for quite some time, but they’ve looked at it sort of in reverse. So if you’ve ever heard the school of thought known as cognitive therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the core tenets of that approach is that the emotional side of how we function, our emotions, are affected by our cognition. So what we feel, even our mood states and so on, that’s fundamentally driven by things like what we believe. And so they’ve come up with these really exciting and powerful techniques for addressing beliefs that people have and thereby affecting their emotions. So we can take a cue from that and have this more nuanced view of the interplay. So back to cognitive psychology. I also come at this really philosophically as what we would call a functionalist, [LAUGHTER] that’s sort of a lens through which I see how we address questions in psychology. So when we say, “Well, why does the mind work in this particular way? Why does it have this component or why does it do this in this way?” I would look at and say, “Well, how does that help us survive? What’s the function for helping us really survive and thrive in our world?” And when we look at things like emotions, our emotions are there for very functional reasons. I believe our emotions exist in order to kind of move us towards things that help us in our survival and move us away from things that are going to be a threat to our survival. And also they serve in this way to kind of alert us to what’s relevant. So it’s almost like a relevance mechanism. So if something provokes an emotional response in us, that may be an old shortcut that our mind has to say, “Yes, this is something that’s important. This is something that maybe you want to remember and that you want to pay attention to.” So I see emotions as kind of a feel for relevance, and that’s something I’m sure we’ll get into in our conversation about teaching and learning. later. And all of this is a practical issue too. I tell the story sometimes about Minds Online, and writing that book, where I got to about midway through the book and literally had this crisis, I remembered it happening like in the middle of the night, there’s something huge that’s missing right around this point in the book. And that book, for those who have taken a look at it, it takes a very cognitive view of how we select and use technologies. But I came to this realization, we can’t really talk about how to maximize the effectiveness of those approaches, unless we also talk about why students are going to do them in the first place, and how we can get them motivated to do them. So, in that book, I ended up covering some very basic elementary foundational concepts in motivation and motivation theory with that idea of what are just the essentials that every teacher needs to know and how might that also get involved in how do we choose certain technologies? How do we set things up in a particular way, for example, in an online course to keep students moving and that keep them putting in that productive effort. And so that’s been around in the back of my mind for quite some time. But now I’m reading all these new articles and this wave of interesting new research that is finding yet more connections between those two sides of the mind. And so how to get students to engage in strategies that work from a cognitive perspective and how to direct that feel for relevance. And early on in my career, as I mentioned in that blog post, I look back and it seems so harsh now, like, well, how do we get students to be accountable. And now I’ve kind of shifted that along with many others towards really looking more at the support side of this and bringing in things like empathy for our students, I don’t think I’ve ever been one of those super punitive “look to your left, look to your right” kinds of teachers, nor have I ever really advised that to their faculty. But I’m realizing that in this really critical case that I’m looking at this relationship in new ways, and I’m excited to share that.

Rebecca: So there’s been a lot of discussion about student motivation and engagement…, a crisis in it. [LAUGHTER] A lot of faculty have reported students being less engaged or less motivated. How can we, as faculty, address some of the challenges that people are experiencing at this moment?

Michelle: And it is such a pressing question, and that’s another thing that’s just really been registering as I’ve had my antenna up about what are people talking about right now? What are they bringing into conferences, and so on? And first off, as a little bit of a skeptic, I have to say, “Well, I think that we still need some more information to nail down exactly what the extent and the nature of the engagement crisis is.” And I think all three of us are attuned to what I guess you can call the fallacy of “students these days.” [LAUGHTER] So as so many people have observed, it’s so tempting to have that filter on of like, “Well, back when I was a student, I was always intrinsically engaged in my classes, I didn’t miss assignments, and so on and there’s a downward trend.” So there’s something about that. I put on my skeptic filter when I see that. But that said, we do have these experiences. And I don’t think regardless, even if we look back and say, “Well, maybe this wasn’t really part of a bigger trend as we thought.” Even if that were to happen, are we gonna look back and say, “Well, we shouldn’t have worried so much about engaging our students, we can almost always stand to engage them more.” So with that big caveat, I think that we should also be really reflecting on and separating out, as much as it’s really possible to do so, disengagement from other related things like prioritizing. I don’t have the capacity to cover all that I need to as a student, and perhaps also as a family member, a parent, a worker, and so on. So here’s how I’m going to go at it, or even just straight up overwhelm, and I think we can look at that from our own perspective, too, and say, “Well, right.” I think we’ve also seen quite a few faculty professional development directors and others who work with other faculty to say, “Oh my gosh, I put up a half a dozen workshops, and I’m having trouble filling them. So we too, as a lot of our demands have converged over the last couple of years, and as we’ve coped with those stresses, we too. It’s not that we’re disengaged from what we’re doing, but we’re having to make some different choices out of necessity. We have the economic costs of college and that whole dynamic that’s going on as well. I’m no expert in that. But I think we all know that students today are working more jobs, succeeding at every single course and getting through as quickly as possible is an economic necessity and so on. So the stakes are very, very high for students, and students are dealing with that. And so that’s one also very important thing to think about when we’re looking at this. So with that, though, have students been more disengaged? I mean, my experience immediately coming back to in-person teaching, I found myself that students were really excited. At the risk of sounding very strange here, it was like a box of excited puppies: Oh my goodness, we’re all here in the classroom together. And I felt the same way in some ways too. But really directing that in some, again, productive ways is what we have to do as the leaders of our classes. Now to practical tips for what can we do. If there’s a disengagement, students are elsewhere, they’re not doing the work, or they’re all excited but they don’t know how to manage that. But here’s a couple things that I think are very practical. So I’m a big advocate these days for flexibility and approachability in what we do. So I wrote a piece last year titled, “Ungrading Light…” I think that was the catchphrase in the title… which talks about “Okay, without sort of throwing out grades and say, ‘Well, students have the wrong motivation when it’s all about the grades.’” If we’re still going to have grades, what are some positive ways to keep students really focused on the learning and engaged with the learning and not just like, checkpoint, checkpoint, how do I get through this? And I do think that even some basic changes to policy can help here. So things like I really have gotten very flexible on deadlines. The caution here that this is going to look very different for people with different course sizes, section sizes, different disciplines, what the learning objectives really are in your course. So I don’t want to imply that everybody just can do this in the same way. And as I also mentioned in the piece, things like very flexible deadline policies can present a professional risk for people who do not have the security of, for example, tenure, and people who are historically minoritized, and are going to elicit different kinds of reactions from students to play out on things like end-of-semester evaluations. So for example, faculty of color. So with those big cautions in mind, now, here’s been my experience is I communicate with students… I say, “I want to be approachable,” I want to really show them and not just tell them that if you come to me and say, “I was pulling double shifts all weekend, and I need to do this paper draft, and I know that, but I need another two days,” that I’m not going to come down on them in a harder, personal way. And if they do that, just not all the time, I will say, “Yeah,” and then my catchphrase right now is, “Take the time, you need to do your best work.” And that turns out actually to be really good for my motivation, too, because I would really rather read what they put together [LAUGHTER] with a little bit of more time, that’s all about I want to do something I can be proud of in this course, and actually walk away with great knowledge. It’s more geared towards that and less geared towards “Oh my gosh, didn’t come in until 11:58 when it’s due at midnight, and I sort of just checked that box again. So that is something as well and other ways to be approachable, that can also elicit more engagement. How do we know students are engaged? Well, when they reach out to us. And so, here again, different individuals have to decide their appropriate comfort level and parameters. But I have a syllabus statement that says here are all the different ways to get in touch with me. If you’ve got a long question, and we need to talk, I’ve got a scheduling program, you click a button, and boom, now you have access to my calendar, and you can get on my calendar the same way my colleagues can. And that’s good. If you have a really quick question like, “Oh my gosh, there’s one thing I need to do in order to finish this assignment and actually be successful, then you can text me or send me a message in a program such as Remind, which can kind of buffer so we’re not trading phone numbers. But, that immediacy, it has not really resulted in this giant pile up of lots of inappropriate communications, which is what I was always warned about when I was coming up as a teacher. But instead, students get the question answered and then they can kind of stay engaged with the flow of what they’re doing. So just basic ideas, but ones that I think can help move us back towards a more engaged setting where students are excited to be there and so am I. If I could add one other thing here, too, we can also take a page out of the transparency philosophy. So if you’re familiar with Transparency in Teaching and Learning, the TILT framework, it’s so powerful. And it’s all about giving more explicit directions to students, as well. What you may read as disengagement or not caring, might be “I don’t know where to start and now, I really am feeling either alienated, overwhelmed, or something in between.” And I think that’s another we can all relate to is, we’re a lot more likely to take the first step down the path and keep going if that first step is lit up, or maybe if the whole path is lit up. So taking that little bit of extra time to say “And here’s where to start and if you get stuck, here’s what to do.” That can also help.

John: I’ve been observing the same sort of issue that many people have reported of students not completing work. I’ve seen students being much more excited to be back in the classroom, and they tend to be fairly engaged in classroom activity. But what I’ve been seeing and what a lot of faculty have been saying is that students aren’t doing the work outside of class at the same rates that they used to do. And one of the concerns in terms of making your classes more flexible, in some cases, you can do that really well and I do allow that with many of the assignments. But in classes where the material builds from week to week, if students start getting behind early in the semester, they’re going to be struggling a lot more later. So I have different policies depending on whether they’re producing something, some type of educational project… a podcast or something similar… as they do in some of my classes, then they can have more time. And I give them as much time as they need to do that with multiple iterations. But with other things like reading the materials online, where there’s some embedded questions, and so forth, there, I do insist that they get it done by a certain time, because then when they come into class and they’re asked clicker questions, some of which they’re graded on, they’re not going to be successful in that if they haven’t done the basic reading. And that’s where I’m seeing a lack of engagement, outside of class. I’ve had many fewer students complete the readings before class, or even weeks after they were due, they’re still not completing some of those readings. And that’s the concern that I’m having. And I have to say that I’ve also observed some of this with faculty too, that attendance at professional development workshops have been a lot lower this year than in the last couple of years. And some of it may be because of burnout after the pandemic. And I should note that on my campus, we’re also transitioning to a new learning management system. And a lot of people have been struggling with that, which takes up a lot of their time, reducing the amount of time they have to learn other new things while they’re struggling to learn the new system. But this issue of engagement does seem to be impacting the amount of learning that I’m seeing, at least in my large intro classes, I’m not seeing it so much in my upper-level classes. But I’m wondering if some of this may be because we have students who’ve spent a year or two with remote learning in schools that often had very few resources to do that, well and students may have just gotten out of practice with doing a lot of work, because in many school systems, students were just passed on to the next grade level without necessarily learning very much in many classes.

Michelle: Yeah, I’ve seen this dynamic, actually even at my upper levels as well became rather glaring the first time that we went back to an in person symposium, it was the kind of capstone experience in this class was to bring some research to the symposium. It’s a wonderful experience, but it dawned on me partway through the semester to step back and just say, “Okay, how many of you have never done a presentation like this before?” And yeah, previously, most of the class would have had some experience either in an in-person research lab that they were in, or in a methods class or something like that. It was one of those head slapping moments, at least for me, feeling, “Of course, of course they don’t know.” And I try to come at it like, “Well, this is the time to do what I probably should have always done for what was previously a small group of students. But it’s still an important group of students who are sitting in the back going, ‘Oh, my gosh, I feel lost. I don’t want to even raise my hand. I don’t know what she’s talking about with the poster or participation or even things like what to wear.’” And so I did, I went back and dusted off and created a few stopgap materials. I found some things out on the web that actually demonstrated a poster presentation that was in progress and what to do and not to do. So it can be an opportunity to do more of that transparency and kind of scaffolding and bringing everybody up. But yeah, it can be shocking to stand back and say, “Okay, who has not actually done this thing that I kind of always assumed would be the case by this level,” regardless of what that is.

Rebecca: I’ve experienced this, even with graduate students, this lack of knowledge of certain kinds of academic experiences, in part because they were learning online or not doing things in person, and now they’re in in-person classes and having any in-person experiences. So I had the same experience, Michelle, but with graduate students, and needing to really build in some transparency there that maybe didn’t need to be there before because in their undergraduate experience, they were very likely to have had a similar experience.

John: And as you said, Michelle, giving students more structure and more support is something that we probably should be doing anyway. We just finished a reading group on Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan’s book on inclusive teaching. And that’s the message at the heart of that book: that giving students support will help all students at least some and will especially help those students who come from backgrounds that provide less preparation for success in college. So to the extent to which we as faculty all learn that lesson, that giving students more support is useful, it’ll be a better environment.

Michelle: I agree and what seems implicit in that., how you’ve put that too is, instead of like, “Oh my gosh, another thing I have to cram into the semester” …for our motivation and our engagement is to say, this is part of one of the most noble pursuits that we can have as educators, to give it that meaningful frame. So yes, a hearty I agree with that book, in particular, and their framework. And for me, that helps me kind of say, like, “Okay, yeah, this is not just an extra add on, this is what we’re here for.” And if I’m trimming back a few extra articles, or chapters, and I have done that, to some extent, in favor of being able to go more deep and into content, and be more supportive in these positive ways, I think that’s a win.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I’ve noticed or experienced recently with students is high engagement in class, high engagement in the subject matter, but we’ve had really interesting conversations about procrastination or not doing things outside of class, largely due to a lack of confidence, or striving for perfection that doesn’t exist. And there’s a lot of that emotion around that. And so a lot of my students have talked about that, or shared that with me, which I’m grateful that they’ve shared that with me. But that’s what’s preventing them from getting started.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I think folks who follow the research on procrastination out there, it’s not as much in my specialty area, but I do think it’s fascinating. And it’s another one of these touch points between what we believe, what we feel, what we’re motivated to do, and then in turn, what we remember and what we learn. So I think that for people who are interested in this whole topic of procrastination, why does it happen? What are some really good ways to talk about it, and address it, there’s new stuff coming out. And it’s a good thing to talk about with students as well, I think years back, it was almost a taboo subject. But now from what I hear you saying, you just bring it up with students, and we can all talk about it not as like, “Oh, that’s some terrible thing that other people, bad students, are doing. This is all of us, right? [LAUGHTER] We live in a world of abundance, but also abundant distractions, and so many things competing for our time. So I like this idea of opening up that line of communication, saying, “What do we all do to tackle this when it occurs?”

John: Dan Ariely had a paper a number of years ago, where he did an experiment in class, I think it was an economics class, actually, where students wrote papers. And he and some co authors had two sections of the class, where in one section, students had three papers with fixed due dates spread evenly through the semester. And in the other section, students were able to pick their own due dates. And there was a penalty in either case of one percentage point a day for each day the work was submitted late. And what was found in that study is that the students did best who either had fixed due dates, they had higher quality papers, and higher quality work, and so forth, they wrote more, and the quality of the work was much better when they had fixed due dates, or when they chose evenly spaced due dates. From an economist’s perspective, the rational thing to do would be to put all three due dates on the last day of class, because then you could still plan to do it evenly throughout the semester, but you would have no cost of doing that. So if something came up, you could postpone it. But what happened is the people who put all their due dates at the end of the semester ended up procrastinating, turning in work later, the papers were shorter, they were lower quality, and in general, they didn’t do quite as well. So that’s one study, I often will cite to students when we talk about due dates and deadlines, and so forth. But it’s an interesting study. And I haven’t seen anything else in economics journals, at least, related to that, but I’m sure there’s more that I haven’t seen in the literature.

Michelle: Fascinating stuff from across the disciplines.

John: One of the things you talk about in your blog post is that the strategies that students use for learning are not the strategies that evidence tells us are most effective. Students tend to use strategies that provide some short-term benefit, and seem to be easier, rather than the strategies that require them to struggle a little bit more with the content. One of the things you talk about are some ways that we could encourage students to adopt strategies that may not feel quite as good in the short run, but result in more learning. How can we motivate students to use evidence-based learning strategies?

Rebecca: …motivate them to struggle? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Right, but that is really what we’re talking about here. And I do want to go into this… big qualification here… I don’t think that students are just out there wanting to get the best grade and for the least effort necessarily, that’s just not a narrative about students that I buy into. So, I don’t think students are trying to do low-effort strategies. But, just like the rest of us, we don’t have a very good or accurate view always, a very empirical view, of what actually pays off in terms of learning. It’s pretty rare that we sit down and actually kind of do the math and say, “Well, I did this, I systematically changed the approach in this way, and here’s the outcome.” So we don’t come at it that way. So no wonder that over time, we end up with kind of a distorted view of what actually does work. So that’s a big piece of it. And it is true at the same time that these strategies we’re talking about… well, let’s take one, for example, of blocked study. Now this is a term that I also want to unpack a little bit too, it’s not super intuitive. So this has to do with the principle of interleaving, which I always say it doesn’t always apply in all studying, but to cases where you’re learning how to apply different problem solving strategies and you have to choose from several when you’re having to categorize and learn to discriminate among categories. So that is a subset of what students are sometimes learning. And the thing is, we have this great powerful line of research that shows that actually mixing it up in an unpredictable way, the different problem types or category types, means it’s going to be a lot more memorable when you actually work through those practice problems or practice sets. And if that’s the case, the unpredictability of like, well, something’s gonna pop up categorizing different painting styles, I have no idea [LAUGHTER] if it’s going to be a Renoir or a Monet, what could be next? It’s that unpredictability. So people sometimes confuse it with just like mixing up topics or having variety, but it really refers to the systematic principle. Now, when students are offered the opportunity to structure their own study, what do you know, they tend to go with blocked study, and again, it’s not because there’s some dispositional factor, they don’t want to do their homework or something like that. Really when you look at it intuitively, it’s like an illusion, block study feels so effective. I’m going to work through all of this one painter or all of this one way of solving a statistics problem. And then I’ll go into the next and our textbooks are organized that way, too. So students have seen that, and so that’s what they fall back on. And there’s some recent work that I’ve talked about in that blog post and in a few other places, that has really studied in a very granular fashion… it’s presented students with different alternatives, like here’s a blocked study schedule. Here’s an interleaved one. We don’t use the technical terms, we show them both options, and say, “Okay, let’s pretend you have a math test coming up. Which one of these do you want to do? And why?” And yeah, students, they gravitate towards the blocked one. And they say, I perceive that this is going to be easier, first of all, and that’s fine. We want to use the most efficient strategy. So they say, this is gonna look easy and also, it feels more effective. Because I feel like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.” But as we all know, sometimes that’s a false sense of security. So that’s the example as it lays out in that one case, and I think that that is a larger kind of big dynamic, that we do have to be aware of what looks easy, what feels easy, what looks effective, what feels effective. Sometimes, your brain is kind of playing tricks on you. And that becomes very serious when it is the case that things like interleaved study are more effortful, but they’re going to pay off more for the time invested. Retrieval practice, which I and a lot of other folks in the space talk about so much, that’s another that it’s gonna require a different level of effort and engagement to close my book and say, “Alright, instead of rereading this chapter, what did I actually get out of it, or maybe I can seek out a quiz.” And to me, I also think it’s not just the effort involved, and research, by the way, it’s also showing students also to look at this and go, “that looks difficult.” It also kind of emotionally, I mean, I was feeling okay about this chapter, and now, I can’t really kid myself any more. So to the extent that students might be kind of saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” …like, we might all do this, this will kind of bust that unjustified optimism, and that doesn’t always feel great in the short term. So if that’s the case, I mean, we can set up these wonderful learning activities, and if students aren’t going to do them, then they’re not doing them or us any good or any benefit. So, that’s the case as well. And so if they have a sense of the value, and a lot of these strategies that maybe we can touch on, do have to do with exposing and revealing and convincing about the value, and finding ways to draw students into exactly those techniques. So just because these are difficult, I do want to make sure everybody doesn’t get this terrible impression of like, “Ah, studying is going to be this miserable slog, no pain, no gain,” …it’s more subtle than that. And they really do work, you really are gonna get so much more out of the time that you put in and for students who really are stretched really thin as we’ve touched on. That’s an important powerful message.

Rebecca: You mentioned a number of specific examples in your post, do oyu want to dive into some of those and share something like the snowball effect or self-determination theory, or some of your other really awesome examples?

Michelle: Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. And, after all, the big philosophy and approach matters, but let’s get down to the actual techniques. So I’ve referenced something called the “snowball effect,” and this is just my informal term, but really, the more you know, the more that you want to know. And the more that you know, because of the way memory works, the more you know about a particular domain or subject area, the easier it is to acquire new facts. And like I always throw out the example of folks we know who are just really committed to some hobby or area of interest, the sports fanatics and so on, they can run into a fact one time and boom, they’ve got it, they’ve maybe got it for life, and they don’t have to study [LAUGHTER] or do anything like that. And so there is that snowball, or rich get richer effect, just because of some factors about how memory is set up and how it works. From a very practical angle, like I ran into this really intriguing study. And it’s not one where we’ve got piles of research yet, but this really got me thinking. So they did a study where they had students through retrieval practice, learn some basic facts about an area that they picked. And they were able to systematically track that when students did learn this foundational information more solidly, then when they had the option, “Oh, would you like to know more about this subject?” …students were more likely to say yes. And that’s totally voluntary. And that’s the sort of thing that makes our hearts go pitter pat, as teachers we want students leaving and going, “Oh, my gosh, now I really want to read that next reading that Dr. Kane assigned, for example.” And like when you were talking about, students are coming into class, and we’re trying to get them into the next level of conceptual stuff and exciting things they can do, if they don’t have the facts, it’s gonna be really, really tough, so it also really points up the importance of doing that. And it also, I think, addresses one of these big myths about memory. And this is one that I’ve talked about in some of my recent workshops, and so on, and I mentioned in my last book, this big myth that if we do focus on having students concentrate on remembering foundational information, we’re going to turn them off of learning: “Oh, it’s going to be this sort of these nightmare of drills.” And, “sure, they’ll know it for the test, but they’ll walk out and they’ll never want to be engaged with the subject again. So it’s a big loss, [LAUGHTER] right?” And this is really calling that into question, saying that sometimes knowing some of these cool initial facts can start to set you down that path and then maybe someday, you will be that expert who can hear a fact one time in this area and we’ve got it. Why? Because we already know so much about it. So again, that whole Interplay there. There’s also the role of choice and autonomy. And this is one that I think a lot of really intuitive, committed, teachers really hit on early, even if they never really have some of the more formal terminology for it. So when there’s choice, not only are students more invested in what they’re doing, there’s possibly a role of curiosity here. So I talk about, in this blog post, this sham lottery study, it was one of these, where if you look at it on the face of it, you’re like, “What are they doing?” But as a psychologist, I’m like, “Ah, that’s really clever.” So basically, they had research participants going through this little pretend lottery of like, “Okay, you’re selecting out of this bucket of red balls, and so on. And what do you think it’s going to come up?” And the one twist that they put in there, is sometimes people chose which of these two little buckets, there are these little random drawings, that they were going to focus on? And then it’s like, okay, well, we can either just move on with the study, or you can see how it came out? Well, they want to know how it came out when they chose… even this incredibly arbitrary [LAUGHTER] low-stakes situation. So I think that’s also another kind of natural, emotional process, motivational process, that we can tie into… setting up curiosities or questions, but also having students say, “Well, which of these two projects do you want to do?” These days I offer options whenever I can. Would you like to write a term paper? The sort of formal paper? Or would you like to put together a slideshow that you can narrate and share? Big learning objectives are probably similar, but students can pick and I always present in practical terms, I say, “Well, if you are going to graduate school next year, and you need a writing sample for your portfolio, this is a great opportunity to do that orr if you’d like to stretch your skills with oral presentations, maybe because of the last few years, you haven’t gotten to do that as much, then you can choose this,” …but simply by having them make a choice, the research would predict that they are going to be more invested, and they’re going to be involved in these more effective things. So that’s one and oh, I’m really excited to see what’s coming out in this whole sub area of “Okay, we’ve done all the research we know that things like retrieval practice and interleaved study, all this engaged stuff. We know it works. We put it on a tip sheet, we gave it to students, nothing happened.” Uh oh.[LAUGHTER] Now what? So not just the like, “Okay, what should students be doing?” But “how do we get them to do those very things?” And, boy, if there was ever a time when we realize, yeah, my ability to just sort of exhort you and make you do things because I say so is limited, this is the time. Because I don’t get to go home with students [LAUGHTER] and say like, “Alright, that whole thing about quiz yourself. And so now you really have to do it.” So there’s this relatively new framework that’s come out too from some cognitive psychologists that I really admire, Mark McDaniels and his team. The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning approach, KBCP. So this pulls in from some other research on intentional behavior change that’s also been perking along just all on its own for years and years. We know so much about how people set a course and decide to change their behaviors. And study skills are, after all, kind of an entrenched pattern of behavior for many students by the time they get to us. How do we go in and change it? And yeah, it’s absolutely not through my least favorite technique, which is put together a list of random tips and hope for the best. So they say, alright, knowledge is the first step. So just telling students like, “Hey, there’s all this research that shows that if you close the book and quiz yourself, you’re going to get more out of this. If you do the reading quiz that I set up for you, and do it as many times as you possibly can, that’s going to help you retain the foundational information.” I’ve told them, I’ve shared it with them, or something like interleaved study, if you’ve got different problem types, mix them up. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s only the first step. So the next step is belief. And that means changing beliefs, which means persuasion. So we kind of dust off a whole bunch of other things out of the psychologist’s toolkit. How do you persuade people? Well, you show, don’t tell. So this team proposes doing things like “Well, let’s run a head-to-head comparison, like a Pepsi Challenge, in class. Sure, your brain tells you that you learned a ton just from reviewing, but did you? Let’s try it.” And this takes some time. I mean, this is not easy. But this is one of the things they propose: commitment. So now that I’ve persuaded you that this is the way to study, now, what’s your next step? So getting your students to say, “Yeah, I actually authentically believe this. And I see how it’s going to help me and I’m going to try it.” And then of course planning. So instead of just like, “I will do this,” right? Those of us who are veterans of New Year’s resolutions of yor [LAUGHTER] know that that is not the way to go. So yeah, saying “Okay, but here’s what I’m going to actually do. So I’ve got a test coming up, I’m going to maybe set up a study schedule, instead of just cramming it all in the last minute, which is [LAUGHTER] a really good empirically grounded strategy. I’m going to find these practice quizzes, or maybe I’ll get together with a study group and do that. So here’s my plan.” And then if possible, circling back and say, “Well, did it work.?” And hey, if we’re right, then students will actually try it, they’ll say, “Wow, in less time, I knocked the top out of this test that I was really worried about.” And that is going to feed that virtuous cycle of going right back to those effective strategies. So KPCB, I love it too, because I’ve been doing something similar in the Attention Matters Project that I think I’ve talked about on some previous episodes as well, which is all about having students themselves come in and see how their attention is limited, learn about the effects of things like distraction on their learning. But we don’t stop there. We give them a few rudimentary tools as well, we say, “Okay, what is going to be your plan if things are dragging in class and your mom is texting you? That’s tough. How are you going to get through [LAUGHTER] that without then checking out of your class? What are you going to do if your neighbors are watching who knows what on their laptop or they’re texting and it’s bothering you? What is going to be your plan?” So getting students to really think ahead to those things, commit to doing them in a way that works for them, and puts that newfound knowledge into practice. So those are some of the things that I’m really experimenting with and excited about right now.

Rebecca: So in that approach, it seems really necessary to help set up a structure for students and then circle back and have a reflective piece so that maybe they will do that on their own next time.

Michelle: And there’s some exciting suggestions from research here, too. I mean, I know it’s easy sometimes as faculty, especially at the end of a long year, like this one, to say, “Ah, well, did it actually stick with them?” But there’s a couple of different projects out there that have kind of converging on this idea that once students really do see something like retrieval practice, active studying, and so on, and once they really experienced that, as part of the structure of one course, they absolutely will run with it. So they will go into the next class, whether in your discipline or not, and say, “Well, from now on, I’m actually going to have a study plan that’s set up in this particular way and I’m going to do this.” So I personally find that very, very encouraging that “Yeah, it takes some work to do this stuff, but the payoff, even if you personally don’t see it right in front of your eyes, the payoff is likely there.”

John: And so the more faculty you start doing these things too, the more likely it is that students will adopt new approaches. So spreading this more widely is helpful.

Michelle: Yes, yes, a hearty I agree to that statement. And I can test on my own campus, I’ve seen more faculty bringing in more structure, things like online reading quizzes, I have noticed that, so I guess that’s a counterpoint to the “Wow, my lived experience is telling me that there’s these issues in engagement. Maybe so, but my lived experience is also telling me that students are coming to me more ready to be proactive about their study, they need a little less persuasion to do things like reading quizzes, because they at least they’ve seen them before. So yeah, I think it absolutely can work that way you’re describing.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Michelle: Wow, well, these days, I’m working a lot on my substack newsletter, it’s called the R3 Newsletter. And I think this is the mechanism by which we connected on some of these new topics. So I love that it’s already starting these great dialogues. And if you haven’t seen substack at all, it’s a bit of a blogging platform. And my substack is free, some subtasks are paid, but mine is definitely free. And so, for example, if you’re interested in this topic, I would definitely tell your listeners to check out Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s substack, as well, it’s called “Once More, with Feeling” and I also want to affirm that she is and her work are really at the forefront of this whole topic of motivation and emotion and particular in learning so a great other substack to follow it and buy her book, Spark of Learning is also just an absolute modern classic in this. So I decided to get in the fray since I saw these wonderful thinkers around me also doing this. And this has been a really good platform, and a way to structure for myself something that I felt needed a refresh, which was my reading of the literature that’s coming out. So what I do is twice a month, approximately, I’ve been putting out discussions of research that I’m reading. My little heuristic is anything that was published in approximately the last year, really privileging the new stuff. And I’ve historically just seen that then when I really get into the nitty gritty of the research and what it says and what it doesn’t and parsing that for folks, especially those who may be outside of social sciences, that’s where I get the most affirmation from folks and people saying, “Yeah, this was really helpful.” So I decided to run with that. And so that’s a big project ight now. I’ve been really happy with the reception and just working on that. I’ve been writing and thinking more about this topic of motivation and cognition. So as we mentioned at the top of our conversation, it’s one that goes back to kind of my initial ponderings, thrashing around as a beginning graduate student of like, “How does this all work?” Coming back to that, and really finding new ways that I can share that with my fellow faculty. So getting the word out there. I have a few new projects that I’m working on that tie back to that attention issue. So that’s another perpetual area of interest for me. So I have a few new writing and research projects that are going on with that and kind of in the development phase. And this summer, I am going to be catching up on a stack of books, just an epic number of these great books and works that are coming out. Seems like every week, there’s a new thing that goes on that list. So I look forward to a few weeks or more to really concentrate on that.

John: And we should note this is the second podcast that has come out of things we’ve seen posted on your substack blog.

Michelle: Oh, wonderful.

John: One other thing. Sarah Rose Cavanaugh has a new book coming out that we were fortunate enough to get a draft copy of and it should be out this summer: Mind over Monsters, if you’d like to see more about this topic.

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. Alright. It’s on the stack now.

Rebecca: That pile keeps growing.

Michelle: Yes, it does.

Rebecca: Better add on another week. [LAUGHTER]

John: We could all use an extra week or summer.

Rebecca: Right? Yeah.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, my pleasure, you as well.

Rebecca: Thanks, Michelle.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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272. Mind Over Monsters

Posted in classroom community, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, emotion, engagement, equity, evidence-based teaching, grading, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, motivation, pedagogy, social justice, storytelling, teaching
January 18, 2023

During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, Sarah Rose Cavanagh joins us to discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Show Notes

  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (forthcoming, 2023). Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
  • Elizabeth Romero
  • Ryan Glode
  • Reacting to the Past
  • Jasmin Veerapen
  • Gary Senecal
  • Miller, L. (2020). Why Fish Don’t Exist: a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life. Simon & Schuster.
  • Robert Sapolsky’s Publications
  • Auel, J. M. (2002). The Clan of the Cave Bear. Bantam.
  • Kelly Leonard
  • Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
  • Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan
  • Michele Lemons
  • James Lang

Transcript

John: During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, we discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

John: Today’s teas are:… Sarah, are you drinking any tea?

Sarah: No, I always disappoint you. I am yet again drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Yet again, such a stable person in our lives with your coffee. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea.

Sarah: That’s a pretty name.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s tasty. And my new favorite.

John: And I am drinking spring cherry green tea here in the midst of winter in upstate New York. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Mind over Monsters. Could you talk a little bit about the origin of this project?

Sarah: For me, I think writing is more organic than it is planned, and so it felt a little bit like the book decided it needed to be written, rather than I decided to write the book. There was just such a groundswell of interest around young adult’s mental health, people talking about it, podcasts, books. And I am a college professor, I’m a psychologist, I am an educational developer. I’m the mom of an adolescent, and so I couldn’t help but be concerned and interested in this topic. And I also felt that, as someone who has struggled with anxiety my entire life, panic disorder in particular, that I had some small bits of wisdom from my lived experiences to share. And so it just all came together.

John: How prevalent are mental health issues among youth today?

Sarah: They’re pretty prevalent, unfortunately. Some people have even labeled it an epidemic. For instance, in 2021, three of the major American organizations dedicated to youth and adolescent mental health joined together and declared a national state of emergency, which was an unprecedented move. And they cited in particular the effects of the pandemic and the fact that already marginalized groups along lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and income were bearing the brunt of the psychological effects of the pandemic. But also there’s a lot of complexities surrounding figuring out whether rates have truly changed or whether there’s also changes in stigma surrounding mental health, which are laudatory changes, we want people not to feel stigma, and to come out and reach out for treatment. There’s also changes in the thresholds of the diagnoses themselves, they shift every several years. And there’s also changes in people’s willingness to seek treatment, and also their decisions about the level at which they might need treatment. And so there’s some evidence that a lot of these complexities may be making epidemics seem worse than it is. But what is clear is that more young adults and especially college students are expressing more distress and asking for help with that distress. Counseling centers on campus are absolutely overwhelmed and students are expressing a lot of frustration with not receiving the level and the timing of care that they need in those settings, and so clearly, we need changes.

Rebecca: In a lot of public conversations, we’re hearing debates about needing to show compassion to adolescents who are struggling, but then also others who argue that youth is too coddled. Can you talk a little bit about what you would advocate for?

Sarah: And that’s a delightfully easy setup for me, [LAUGHTER] because in the subtitle of the book is “compassionate challenge and why we need to support youth mental health with compassionate challenge.” And I argue that this debate and tension between compassion and challenge is one of these false dichotomies that we human beings seem to adore. [LAUGHTER] Students clearly need compassion, and I think compassion has to come first. For me, what that looks like is establishing classroom communities and learning environments on campus that are characterized by safety and by a feeling of belongingness. You need to feel safe enough to take risks. And you need to feel that you’re supported not just by your instructor, but also your fellow students and the Student Success Office and all of the people on campus. But once we’ve established that grounding and that safe setting, then I think to truly learn and grow, we do need to take risks, we do need to step outside our comfort zones, and we need to be challenged. And I think that challenge can be very positive. I spend one of the last chapters of the book really digging into the science of play, and how play is all about being vulnerable and taking risks and play can be scary. And you can only play in settings where you, again, feel safe. And I think, finally, what I call compassionate challenge isn’t just important for teaching and learning. As I draw out in two interviews with clinical psychologists Ryan Glode and Elly Romero, compassionate challenge is also really key to addressing anxiety and symptoms of mental health. And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any therapy in the classroom, but learning environments marked by compassionate challenge are ones that are consistent with principles that help address and resolve anxiety, which again, involves facing your fears, and environments where you’re technically safe and there’s a facilitator there to help you manage those risks.

Rebecca: John and I were talking earlier about some of the things that I had observed in my own classroom in the last year with an increase in desire for perfection, like kind of perfectionism or anxiety around not being perfect and not being right and working with students in class and trying to find ways to help students work through that so that they could take risks or could show things in progress to get feedback so that they could continue to improve. Can you talk a little bit more about what that might look like in a classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think that a lot of that brings up assessment and grading. And I think why we see that perfectionism in the classroom is that students are very concerned about their grades, because they believe, to some extent rightly, that their grades are going to translate into future security, and to getting into the right graduate school or getting the right job. And we do this to students. In high school, we train them to be so focused on the grades in order to get into the correct college and I have a high schooler and her grades are constantly just streaming, coming in in real time to her phone. And then we’re surprised when students get to college and they’re too focused on their grades. [LAUGHTER] And so I think that helping students with that need for perfection is probably reforming our grading systems so that there isn’t that need, that that focus on perfectionism isn’t necessarily rewarded in the same way. And instead, we’re rewarding taking risks and doing something creative, and maybe failing and having multiple iterations of something and seeing that work can grow over time, which, I think, amplifies creativity

Rebecca: There’s a lot more focus on process than on the product, then.

Sarah: Yes.

John: You mentioned using play in classrooms, what would be an example of the use of play in the classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think you can directly play through using improv, and especially in the early parts of the semester when you’re all getting to know each other, a lot of icebreakers are very playful. And community building can be very playful. I think there are ways like the whole reacting to the past role playing approach in history. You can easily roleplay in literature classes. So I think you can directly play. I think that what play can also be is almost like a philosophy or a stance that you take, that what we’re doing in the classroom is not dire. And, related to the grading that we were just talking about, there aren’t large stakes, that what we’re doing here is this is kind of a sandbox, where we’re playing with intellectual ideas, we’re testing things out, we’re experimenting. And there’s a sense in which it’s lighthearted, even when the topics are not light hearted, I think that we can take this lighthearted stance with our students. And I think also mixing things up and not getting too into routines, can also be playful. And I feel like I have a lot of tricks in my teaching bag, different discussion techniques and ways of getting us up and moving and things like that. But there’s always a point, kind of through the three-quarter mark of the semester, where they’ve seen it all. And so I try to save one or two things for that point in the semester and kind of throw everything out the window and do something entirely different. And I think that that can be playful as well. And so I don’t think that play in the classroom is all about things that we think of as play proper, like improv and roleplay; it can also be all of these other techniques.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve studied in the past is play. And one of the things that’s interesting about play is that there’s rules and there’s structure. And so a lot of times we think that play is just chaos, but actually play almost always has rules. They might not be formal rules, they might be informal rules. But that’s a way that people can feel safe and able to play is that they understand what the structure is and what the rules are.

Sarah: Those are great points.

Rebecca: You think that it’s hard to facilitate because it might seem so foreign, but actually we’re all very familiar with play. And it is actually incredibly structured. We know that structured things can be really inclusive. And so you might be hesitant to try something that seems like it might be unstructured, but I think, lo and behold, play is actually structured.

Sarah: Yeah, and a lot of those classic improv activities have strict rules in fact and one of the rules is that there’s a kindness.So, even when animals play… you know, I watch dogs play a lot at dog parks, and it can get quite vicious looking, but the animals are safe, you don’t harm each other and that is a strict rule of play as well.

John: Some of this book is drawn from research you conducted as part of the Student Voices project. Could you tell us a little bit about that project?

Sarah: Absolutely. So this was a project that grew out of my last grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. I had done a quantitative study that I talked with you all about in the past. And we had some funds left. And I had an honor student, Jasmin Veerapen, who’s now at Columbia, getting her social work degree, and she needed an honors thesis project. And so we collaborated together and ran a qualitative follow up and interviewed students from 35 different very diverse types of institutions across the country. And it was not a project focused explicitly on mental health, but on emotions and learning. So for instance, the first two questions we asked of all of our participants was: What was the best learning experience you have had in college, and tell us all about it?” And the second was, “What was one of the worst learning experiences you had in college?” ..and their insights are all so rich, and I share a number of their wonderful stories in the book. It’s a great pleasure.

John: Would that be something that you’d encourage faculty to do in their own classes?

Sarah: Yes, it was very illustrative, a lot came out of that. And we actually had worked with a consultant, Gary Senecal, because this was my first qualitative research study, and so I didn’t really know what I was doing. And he’s done a lot of qualitative research, and so he was our consultant. And he helped us shape the questions. And I think he had a large role in shaping those first two questions, because they’re just open ended enough that students share very different things, but then they all coalesce, and so it was very informative. And I think many professors could learn a lot asking their students those questions.

Rebecca: You included many narratives throughout your book, some of your own personal stories and some of the stories of student voices from this project. Can you talk about why you decided to include narrative as a part of the book?

Sarah: Yes, when I think about the books that I most like to read, the nonfiction books that I most like to read, they have a really strong narrative component. So I recently read Why Fish Don’t Exist, which was one of my favorite reads out of the last few years. And I love Robert Sapolsky’s books, and I’m a story person. And I mostly read fiction. And so I really enjoy nonfiction that has a strong narrative component. So that was one of my motivations, that I wanted to write a book that was like the books that I like to read. I think that story, though, also is really compelling. I think that there are insights that are embedded in stories that things like quantitative data can’t always tap into in the same way. And I think in particular, for topics like this, and for emotions and for students’ perceptions of their own learning, I think that we need story.

John: In addition to narrative, which is really compelling in your book, you also bring in a number of other disciplinary studies. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other disciplines and some of the other research your book relies on

Sarah: That’s a little, maybe, too far into humanities, I’m a little worried. I am a social scientist by training. And I’m very aware of the fact that there is disciplinary expertise. But I do bring in a lot of humanity’s work, in particular monster theory. So I read quite a bit of monster theory, which wasn’t even something that I knew existed before then, but that’s in there. I do something that I get from my mother. I used to make fun of my mother for always citing literature and stories as evidence for things. I would take an anthropology class and come home from college, and we would talk about it. And she would shake her head at me and say, “Well, that’s not how it happened, in Clan of the Cave Bear. [LAUGHTER] But I do a little bit about that. So I bring in some stories from novels and short stories that I think illustrate the points that I’m trying to make as well. And then I think, most compellingly, I bring in actual experts from their disciplines. So I interview a sociologist about her research on trigger warnings. I interview a Latin American Studies scholar about his work on vocation, which I found so fascinating. And I also interviewed a couple of clinicians, as I said, and Kelly Leonard who is a Second City improv person, and so I bring in those other disciplines through the lens of the people I’m interviewing.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s really helpful to have these illustrations because statistics can go only so far in helping us understand what that actually looks like and feels like in our classrooms or in the experience that students are having because we can feel really far removed… or I’m feeling farther and farther removed [LAUGHTER] from students and it helps to hear things in their own voices. And we don’t always ask them enough. I wish we asked more.

John: …which is something really troubling to those of us who focus mostly on statistical analyses, and so forth. [LAUGHTER] But it’s true, a compelling story can be much more effective in convincing people of some concept than any number of studies that you might present to them.

Sarah: But we do have lots of citations for people like you, John. But I tried to bring both sources to the table,

Rebecca: …which is good, because you got both of us here.

Sarah: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: So can you talk a little bit about the intended audience of your book?

Sarah: Absolutely. My primary audience, I think, is people who are doing the work of higher education, so college instructors, staff like me who work in teaching centers, and student success offices, administrators, and so it does have a strong higher ed thread throughout. That said, I don’t think there’s a super bright line between especially late high school and early college in some of these concerns. And I think it could be useful for high school educators, especially those who might be advising students about the college selection process. I think that there is some insight and some sections, maybe, that could be of interest to college students themselves, and possibly their parents. But I would want them to know that it’s not a parenting book. I don’t want anyone to pick it up thinking it’s a parenting book. There’s long sections, again, on trigger warnings and institutions needing to actually carry out their DE&I statements. And someone picking it up thinking they’re going to get some pithy advice about parenting is not going to be satisfied.

John: Would this be a good focus for faculty reading groups or book clubs?

Sarah: I think so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We think so too. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it looks like, yeah, it looks like some really wonderful topics that you’re exploring to think about all of higher ed in a lot of ways, and perhaps some reimagining that needs to happen.

Sarah: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what we, as educators or people working in higher ed, can do to create a more compassionate and challenging environment for our students? What are some actions we can take?

Sarah: Well, I think you have to do the compassion piece first. And I think that colleges really need to be examining, and I think they are examining, there’s lots of other people sharing this message of compassion and relationship, rich education, thinking of Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book. And I think that we need to embed compassion in the atmosphere in the classroom and the dorms. I think that we need to pay a lot of attention to community. I think that we need to shore up resources in counseling centers. I’ve been attending, as part of the research for this book, lots of webinars with people who are looking at this topic from a lot of different frameworks. And there’s a lot of interesting work being done on peer support, which I’m both interested in and also wary of. I think that peers are our natural first source of support. And that peer support could be really life changing for a lot of college students. But just like we shouldn’t be doing therapy in the classroom, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of college students to do counseling for their fellow peers. And they’re trained to spot warning signs and to do the kind of heavy lifting that a lot of counseling involves. And so I think that we’re going to need to dedicate more resources to trained clinicians in our counseling centers. In my interview with Ryan Glode in the book, who is, again, a clinical counseling psychologist, he really feels that counseling centers provide just sort of venting sorts of therapy, and that he’s a strong advocate of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, and that students need much more individualized treatment and approaches. And so I think that that’s an interesting thing to explore. And the last thing I would say is, I always say this, but faculty need more support and time, because there’s been a lot of great essays coming out, the last couple of weeks even I’ve seen, about the fact that student success is really faculty success, and faculty are where students get more of their support than anywhere else. And we can try to reach out to them in many different ways, but they land in our classrooms, we know that we’ll see them in their classrooms, even if they’re not leaving their dorm much, they usually come to class. And so it’s an entry point. Mentoring is such a strong part of the college experience and so wonderful for growth and mental health. And so I think that for faculty to really apply all of this and have really close student relationships and really rich classrooms and all of these things, they need more time and more support. And so I think that the two places I would put my support is in the counseling center and then in supporting faculty, giving them the kinds of time and the kinds of support that will allow them to be the teachers that they can be when they have the time to do so.

Rebecca: Are there specific places where you found compassion to be lacking that surprised you in your research? We know that there’s a [LAUGHTER] strain on counseling centers, but were there some other places that really rose to really needing some attention,

Sarah: None of the students we talked to had trouble coming up with either a best or worst learning experience. And the good ones are really, really good. And the poor ones were pretty poor. And so there’s a lot of unevenness, I think, and I think that that, when I talk as I just did about, if you just give faculty more time, then they’ll blossom, and then the students will blossom, and sometimes when I have conversations with administrators about that, or see policies being enacted on different campuses, I can tell that there’s a wariness that if you give faculty time, they’ll just either do more research, or they will check out and that there’s a danger there and we need to work faculty harder. And I do see in talking to the students about their best and worst learning experiences, that the people teaching those worst learning experiences really need to step up their game a little bit. And so I think that there are those pockets out there that still don’t apply themselves to their teaching or look at it as an onerous responsibility. But the good teachers are really fantastic. And so maybe leveling that out a little bit, bringing the worst learning experiences up to the best learning experiences might be somewhere I recommend some attention.

John: One of the areas where people often see a dichotomy between compassion and challenge is in terms of deadlines in courses where material later in the course build on material earlier in the course, it’s really easy for students who are struggling to get further and further behind when they don’t have at least some sort of a deadline. Do you have any strategies for addressing that, besides focusing on the learning rather than on grades? What can we do to help ensure that students make regular progress while still maintaining compassion?

Sarah: Um hmm. I think this is the question of the moment. [LAUGHTER] And I can tell you, I just had a conversation with a reporter at The Chronicle who was writing a whole big piece on just this issue. And we at Simmons just met with our advisory council, who are a group of about 12 faculty who we check in with about what faculty needs are. And this was their number one answer, like clearly. So we’re going to do a panel in the spring at Simmons, where we have some faculty with very different perspectives. We’re hoping to draw out some of these tensions and have this discussion. And so I do think it’s an excellent question. And I think that a deadline is a good example of where compassionate challenge needs to be. I think that all of us need the structure of deadlines. I myself benefit [LAUGHTER] greatly from the structure of deadlines and schedules. And I think especially for college students in the early years, if they’re so-called traditionally aged students, some of the process of those first year or two of college is learning time management and in scaffolding them into good time management. And so I think that structure is very important. As Rebecca was saying earlier, it’s also an inclusive teaching strategy, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have written extensively about that. But I think without compassion, deadlines are going to worsen student anxiety, and also it doesn’t make a lot of sense for contemporary life. And so some techniques that I’ve seen are things like using frequent tokens instead of just no deadlines or 100% flexibility with deadlines and things kind of pile up toward the end. You can have tokens where students can have a set number of missed assignments, or dropped assignments, or I need an extra week or two. I think that it’s important in whatever you do, if you are going to be flexible to be transparent with all of the students about it, because I think that some students will ask for flexibility and the other students won’t know that they can ask for flexibility. And a lot of that falls out along the lines where everything falls out and creates inequities. So I think that having some structure, but with some flexibility built in is probably the best way to go. I was interviewing a biology instructor for a different project. And she was telling me what she did is she had pretty close to unlimited flexibility within modules. So she had her whole semester set up in modules, but then you had to submit things within that module, because as you say, especially some fields, the information builds, and if you miss part, you’re going to be in trouble. And so I thought that was another interesting approach. But I agree that in particular when we’re thinking about mental health, that structure is better. And the last thing I’ll say is that at my previous campus, we had a panel of the Dean of first-year students, it was the head of our accessibility office, the head of our counseling center, and then a clinical counseling psychologist from our psychology department about issues surrounding student mental health. And one of the instructors asked about deadlines, and they were all unanimous, they said, deadlines are necessary. The worst thing you can do for a student high in anxiety is allow no deadlines or submissions whenever they like, because that will quickly get them into a negative place, and that they need that structure. So I think it’s a great example of the need for both compassion and challenge.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think about when I hear structure or certain kinds of support is routine. And you talked a little earlier about having some routine, but then disruptions to that routine. Can you talk about why some of the disruptions to the routine might be important, or why not having a routine all the time could be helpful for students?

Sarah: Well, I think the positives of routine are that they’re reassuring, for one thing. I think we all as human beings, it’s relaxing to settle into a routine, and it’s also lower in cognitive load. If you just know, okay, every Thursday, I have a homework assignment, every Tuesday I have a quiz, you don’t have to constantly be scrambling and figuring things out every week. And so I think that routines can be reassuring, and they can also be more transparent and easier to follow along. I think where the disruption is great is it re-energizes. So it’s great to be reassured and calm things down. But then that can get boring and kind of stultifying after a little while. And so once you have established the routine to mix things up once in a while, I think, can be re-energizing. And so I think that’s where a blend of the two can be really powerful.

Rebecca: You mentioned that you do this in your own classes. Can you share an example of one of the ways you mix things up in your own class,

Sarah: it’s not terribly exciting. But the one that I do this most clearly is in my motivation and emotion class. And in that class, we’re covering different topics and we’re reading research articles and doing presentations. And again, I try to mix things up, but I have a set number of things that I mix things up. And then usually right after Thanksgiving, I throw everything out the window and we just spend a week doing something different. And so we used to watch a movie together. And then we would write an essay about the motivation and emotion aspects and the themes that we’ve talked about all semester long, how it played out in those characters lives. And I was showing Lars and the Real Girl, I don’t know if it’s kind of an older movie now and stopped doing that for a while for a number of reasons. But then more recently, in this activity called “making the world a better place.” And I had a selection of psychological science articles, each one that tackled a societal problem, like climate change, or misinformation, and how we could use principles from recent psychological science research and to help improve this societal conundrum. And then we did small group work with snacks. And they would work on little group presentations all together that were very low stakes, and then present them to each other. And we would have a grant competition among them. But it was just this week where the routine was very different.

Rebecca: It sounds like almost a culminating point of the semester, instead of ramping up stress with a big project, it’s ramping down the stress with something that’s applied, but in a more low key way.

John: …but also valuable and fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. To me, it sounds like: “[LOUD EXHALE]”

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Sarah: Well, I have a new grant. Well, a semi-new grant. And it’s a National Science Foundation Incubator Grant with my co-PI, Michele Lemons of Assumption University. And it is examining assessment, feedback, and grading in undergraduate bio education in particular. And so we had a qualitative portion, we had a survey portion, and we had student interviews, and we’ve just wrapped data collection, So I have a lot of writing and meaning-making and analysis, and then a full proposal grant [LAUGHTER] to write. So on the research side, that’s what’s going on. And on the writing side, I don’t know yet. I have a few possible ideas. I’m in a writers group with Jim Lang, who I know you both know, and his new book, which is going to be fantastic… and you have to have him on the show… is all about how academics can successfully write trade books for a wider audience. And I’ve been enjoying the chapters as he’s been writing them. And I was reading his chapter on where to get your book idea, and I realized that I’ve written a couple of books now from my expertise, but I don’t have to stick with my expertise. I could do something super fun. And so I don’t know.

John: Not that your expertise isn’t fun or interesting. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Well, thank you. And anything I write will obviously have a strong psychology component, it’s just like in my bones at this point. But yeah, so stay tuned. We’ll see.

Rebecca: Sounds like some exciting things down the pike for sure.

John: We look forward to hearing more about that when you’re ready to share that.

Sarah: Oh, thanks.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you.

Sarah: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always learn stuff from our conversations, so I’m looking forward to having you on again in the future.

Sarah: Oh, thanks. Same.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]

268. Advancing Inclusivity while Mitigating Burnout

Posted in burnout, classroom community, cognitive psychology, diversity, emotion, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, faculty, first-generation students, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, learning, mental health, online learning, pedagogy, stress management, syllabi, teaching, workload
December 21, 2022

This episode is a live recording of a panel session at the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference in Orlando on November 17, 2022. The panelists were Michelle Miller, Liz Norell, and Kelvin Thompson.

Michelle is a professor of psychological sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and also more recently, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching and Learning and the Science of Memory in a Wired World, which was recently released by West Virginia University Press. Liz is a political scientist, and an associate professor at Chattanooga State Community College. She is also an experienced registered yoga teacher with over 500 hours of training completed. She is currently working on a book on Why Presence Matters in High Quality Learner-Centered Equitable Learning Spaces. Kelvin is the Executive Director of the University of Central Florida’s Center for Distributed Learning, and graduate faculty scholar in UCF’s College of Education and Human Performance. He developed the open courseware BlendKit course that many of us have taken, and cohosts TOPcast, the Teaching Online Podcast.

Show Notes

  • Panelists:
  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. Harvard University Press.
  • Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World.
  • Norell, Liz (forthcoming). Why Presence Matters in High Quality Learner-Centered Equitable Learning Spaces. West Virginia University Press.
  • BlendKit
  • TOPcast
  • Brandon Bayne’s twitter post on the adjusted syllabus.
  • Nick Sousanis’ syllabi
  • Behling, K. T., & Tobin, T. J. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press.
  • Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR)
  • Joosten, T., Harness, L., Poulin, R., Davis, V., & Baker, M. (2021). Research Review: Educational Technologies and Their Impact on Student Success for Racial and Ethnic Groups of Interest. WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET).
  • Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press.
  • Eaton, Robert; Steven V. Hunsaker, and Bonnie Moon (forthcoming, 2023) Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • Enneagram test

Transcript

John: This is a recording of a live panel session that took place during the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference in Orlando on November 17, 2022. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Welcome to “Advancing Inclusivity while Mitigating Burnout.” I’m John Kane, an economist and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Rebecca: I’m Rebecca Mushtare, a designer and an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at SUNY Oswego. We’re the hosts of the Tea for Teaching podcast and the moderators for today’s session. We’d like to let everyone know that we’re recording this session in order to release it in an upcoming episode of Tea for Teaching. And today’s session will include 30 minutes of moderated discussion, followed by 10 minutes of questions from all of you, and I’ll turn it over to John to introduce our panel.

John: Our panelists are Michelle Miller. Michelle is a professor of psychological sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and also more recently, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching and Learning and the Science of Memory, which was recently released by West Virginia University Press. We also have Liz Norell. Liz is a political scientist, and an associate professor at Chattanooga State Community College. She is also an experienced registered yoga teacher with over 500 hours of training completed. She is currently working on a book on Why Presence Matters in High Quality Learner-Centered Equitable Learning Spaces. We also have Kelvin Thompson. Kelvin is the Executive Director of the University of Central Florida’s Center for Distributed Learning, and graduate faculty scholar in UCF’s College of Education and Human Performance. He developed the open courseware BlendKit course that many of us have taken, and cohosts TOPcast, the teaching online podcast.

Rebecca: This wouldn’t be a complete episode of tea for teaching if we didn’t ask about tea. So Kelvin, our coffee drinker, are you drinking tea today?

Kelvin: I am drinking tea today, Rebecca, this is a mint tea from Tazo. I have to admit, I went looking for my favorite conference tea, which is that orange Tazo tea that I looked everywhere and they didn’t have any.

Rebecca: Ah, a little bummer. Michelle?

Michelle: Well, true to form, I’m drinking coffee and I’m going to admit that I also mixed it with Swiss Miss hot chocolate, [LAUGHTER] a very guilty pleasure on many levels.

Liz: I don’t drink anything hot. So I’m drinking diet coke.

Rebecca: Woo!

Liz: Thank you.

Rebecca: As many guests before you have as well.

Liz: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: John?

John: And I am drinking an English breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: And I have some very strong Awake tea, so that we’re really awake for this episode.

John: The pandemic spurred a rapid transition of instructional methods and an increased focus on inclusive teaching, and we want to talk a bit about that in today’s session. We’d like to ask the panelists: What were some of the improvements in inclusivity and building a sense of belonging, that you’ve observed during the pandemic? …with particular emphasis on remote and asynchronous courses. And Liz is going to start.

Liz: What I found, particularly in asynchronous online courses, is that I have noticed this has much broadened the ability of neurodivergent students and students who have some kind of disability, especially an invisible disability. And the way that it’s done that is by really forcing us to accept multiple kinds of student engagement. So what I noticed in March of 2020, is that students who had been almost invisible in my face-to-face class, when we came back to Zoom after spring break, I didn’t see their faces, but I heard their voices, if not vocally than in the chat. And I have so thoroughly appreciated that. I also learned from my students that you can change the way you show up in Zoom by getting one of those little lens things over your camera and changing your virtual background. So oftentimes, they would come into a Zoom room, and this would be in a synchronous class, and they would have a different cartoon character of the day. And this is a wonderful way to get to know more about them and their personalities. What I’ve also found is that when we are meeting synchronously, recording the classes is really helpful for a lot of learners. And so, since I’ve gone back to face-to-face teaching, I always open a Zoom room and record it and sometimes students will join by Zoom because they can’t come to campus that day. My partner who teaches math has also started doing this because they found that it’s really helpful for the students to be able to review what they did in class when they’re trying to apply it in their homework or preparing for an exam. The last thing I want to mention is that I teach political science, we always do a unit on civil liberties. And one of the things that I did in person was bring in a prop box and have them do skits where they acted out the precipitating events to major Supreme Court civil liberties cases, and I thought there’s no way we can do this over zoom, right? Yes. And it’s just getting really creative with Zoom backgrounds, with props that they have in their houses. It makes it so much more campy that it’s much more fun, because in person they always like “Oooh, I’m nervous.” In Zoom, it’s going to be a train wreck, okay, we’re just gonna embrace that, and that really creates a really fun dynamic in the classroom.

Kelvin: I would agree with the broad brushstrokes of what Liz said, I would like to broaden it further though, and say that throughout the last couple of years, what I’ve seen in a way that I’ve never seen before is an emphasis on empathy, and what we might call a human first orientation. I was really heartened to see that in a lot of ways in the early days of the lockdown era of remote instruction, and I still see ripples of it now. Two things that come to mind from the early days that are worth a review, if you haven’t looked at him in a while. One that got kind of viral, the so-called adjusted syllabus of Brandon Bayne from UNC, where he got really kind of real and transparent with students and released it out all over for adaptation. And then Nick Sousanis from San Francisco State University more recently had what he called notes on now as a syllabus section that just kind of, in a more encapsulated way, he sort of said that he wants to keep anchoring down to that human-first element, and just keep that a present part of every course’s syllabus.

Rebecca: Thank you, both Liz and Kelvin for giving us some insights into what we’ve already been experiencing and reminding us about some of the strong improvements that we’ve had. Many campuses are moving back to onsite instruction, while also considering how much of their portfolio should be including online options. And while each campus continues to adapt and adjust, how can we maintain the momentum around inclusive practices and avoid slipping back into our old habits? Michelle, will you start us off?

Michelle: And I love the framing here as momentum, because I think that many campuses have generated a lot of great energy around the why of inclusion, the why of equity, the why of justice, and why this is so important. The trick is going to be to follow that energy on with more on the what and how… how do we put that into practice. And I really struggle when I think about it, because our students, they need practice when there’s a new skill, a new way of responding. They need practice in lots of new contexts. And I talk a lot about transfer. And we may remember a skill or develop a skill in one context and we just don’t remember to activate it and carry it through in a new context. And we’re going to need that. We’re going to need to have certain techniques and teaching moves that do become second nature to us and be able to recognize, hey, this is one of those opportunities to put those into practice. So I was just doing a session this morning by a group from the University of Wisconsin. And they talked about, for example, the need to provide lots of concrete examples to faculty like what does this look like? Maybe even in your discipline? So, for example, increased course structure, we know this is proven to be an inclusive teaching practice. So I need to say, “Oh, yeah, this is the place to do this.” The frequent low-stakes assessments, we know that that reduces disparities in opportunity and disparities in achievement across many student groups. And so offering those concrete paths, making sure we know how to set them up, and then showing faculty that we see it when they’re making the effort and rewarding that. We don’t always need that little extrinsic reward, but institutions have to really keep that up if they’re going to see that this carries through, because that’s going to be the difference between institutions that really have that momentum moving forward and the ones that fall behind.

Liz: I agree… [LAUGHTER] with what she said. I come at this from a little bit of a different perspective, because I am in the classroom, or at least in a virtual classroom. But I think the word that comes to mind for me when I think about momentum is intentionality. And I think if we can remember to teach through our values, especially those values that became so crystallized during COVID, that’s a really good first step. And I’m fond of saying that what’s good for students is good for us. So I want us to think about the ways that we prioritized care, humanity, grace with our students, and also make sure we’re doing that for one another and for ourselves. And I mentioned this before, but COVID really revealed a lot of inequities that had been there for a long time. And now that we know that they’re there, we have to be very intentional about ensuring that they don’t just kind of go back to being invisible again now that we’re not all on Zoom together. So those are the things that I’m thinking about. It’s really leaning into our values, not forgetting what we learned, being intentional and doing for ourselves what we have seen we need to do for our students.

Rebecca: That’s a great reminder to think about not just the students, but the whole community, faculty, staff, etc.

John: During the early stages of the pandemic, we saw a lot of experimentation. And we saw the rapid growth of remote synchronous instruction and HyFlex instruction. And one of the things I think many of us are wondering is what roles they will play as we move forward into the future. Helvin?

Kelvin: Well, my crystal ball never was working. [LAUGHTER] It’s not even broken. But here’s kind of what I think is happening and what may continue to happen. I think synchronous online options will continue to be a factor in our digital teaching and learning in a way that it was not before the pandemic. And it is certainly possible that what I refer to as true HyFlex may still have a place as well. It’s just, gosh, it’s hard to pull real true HyFlex off, right? It’s such a design-intensive approach. What I contrastingly refer to as pseudo HyFlex… dual mode, simulcasting, webcasting of classroom experience… that has challenges. It has a place, perhaps, in individual instructor preference. But I’m going to tell you, firsthand from faculty colleagues I talked to as well as data I’ve seen, it’s exhausting. And it’s challenging for students, the what is sometimes touted as student flexibility ends up just becoming sort of a lowering of expectations and come and go as you wish and the intentionality and momentum seems to dissipate. I’m a big fan of intentional design and modalities of choice, and so forth,,,that way, instead. So, I think synchronous is around and I think our mutated modalities are around. And true. HyFlex has a place. But I’d love to see a diminishing of pseudo HyFlex.

Michelle: This is sparking so many of my own thoughts that I’m really feeling in a way validated here. And I’ll echo a lot of this as well. I think that again, in true HyFlex, where I am fully engaging the folks who are all spread out, I’m fully engaging whoever’s in my classroom, and we’re achieving all of our objectives. That really is a lot. And it’s not the technology. It’s the cognitive capacity. And as a cognitive psychologist, I say, “Well, when you practice remembering to read the chat and read the room at the same time, those demands get a little bit less, but they don’t go away. It’s just too complex.” So I think that we are going to have, yeah, the true bonafide HyFlex courses going forward, they need to be designated, they need to be supported in a particular way. So they may not be unicorns exactly, but I kind of see that coming forward. What I feel like I’ve kind of settled into a more HyFlex light, HyFlex infused is, for example, if you’re home and you’re remote, you need to be remote today, I don’t have an elaborate Google doc with a structured discussion maybe for you. But you can follow along, you can send in a participation card, I do give a lot of credit for participation, and so we’re kind of moving to that. I do think that we still have a sense of possibility. I mean, we have definitely gotten those skills, and we will find new ways to use them. But even just the basics, like “Hey, you can record your class meetings.” And I offer that too as an option for catching up sometimes where needed. I really thought that was going to be a disaster for a lot of different reasons going on. I said that’s not going to work. And I will eat those words now. So we have a few of these tools in our toolkit that we can use in this lower key way, I think.

Rebecca: So Kelvin, you mentioned the ability of changing modalities and offering some flexibility here. And the ability for students to choose the modality that they take the course in is just one of the ways that we’ve seen increased flexibility. But we’ve also seen increased flexibility around attendance, assessments, and many other aspects of teaching. How can we continue to support increased flexibility for students without overburdening faculty. I’m really hoping you all have some magic that you can help with.

Michelle: Yeah, so increased flexibility without the overburdening of faculty… When I reflect on this, I think we can borrow from the plus one strategy that you might be familiar with from Universal Design for Learning. Tom Tobin and his colleagues who write about this… the idea being that, yeah, we’re working towards perhaps a very rich environment with many different ways to demonstrate what you know, to take a test, to participate in in a learning activity, but you don’t do it all at once. And I also think, too, that I know that I’ve gotten, I think, pretty adept at finding those opportunities for flexibility that don’t necessarily add more for me to do and I think an example of this would be the way I give exams these days. So during the pandemic, I said, there’s always going to be an option instead of sitting for a traditional test. So I have an option that’s an essay paper with length and scope parameters and so on. But students can structure this. I suggest they often structure it as an email home to your family about what you’ve learned during this portion of the course. I’ve had a few students who have run with it as a science fiction writing exercise, which works great in psychology. So people will report home to their alien commander or home base about what they’ve learned about humans on Planet Terra. And those are, if anything, just a change of pace for me to read. I’m reading the exams anyway. So I’m always about the efficiency and so that’s something that I’ve tried to capture as well. But here too, we have to remember there are risks when we offer these and faculty who do go out on that limb and try it the first semester or two… maybe it doesn’t work perfectly… they’ve got to be affirmed, and they’ve got to be protected especially untenured. Folks,

Kelvin: I feel like I want to report to my alien commander now. [LAUGHTER] “Mork calling Orson, Mork calling Orson,” that’s a deep cut call back, you have to be of a certain age to appreciate that. I agree with a lot of that. I don’t think I disagree with any of that. But I will broaden out a little bit and maybe anchor back, Rebecca, to your prompt a little bit. I personally think we should lean into intentional course design in intentionally designed and created modalities for which student flexibility is the intent. Asynchronous online is probably the most flexible thing we offer outside of maybe true adaptive learning, which is… don’t get me started… that’s another whole tough banana to peel. I need a better metaphor… bananas aren’t that tough to peel… [LAUGHTER] a tough onion to peel, there’s lots of tears. I don’t know… something. And then I think we need to reiterate to ourselves and to our faculty colleagues that there are codified effective practices in each of these course modality domains, like… a shameless plug… at UCF, we host the teaching online pedagogical repository (TOPR), an online compendium of online and blended teaching and design practices. So there’s stuff that we know that are research based, time honored, that work well and benefit students, things like the broad category of learner choice, which I think just echoes a little bit of what Michelle was saying. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel if we lean into those things. And there’s real student benefit for doing that.

John: The disruptions we experienced in education during the pandemic when people were learning remotely affected all students, but disproportionately affected students who are first-gen, students from low income households and minoritized students. How does higher education need to adjust to meet the diverse needs of all of our students, some of which were not as affected by the pandemic if they were in well-resourced school districts and others that were left behind a bit when they didn’t have access to the technology or the resources that better funded school districts had?

Kelvin: Yeah, we could do better. Even here at the conference in which we’re participating here as we record this, we saw even today, student voice represented on stage and I think we can do better with that. There’s knowing who our students are, there are data that we are collecting and could collect that tell us something. But there’s also just attending to students’ personal stories, keeping a human face on the student experience, being grounded in our work there. But broadening further, again, I’m a big advocate of research-based and time-honored teaching practices. And in our digital teaching and learning domain, many of those have been shown to benefit minoritized and disadvantaged student sub-populations. I would do a shout out here to Tonya Joosten’s research review that has its long title. It’s got educational technologies and student success and racial and ethnic groups of interest all in the title. It can be Googled, it’s free, it’s available, but she does a nice job of reviewing and synthesizing the extant literature and making some recommendations from that. And so there are ways in which our online and blended in particular design and teaching practices benefit everybody but in particular, benefit first-gen, minoritized students, and so forth. And here’s a little free factoid… in a little fascinating recommendation. She says, you know, there’s some evidence to suggest that reduced seat time blended courses at the lower-division level particularly benefit disadvantaged students subpopulations and then going into online courses at the upper division in the major kind of courses. Those two things together. You know, it’s stunning, that’s not whiz bang, whirly gig shiny, right? …but it’s just doing the work but as we align that it really has benefits that evidence would bear out.

Liz: I just want to start by echoing something that Kelvin mentioned, which is that if we’re going to serve the students we have and the students that we will have, we have to know who they are. And there are studies of generations and qualities, but I don’t think anything replaces asking the people in your classroom about themselves in a way that is safe and non-threatening, but comes from an authentic place of curiosity. So I do this with my students. At the start of every semester, I ask them questions, none of them are required, but I ask them questions about things like, what kinds of technology do you have? And how many hours a week are you working? And which of this very long list of challenges do you think you might face during the semester? What kinds of things can I do to help you? …just so that I have a sense of who’s in the room, and what might be going on with them. So just yesterday, I was teaching my Zoom class from upstairs in my hotel room, which I was very grateful for, because I’m an introvert, and this conference is overwhelming. So I was happy to have an excuse to get away for three hours to teach. But we spent 20 minutes just asking, “How are you? No, no, how are you?” Not, I’m fine. I’m okay, but what’s going on? And one of my students said, I’ve always struggled with depression, and I thought I had it under control. But the last week has taught me that I don’t. And it’s only because we’re in week six of a seven week class that that student felt like he could say that, and the whole class could say, “Me too.” And those moments, I think that is so critical. And it’s just the humanization that we’ve already talked about, and meeting people where they are, I want to put in a plug for Zaretta Hammond’s book about, I don’t remember the full title, but it’s the brain and culturally relevant responsive teaching. It’s got a lot of really good buzzwords in it. But it talks about how, when the brain is in a state of trauma, or stress, you can’t learn. And so we can talk about all of these things that we can do. But if our students are not in a place to hear it, nothing that we do is going to make a difference. And I think if we’re talking about how to teach the students we have, we have to be aware of that before we can move forward.

Rebecca: So you’ve nicely connected to our next topic. [LAUGHTER]

Liz: …almost like I meant to.

Rebecca: lI know, it’s almost like you knew it was coming. Campuses are seeing a rise in mental health needs in their student bodies, both prior to the pandemic and it obviously continues to increase. And shifting to more inclusive practices is shifting the relationship that students are having with the faculty, just like you mentioned, being able to be more open about some of these things. In my own experience, I’ve seen an increase in disclosure of mental health challenges and distress and the need to refer and actively engage in suicide prevention. These are things that I didn’t need to do five years ago, [LAUGHTER] or maybe I didn’t need to do but didn’t see, but definitely see now. So how can faculty and institutions more effectively respond to mental health challenges facing our learning communities? And obviously, Liz, you kind of started us off on some ideas here. Michelle?

Michelle: Yeah, I’d like to put another book on the radar actually, as well. And full disclosure, I was an editor on this book, but I really believe in it. It’s coming out next year, actually, it’s called Learning and Student Mental Health in the College Classroom, lead authors, Robert Eaton. And it is in this space of friendly, actionable strategies when we do have increased disclosure. I mean, I found too, that Zoom itself is a sort of a dis-inhibiting space, like many online spaces are and going in I should have known that. it’s like on paper, I’ve read it, but then it became very, very real. So what do we do with that? Because the thing for faculty is, we mean this well, but our minds immediately go to: “How do I fix it? Oh, my gosh, do I have to kind of do amateur therapy that I’m not qualified to do?” And no, that is absolutely not what we need to do next. It’s a good thing to be concerned about not crossing boundaries at that same time as we are responding to what students are disclosing for us. So the strategies that I like are those that say, well, let’s start by not accentuating the crises and the stresses that are there. And a few other kind of concrete things… For me, not asking for doctor’s notes. Boy, when I started teaching a long time ago, I was all about the documentation and “show me exactly what happened at the emergency room,” and that type of thing. So now I offer flexibility and many paths to catch up that much like universal design for learning are built in for everyone from day one of the course. So if there’s something that prevented you from coming to class or making that deadline, okay, we can talk about it if you want, but we don’t have to. And you can simply take those paths that I’ve already laid out for you. I think taking the time to empathize, many of us did practice those skills and we can continue to do so. When I get to talk to people who are just starting out as teachers, I say, “You have this big loud microphone, this megaphone to a student’s ear. Your words land very, very powerfully. So you really need to think about those.” I find that my students seem to come to me expecting very harsh treatment and very harsh reactions, when they tell me about what they’re going through. And so I remind myself to simply start with warmth and compassion and human empathy, and a way forward. So that’s something that we can do. And when all else may fail, I say “How would I want my own child, in the same situation, a crisis, which is hopefully temporary and passing… how would I want them to be spoken to? How would I want that email to be phrased? What kind of pass forward would I want for them?” So that’s how I take it.

John: We’re a little behind schedule. So we’re going to ask anyone in the audience to come up to the microphone. One of the issues we haven’t quite gotten to is the issue of preventing burnout. Maybe if Liz could address that briefly while people come up.

Liz: So I want to talk about burnout in a very particular way. Because I think we often think of burnout as a me problem. And I think of burnout as an every one problem. It is a system that is creating it. And so I want to tell every one of you listening, that you are not the problem, and you haven’t done anything wrong. But in order to mitigate burnout, we have to be aware of what our boundaries are. And that often requires getting really quiet, and listening to ourselves. Because we’ve been steeped in this culture that tells us that hustling and productivity is the only way you’re valuable. And that is not true. But you’re not going to be able to figure out what your boundaries are if you’re listening to those voices. So you got to step out of that for a minute, and figure out what really matters to you. And here’s a good way to do it. Think about yourself 20 years from now. What are the things that are going to have mattered about what you’re doing right now? And what are the things that you won’t really care about? Choose to spend your time on the things that will matter to you 20 years from now, and all of these other kind of petty political debates in your institution… because we all have them… that’s not what you’re going to be remembering when you look back on your career. Focus your energy and your care on the things that you’re going to care about over a career and make choices accordingly. I think that’s the advice I would give.

JELISA: My name is Jelisa Dallas, I’m representing the University of Phoenix. My role is as a recognized student organization manager, a program manager. And so my question was, “How do we effectively work with students in a way that’s going to help streamline their purpose as it pertains to connecting with them in the classroom? So a lot of students have a lot of things going on, and how do we streamline that to get them to stay focused and prioritize when so much is going on and around?”

Liz: Thank you for the question. I mean, I think it’s making sure that what we are doing, we’re transparent about why it matters to them. And it’s creating relevance to whatever their goals are. And of course, you can’t do that if you don’t know what they are. So again, you need to know your students, but designing the work for your class, so that it feels intrinsically valuable, I think, is the best advice I can give.

ALI: Hi, I’m Ali Kirwen, I am a course operations specialist with the University of Michigan, we are an all online program, or I work for an online master’s program. It’s asynchronous, we have students everywhere in all different time zones. And we have faculty that care a whole, whole lot about our students. So I’m wondering, as a designer, how can I help encourage my faculty to set boundaries with their students in a way that honors their joy of teaching and interacting with their students, but is working towards preserving them and not burning them out as well? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Well, I think that even subtle things like wording choice. So are there things that say over and above, do we give awards for the person who did the most? Or do we give awards for people who did the best? So I think that faculty, especially when they’re new, are really looking for those cues. And so those can be powerful.

Kelvin: What Michelle said… [LAUGHTER] No, what Michelle said but just maybe that underscore and amplify that for a second, I’ve thought about doing this myself, and I just haven’t. But I love the colleagues and maybe some of you are them who have those little statements in the bottom of your email, right? Like, “if you’re getting this email, when you’re not working, don’t feel some sort of obligation to respond right now. I sent it at a time that I was working, that might not be the time that you’re working. And, in a collegial sort of way, we can have that same kind of a vibe, I think, in our course interactions between faculty and students. And then again, wording… I got a note just last night on a book project I’m working on from a colleague who’s gonna peer review. And he said, “I show my respect by being direct and blatantly honest.” And so I think framing is everything. Word choice is everything. And making explicit where you’re coming from without just sort of caving to the implicit pressures and cultural expectations. That’s hard. But it’s important.

Liz: Yes. And women in the academy, we do a lot of emotional labor. And that comes very naturally to me, if you know anything about the Enneagram, I’m a 2, like, I want to fix all your problems, okay. But the way that I do this, because students tell me everything. I think they tell me everything, because they know that I will listen. But what I have learned for myself, and this has been the difference between moving towards burnout and not, is that I am here to listen to you deeply. I am not here to fix your problems. And I will refer you to people who can help you. But if you just need to be heard, I will listen. And sometimes that does get heavy. But I also recognize that if I fix all the problems for all the students, I’m going to be exhausted. And that doesn’t really serve them in the long run. Because they don’t need someone to fix their problems. They just need someone to tell them that they’re okay and that I believe in you, and I care about you. And so I would say that, but deep listening is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone else. And that’s just listening to understand what they’re saying, not to respond. So that’s what I would say. And please never send pictures from the ER, never. [LAUGHTER] You know, students tell them, no ER photos,

John: We always end by asking: “What’s next?” …and we’ll start with Kelvin.

Kelvin: Crystal ball, still not working. [LAUGHTER] But here’s, I guess, my read on the situation, there are more options for people to learn and work than there ever have been before. So I think that we can either meet the needs of our colleagues and our learners, or someone else will when they go elsewhere.

Michelle: What’s next for me, I want to keep doing the absolute best I can teaching my actual classes. I’m just reconnecting so much with that. And I think that’s a good thing for now. And I’m eagerly looking at, hopefully, deeper changes in the academy, also looking for rebuilding online presence. Twitter used to be a big part of my online life and I quit that in May, and saying what kind of connections was this yielding with other faculty, even with students and the big ideas in my field. And maybe I can take more charge and have more agency in that going forward?

Liz: I’m working on a book. So you should all buy it when it comes out. Michelle is the editor, so it’s going to be really good. [LAUGHTER] It’s tentatively called The Present Professor. And we mentioned it in the introduction. But really, I’m just looking for ways where we can create more student centered,e students supportive and faculty well being centered places of learning. That is my passion. And I’d love to talk to any of you who are interested in that.

John: Thank you all for coming. And on your tables, there’s little packets that Rebecca designed with some tea in them, so please take them with you so she doesn’t have to bring them back to Oswego.

Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you all for joining us. And thanks for those that asked questions. And thank you to all of our panelists and we finished on time. [APPLAUSE]

Liz: It is exactly 12:30.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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257. PsycLearn

Posted in adaptive learning, assessment, backward design, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation students, higher education, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
October 5, 2022

Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, Anna Yocom, Linda Goldberg, and Alan Strathman join us to discuss how the American Psychological Association has developed adaptive learning packages for core psychology courses.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, we examine how one professional association has developed adaptive learning packages for core courses in their discipline.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are all involved with a psych learning project, which we’ll be talking about throughout the podcast. Let’s have each guest introduce themselves.

Anna: Hi, I am Anna Yocom. I am a senior lecturer at The Ohio State University in psychology and I am also a Content Manager for PsycLearn.

Linda: And I’m Linda Goldberg. And my role with the PsycLearn project is that of product evangelist.

Alan: Hi, this is Alan Strathman. I’m a content manager for PsycLearn and was a professor of psychology for a long time at the University of Missouri.

John: Welcome, everyone. We’re really happy to talk to you about PsycLearn. I first heard about this when I was working on a project at SUNY dealing with adaptive learning solutions. And we had seen some write ups of PsycLearn so we want to find out a little bit more.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Alan, are you drinking tea?

Alan: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee drinker.

Alan: Sorry.

Rebecca: I see how it is. [LAUGHTER]

Alan: I had tea this morning this morning.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Rebecca:: How about you, Linda?

Linda: I’m having an iced tea this afternoon. It’s hot and muggy outside, so something citrusy and decaf.

Rebecca: …and perfectly refreshing. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: That’s right. And sweetened.

Rebecca: Awesome. Anna?

Anna: I had tea earlier, but I have switched to water.

John: And I’m drinking spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I have some Scottish breakfast. Still in my pot today.

John: We’ve invited all of you here today to discuss the PsycLearn adaptive learning platform developed by the American Psychological Association. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this project?

Linda: Okay, I’m going to start with that. And there are a couple of overlapping facets to the origin story, so to speak. One is really a desire to expand APA’s publishing program. APA has a very rich publishing program, which includes publishing of over 90 academic journals, a very robust books publishing program, where many of those books are aimed at clinical practice, as well as books that might support the professional researcher, books that might support self help, and so on. And we found that there was an opening for us to make a contribution to undergraduate academic instruction and contribute to that portion of the path toward the profession. We also were recognizing as we contemplated this new project that there was a tremendous amount of disruption in the higher educational publishing landscape, a lot of cost pushback, a lot of desire among publishers to leverage technology. And we thought that perhaps not simply for delivery of content, but to improve the learning experience and to improve efficacy that we saw there might be some opportunity there.

Alan: Yeah, also, let me jump in. I think the developers also saw this as an opportunity to work toward some of the goals that APA has for the field of psychology, including, for example, utilizing psychology to make an impact on social issues.

Linda: And the field of cognitive psychology is one that tells us a lot about how we learn. So we felt like we could draw from our very own field in development of our final product,

John: Which courses have been developed for this platform.

Linda: So we started with a course for research methods and psychology and added a PsycLearn statistics for the behavioral sciences to that. These two courses are typically required for all majors in the discipline. And they also represent the most challenging content for many students. So we thought that seemed like a good place to start.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how this material was developed?

Alan: Sure, we use a backwards design process where we start by identifying what we want students to learn in each module and a module is similar to what would be a chapter in a regular textbook. These outcomes that we have in mind become Learning Objectives, and they really guide the content development. Learning Objectives are developed through collaboration, a conversation, maybe a hashing out between the subject matter experts and the content managers, and are influenced by a variety of factors, including how well the learning objectives address APAs guidelines for undergraduate education. And then there is a rigorous review process where other experts in the field provide feedback and often suggest additional learning objectives

John: Was there much of a challenge getting agreement on learning objectives. I know in many disciplines, there’s a lot of discussion of what should be in the core material in the discipline? Has psychology been able to overcome that a bit by agreeing on these standards?

Alan: Well, I think it is a challenge in every case, because everybody has a sense of what they think should be taught and what is essential for students to learn. Like I said, I think it’s hashing out. It’s sometimes a little bit of trial and error, where we identify a learning objective, and then start writing about it. And then at some point, we may decide that’s not the right objective to have. But I think in the end, the subject matter experts and the content managers do a really good job of coming to some consensus on what we want to teach.

John: Was the content in the courses, the actual readings and other materials, developed by the people who created the package?

Alan: Absolutely. We are a digital first product, with original content developed by experts in various sub disciplines in psychology. And this really gives us a big advantage I think over print textbooks. So starting from scratch, in an entirely digital environment, we can develop a seamless presentation, where we start with learning objectives, we present content, we design activities and interactive exercises, and then have assessments. And we can be sure that all those things are aligned with learning objectives. And we don’t have to try and retrofit learning objectives into existing content. And then just hope that assessments that we have address the new learning objectives. So I think being able to work in a digital environment allows us to have this really seamless presentation where we start with learning objectives and we go all the way through assessment, and all those things match.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted a little bit about maintaining the content, given that it’s in a digital platform. But can you talk a little bit more about how you maintain that or what that review processes is or how that gets updated on a regular basis?

Alan: Well, that’s a good question. One issue for us is that we’re still so new, that we haven’t had semesters and semesters of feedback from students that we can use to make revisions. But what is really exciting is that whenever we decide that we want to make a change, we can do it in real time. Think about a print textbook, whenever they decide that they want something to be different, they might wait three to five years for the opportunity to make those changes. With us, since it’s digital first, we decide something needs to be changed or updated or revised and we can make those changes in a really timely fashion. And I think it really helps to keep our content current.

John: And if you find that students are not achieving the learning objectives, you have the ability, at least, to make some changes, either redefining the objectives if perhaps the objectives didn’t work too well. Or if the learning materials weren’t quite aligning with that. How often is that type of change done?

Alan: Well, so far, we’re still into the development process, that we’re making those changes just all the time. As the products get older and more mature, I think we’ll need to do that less. But again, we’ll still have the opportunity to do it as often as we’d like to.

Rebecca: John mentioned at the beginning of the episode about his interest in this project related to adaptive learning. Can you talk a little bit about the adaptive learning component of this project and the platform that you use.

Anna: The platform that we use is CogBooks, it is a platform, I think, is really unique compared to other textbooks, because it allows students to engage in their learning, and really direct their own learning pathway. And that’s based on their understanding of the content. So instead of going through a whole chapter, and then maybe quizzing yourself or testing yourself, after each content page, they get some formative questions and they get to make their own assessment. They get to say, “Okay, did I understand that? Was I not too sure? How did I do on those questions?” And then they can choose whether they want to get that support material or not, which we think of as like, “Would you follow up and ask your instructor a question.” That’s how we think of this support material. So if a student is very confident with the material, they’re essentially going to get a different path than a student who might need help in a couple of different areas or a student who might need help in a lot of areas. There’s just more examples or more practice. So it can look a little bit different for each student, which is pretty cool.

John: Linda mentioned earlier that psychologists have done a lot of research and cognitive scientists have done a lot of research on how people learn, how have some of those principles of how we learn been built into this platform?

Alan: Well, Linda is certainly right. There is a lot of research on learning science. And because we are psychologists, we’re familiar with the research, and use that knowledge to help students learn throughout the product. I think the centerpiece of our efforts to use learning science is the inclusion of metacognition, that is helping students evaluate their own learning, helping them identify what they know and what they don’t know. And when they identify what they don’t know, then they could spend a little more time learning that particular topic. Often students get to the exam, and they haven’t really done a good job of testing themselves, identifying what they know, and what they don’t know. And the first time they realize they don’t know something is when they get to the exam. And that’s obviously not the right time to get there. And so we’re able to identify ways that we can help them evaluate their own learning. We help them in this process by incorporating those learning strategies that we know are supported by research. We present concrete examples throughout. We have frequent activities and assessments. Students get practice retrieving content from memory. And these opportunities are spaced just as the research suggests they should be. They have interactive exercises. They get practice in the elaboration, or explaining content to themselves in their own words. And really the process of taking material and from the jargon in which it’s presented to explaining things in their own words, is a really useful process for students to engage in. And we could have a whole podcast just on principles of learning science that PsycLearn incorporates.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what the student experience is like for students that are using the platform? So Anna, you hinted a little bit at this with some of the adaptive learning components. But what does it look like from: I entered this space from the beginning, and now I’m interacting with this over time.

Anna: So students really, I think, approach PsycLearn differently than a printed textbook, again, not only just the fact that they would go through a printed textbook, and then maybe ask themselves some questions, probably skip over a lot of reading, because maybe it’s not very engaging or easy to get distracted with print textbooks as well. But one of the really interesting things is that they’re engaged with the content pages within them. So they’re not just engaged outside of content, like “Oh, refer to this video,” or “you can reference this activity” or “try some completely different platform to help with your reading….” but within the content pages, they get activities in which they’re asked to reflect on the course material. How does this connect to things you already know? So they get to respond to those things within the content pages. They get practice formative questions, formative meaning that it’s not just did I get this right? Yes or no. But they get feedback. So they would find out what a suggested answer was to a short answer question. They can compare that to their own. With a multiple choice question, they get follow up on why that is the correct answer, not just “Well, if I’ve missed this a couple of times, and they get multiple chances to respond, but they get some explanation about why that was the correct answer.” And so we have video questions, we have matching exercises, we have short answer, we have multiple choice questions, different drag and drop. So we’ve tried to just vary the kinds of interactions that students would have, the ways that they can practice answering questions. And this variety really helps maintain interest throughout. So they get to engage it in lots of different ways. It’s not just a rote memorization, but they’re actually applying the material as they go through each module.

John: So you mentioned formative questions. Are there are some assessment tools built in to evaluate students’ learning for grading purposes, for example?

Anna: There are. Yeah, so there are summative questions. And we try to have them associated with those learning objectives that Alan had talked about earlier. And so after maybe one, two, or a small group of those learning objectives are covered, there is a short sample, maybe 5…10 multiple choice questions where students have a few attempts, and we want them to get to about an 80% accuracy. And one of the nice things is if they don’t on their first attempt, they can actually go access those support pages then. So maybe they skipped over them earlier. And they thought, “Okay, I got this, it’s fine. I understood this page.” And then they get to these questions later on, these mastering the content and they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, I was missing some of this.” So they get another chance to go back to those support questions, and try it again. So then hopefully, they can get those right after three attempts. We don’t want them to be punitive. We want them to get engaged with the material and get to that mastery.

Rebecca: So now that you’ve talked a little bit about the student experience, can you talk a little bit about how this supports instructors? What kind of feedback is provided to instructors and maybe how instructors are using this in their teaching.

Anna: One of the things I really like, we all know, anytime that we can even maybe think back to our own experiences in classrooms, it’s a struggle getting students to read. But a lot of these classes, I mean, really all of our classes, if we’re assigning some sort of book, some reading material, we want them to read it. So how do we get them to engage? Well, that’s where the accountability comes in. So we’re giving them this tool, and then their instructor can see, “Okay, they’ve made it through this material, they engage with this.” So the instructor could choose to then reiterate that material in class, or they could choose to maybe take an active learning approach in class. And okay, now that you’ve had this background, everybody made it through, we’re going to apply it. And maybe not everybody got to 100% on every question, but maybe we got to about over 90% completion, which is what I would typically see in my classes. So you would have students who, even after a few attempts, would sometimes miss some of those mastering questions, but generally, it was pretty high. And so I could see that before I went into class. Okay, so students, as a whole, on average have got this. So I can take it a step further, where I can go back to those questions that were really challenging. So you get to track progress through each module, you can also dive a little deeper with individual students. So a student comes to you and says, “I’m really struggling,” the instructor can go in there, they can look at their pathway. Were they accessing the support material? Did they take those quizzes a few times? Where were they spending their time? Or if the instructor wanted them to cover it on let’s say, Tuesday night, were they doing it all Tuesday at 9pm? Right? Like you could actually see all of that. So you can kind of work with them like, “Well, I see you started this that night, let’s think about how we could maybe back that up. Like maybe we should pace this out at least a few days ahead of time, which is a really nice way to work with students.” And it also syncs with the LMS, the learning management system, so it really takes that burden off of instructors as well. So it’s talking to the platform that we get there. So we get this easy back and forth, which is really nice. So we can nudge students along with that, I would often encourage students to visit those support pages if they were struggling, like, “Look, I know this is really challenging,” or, “Hey, there’s more practice, if you just want a little bit more practice, you can go to some of those support pages to get that.” And the other nice thing is students can actually email right from there, which I think is pretty unique. So if a student emails me, I could see okay, they were having problems in statistics with variability and standard deviation. And it will take me as the instructor right to that page. And so then I can see that and I can say, “Oh, well, why don’t you try these examples here,” which was really nice. Instead of just a student saying, “I don’t know, I don’t get this,” they can let you know exactly where they’re struggling. So it provides a lot of options for instructors.

John: And do instructors get aggregate statistics on what areas students are struggling in addition to data on individual students?

Anna: Absolutely. So you can see that on the dashboard. You can see if there were chunks of mastering questions, for example, or a specific question that students struggled with. So you could choose to review that and maybe even go over some of those in class or go over specific topics in more detail.

John: How are instructors combining this with other face-to-face learning activities, for example, in face-to-face classes. As I understand it, most people use this as a textbook replacement, except a much more powerful replacement to a textbook. What other things will people often do to provide more of a sense of community or a social component to the learning?

Anna: Yeah, so, I think a lot of instructors are using it, just as you said, as a textbook replacement. And that’s how I have used it for statistics in particular. So it was taking the place of my other textbook, which actually was a print textbook that was online. And so I don’t feel like there were any losses. But we were gaining the ability to say, “Okay, we’re all on the same page. I know that everybody’s at least had some exposure to this. So now let’s talk about it. I can see where you were struggling. So I know we’re going to need more examples here. I know we’re going to need more follow up here.” Or “why was this question challenging? Why was this hard?” So I think drawing on those parts are how we can maintain those social ties and the social interactions we want whether it’s online, whether it’s face to face, or in any capacity.

Linda: I’ll just go ahead and point out as well that part of the content package that we’re making available to instructors who adopt, PsycLearn course material is a set of student activities that sort of exist outside of the platform itself and are available for instructors to assign or to bring to the class. They’re typically designed again to align with specific learning objectives and to give the instructor options for an in- class activity or an additional assignment activity. And that’s accessible to the instructor when they’re using the dashboard.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really great support materials. Can you talk a little bit about how this platform has affected equity gaps that we might be seeing?

Alan: Sure, I think there are two ways that PsycLearn is addressing issues of equity. First, we are designing PsycLearn to be culturally inclusive, that is we work to make sure that through examples, images, photos, figures, every student can see themselves in the product. Plus, our goal is to include the research of diverse psychologists and psychologists of color. And then I think the second way that we strive to be equitable is to design for universal access. We want the product to be accessible to all students, and so we make great efforts to do so. We use typography that’s particularly accessible. We incorporate transcripts and closed captioning, we have text-based alternatives for non text elements. And our efforts are well beyond what the minimum guidelines would be, well beyond what typical expectations would be, and I want to say that this is because we value this process so highly. We are keenly interested in making an accessible, inclusive product, and I think we’re really working hard to do that.

John: Have there been any studies of the overall efficacy of this program compared to alternatives?

Linda: Well, we have conducted some impact surveys, surveys of student users to gauge their impressions of the impact of PsycLearn on certain important aspects of their experience. Through surveying students, we looked at the impact on their knowledge gains, on their confidence in their ability to use that knowledge, and on motivation to complete assigned activities. And on the questions that we asked, to sort of tease out each of these thematic areas, we did receive very positive response. Now, these are, albeit, impressions of students. That’s sort of the first line of study available to us. And we feel pretty motivated ourselves by what we’re learning, by what we’re hearing from students. These surveys did also include some open text entry questions. And very interestingly, some of the criticisms that we heard were often this is a lot of time, this is a lot of work. But by the same token, we’ll hear in the very same response, but it’s very worth my time, and it really helps. And I feel confident when I go into the class, and I already know what my instructor is going to talk about, I feel more relaxed, I feel more able to pay attention. That kind of response has been very rewarding to receive from these student surveys.

John: With some other platforms, there have been studies that have looked at the impact on equity gaps, and they relate very much to what you just said, that basically, students come into our classes with very different backgrounds. Some come in with a very rich and strong background from prior courses, others come in with a somewhat weaker background. But to make it through an adaptive learning platform, the students who come in with less background can acquire mastery, but it takes a bit more time and effort. And the students who come in with a stronger background can race through a little bit more quickly. But much of the research does suggest that those equity gaps tend to be reduced. But it is at the cost of additional effort by those students who come in with a little bit less prior knowledge or prior experience with some of the material. And so I think that’s one of those real strengths of adaptive learning platforms compared to other formats like textbooks and lectures and so forth, where everyone is expected to move at the same pace. But as Chuck Dziuban, on a previous podcast has said, in a traditional course, everyone spends the same amount of time with the material, but they learn different amounts, when they’re working with adaptive learning platforms, they have to spend different amounts of time, but they all can achieve the same learning outcomes, they can all reach the same outcomes. But it may take more time to do so.

Linda: That’s certainly our hope, and some of what motivates the work that we’re doing. I feel like having respect for the time that our students need to spend is top of mind. We need to make sure that what we’re asking them to do is a good use of their time. And therefore this mode of delivery and the kind of content that we make available through the multiple activities and so on that Anna was describing. We’re giving our students opportunities to do that self testing that reiterative process and not simply trying to digest a narrative.

Anna: I always think back to a student I actually had in class a number of years ago, and this student went through the same class multiple times. And it was a class that was needed to get to other upper-level classes and was very frustrated, of course. And then we came to find out that this student in the multiple times of taking the class, the book was listed as required, but with either a digital or print textbook, you really don’t have any way to monitor that. You don’t know if the student’s using the book even if they have it. But this student had never got the book, just never occurred to them that, okay, this could be a really valuable tool. And so that’s really a benefit. I see. Like you were talking about equity, let’s give them this tool. But let’s make it something that’s valuable, that can really help them and if they need that added support, they’ll get it. But kind of level the playing field a little bit.

Rebecca: How do you see this platform evolving over time.

Linda: So we are able to work fairly closely with our platform partner, CogBooks. We’re able to contribute to their roadmap planning to some degree. We’ve collected feedback through a variety of channels, also, not only the student surveys that I’ve mentioned, but we also, in the past year, conducted a qualitative study that included student interviews and observations of students who were assigned to use PsycLearn. And this exercise gave us really valuable insight into how and where students focus their time and attention. And so for instance, through that process, we were able to get some real good insight into how they approach the summary of each module. And as a result, we’ll be able to give some greater attention, we’ve got some plans to enrich and make more accessible, the content that we placed there, because we were able to learn that they highly value that for later test preparation. So that’s just an example. We’re hoping to be able to continue to do those observational and interview studies.

Rebecca: So I’m really curious for each of you to answer this question. But what makes you really excited about PsycLearn?

Anna: I’m happy to go first, because I am a very energetic instructor. I will be at the front of the room, and I bring a lot of energy. And what makes me excited about PsycLearn is just the ability of students to be active consumers of their learning. I would love for them to take away something that is memorable, that feels unique. And so PsycLearn frees me up as an instructor, that I don’t have to go through every bit of background information in the way I use it in class, I can assume they’ve had things. Let’s spend time on things that are interesting. Let’s dive deeper into things. Let’s do more exercises for things that are challenging. And so the students get to think about and apply new ways of learning and engaging the material from the very first moment that they encounter the content.

Alan: Yeah, for me, it’s really about the inclusion of metacognition, I think it’s really helpful to have students be able to evaluate their own learning. I think this makes them do better on exams, and I think it makes them more successful in their entire college career. It’s also an important part of my own teaching. I have a lot of activities in class where students can answer and identify how well they know what they’re supposed to know. And what I often find is that students study, but they don’t know how much to study, they don’t know: “Do I know it as well as I need to know it.” And this product gives them a lot of feedback, really helps them understand if they understand the material as well as they need to. And PsycLearn really can do that in ways that regular textbooks cannot.

Linda: I would say that my excitement really comes from the big picture, the opportunity for us to deliver on these experiences that Anna and Alan are describing. But we’re going to be able to do that across the foundational courses in the curriculum. And so that larger picture future horizon is pretty exciting.

John: Well, you’ve already addressed some of this, at least in terms of PsycLearn, but we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Linda: Well, we have sort of talked a little bit about future and what’s next and our opportunity to be iterative. The digital platform allows us to be continually rethinking what is the best activity to offer to reinforce or bolster certain concepts. And so that’s certainly something that is ongoing. We can take feedback from students on how well they feel various content is supporting them. We’ll be looking at what we can do to encourage a greater level and engagement with that support material, so that students aren’t feeling like, “Oh, that’s extra, I don’t really need to go there.” Indeed, it’s extra. But it’s really vital, especially for students who might sort of marginally understand. And so the opportunity for us to deliver a reframe of a concept can make all the difference at that tipping point.

Anna: Yeah, and I think what Linda had said about using the support material is really important to us. So we’re really interested in applying these learning science principles that Alan had talked about to say, “Okay, what is the best way to get students to engage with this.” We want them to see that cool stuff we’re putting on those pages, if they feel like they could benefit of it. So we want to reach the students that need that support. So I think just diving in a little deeper and figuring out the best ways to reach them, to get them to say, “Okay, yeah, I could use a little practice.” Or “I could use another example,” snd really assess that learning of their own. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge we have constantly, especially when students are new at something, they tend to think, “Oh, yeah, I got this. I know it all.” And so getting better at that metacognition, I think, is really exciting to us.

Alan: Yeah, and I think for us, it has a lot to do with making a better and better product. I think about what it was like the first time I taught a course. And I equate that to the first iteration of a PsycLearn product. And then I think about what was it like the fifth time I taught that course or the 10th time I taught it, and how richer and deeper it was. And I think the same thing will happen with PsycLearn. We’re going to keep on creating a product that gets richer, more inclusive, and more likely to help students succeed.

John: I was really excited to hear about PsycLearn, and everything you’ve talked about makes me even more excited about the opportunity for this and I hope that other disciplines will start working on similar materials for their basic courses, because the benefits from this have been well established in terms of improving student learning and reducing some of the equity gaps. Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Alan: Thank you.

Anna: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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187. Talking Tech

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, learning, mobile, motivation, multitasking, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
May 12, 2021

Student use of mobile technology can enrich student learning experiences, but can also interfere with the focused attention that is essential for learning. In this episode, Michelle Miller examine how we can talk to students about technology in ways that will help them become more efficient in their learning and professional lives.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention and student success in the early college career.

Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells us about Teaching and Learning in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University series on teaching and learning.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Student use of mobile technology can enrich student learning experiences, but can also interfere with the focused attention that is essential for learning. In this episode, we examine how we can talk to students about technology in ways that will help them become more efficient in their learning and professional lives.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells us about Teaching and Learning in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University series on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Rebecca: So good to have you back. Today’s teas are…. Michelle, are you drinking any tea?

Michelle: Well, I’m still on coffee. We have a three hour time difference this time of the year. And so I figure I’m entitled.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I am drinking ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: And I have golden monkey today.

John: …for a change.

Rebecca: It’s expensive. I only drink it on special occasions. I was like, we’re gonna get to talk to Michelle, today. I’m gonna make fancy tea.

Michelle: Well, coffee is the fanciest tea of all.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk a little bit about how to talk to students about technology and why perhaps you might consider talking to students about technology. You teach a course on mind, brain and technology, and you’ve also created the Attention Matters projects that we’ve discussed on an earlier podcast. Could you tell us a little bit about the mind, brain and technology class that you teach?

Michelle: Right. So this has been such an incredible privilege I’ve had, on and off. for several years. Now, back a long time ago, when I first applied for and was competing for the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellowship honor and award here at Northern Arizona University, one of the things that we got to do as part of our application packet was to envision a dream course. And this was, gosh, around a decade ago that I did this. So the landscape of the research and technology itself was very different. But this is the course that I came up with to say if I could teach one thing, brand new, build it from the ground up, this is what I would do: something that would connect psychology, especially empirical research-oriented psychology, the role of emerging technologies in our lives and the incursions they’ve made into all of our lives, and blend that with some real practical advice and things that would be engaging to college students today at a variety of levels. And so it went in my packet. I was so fortunate to win the award and be chosen for it. And then I came knocking on the doors, and I said, but remember, there was this dream course, I actually was very literal minded. So I said, “Well, I get to teach this now, right?” And my department said “Well, oh, okay, yes, we can work that out.” And it originally was taught as a senior capstone, and it’s been taught in that form, again. Another time it had an incarnation as a freshman seminar, a first-year seminar, and right now I’m teaching it as a fairly large general elective upper division elective, primarily serving our psychology majors and our minors. And so this is a course that I’ve been able to dip in and out of throughout the years. And I actually quote one of the first cohort of students, I got some really choice quotes that I included in my last book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. And this semester, I actually have students reading some early drafts of the book I’m writing right now. And so it’s really been interwoven throughout my professional evolution over the last 10 years.

Rebecca: It’s pretty cool that you got to ultimately teach the class and it’s been going on for so long.

Michelle: Indeed, it is, indeed it is.

John: What do your students think about the role of technology in social media, in their lives, as well as in educational environment?

Michelle: Well, right from the get go, when I got to first design this class, and actually be sitting with a cohort of students every week, and bringing up a new topic, we divided it up into: there’s technologies for learning; there’s the effects of technology on aspects of thinking, like cognition, and so on; there’s several weeks on social media, which we’re right in the middle of right now. So there’s lots of different kind of articulation points where different students can come in with opinions. And so it does really cover that really broad area. So right from the beginning, I was so struck by the thoughtful and sometimes unexpected things that students would say… unexpected meaning kind of counter to what are some real stereotypes about… first of all, that all college students are a traditional age in this kind of lifestyle where you live in a dorm and party on the weekends. And I think most of us know that today’s college students do not fit that mold, and they’re not all that age. But, even students who are in this younger age bracket, to have them really say… like one of the early exercises we do in the course, I asked them to sort themselves on a continuum. We did it on a whiteboard this time via video conference, but in a physical classroom, they’d actually stand on different ends of this… place yourself physically on this continuum: Do you love technology, you want it everywhere, can’t imagine life without it… you hate it, you want to go low tech. And students are really spread across that spectrum. And so many of them have thought… they’ve said, “You know, I noticed I feel a certain way after I’m on Instagram for a certain amount of time,” or “I’ve tried electronic textbooks and I personally prefer paper.” …that’s actually consistent with some of the surveys that have been done with college students as well. So they are varied, they’re rich, and they are very counter to the stereotype that younger people just want technology everywhere in their lives.

Rebecca: What is one of the biggest misconceptions about technology that your students bring up in class that you address?

Michelle: Well, there’s a complex of sort of some interrelated ones that dial into my specialty area, which is cognitive psychology. So naturally, I noticed those really prominently myself. And so those ideas that using technology is going to reduce attention span, it’s reducing even your ability to think. And then there’s a sort of a related set of issues around what has been in the past a very controversial and headline dominating issue, which is the issue of taking notes by hand versus on a laptop computer in class. And that research, in particular, not to go through all of it, but, while the original study that sparked that debate was well designed, the interpretation of it has been just stretched until it screams. That study doesn’t talk about the distraction issue, there’s a lot of things that aren’t addressed in it. But students have come away, they’ve heard this kind of very superficial version of that, by which laptops are bad, and they also have kind of picked up a folk belief that if you handwrite something, it sort of drives it into your memory automatically. And it does not work that way. In fact, if you read the original study, one of the things that they say is that in as much as laptop note taking can be less memorable, whatever you’re taking notes on, It’s because you’re less likely to paraphrase, synthesize, and compress down what you’re hearing. And yet we have other people, they’ve heard these people in the culture say, “Oh, well, if you want to remember something, sit down and copy it, get out that pen and paper,” and that’s not really an effective study strategy. So they’re a little surprised and they say, “Oh, wait a minute, there’s some nuance to that study, and maybe some others that didn’t replicate it.” That study wasn’t talking about distraction on a laptop, it was just strictly speaking about this one aspect of how memory encoding works. Attention span… I probably talked about it on an earlier podcast… This is not a concept that attention scientists usually use. And so right off the bat, that’s a little suspect. And there’s not really good solid evidence that fundamentally, attention is changing. So they’ve absorbed some of those things. And so they’re really delighted to really dig more into those. So I might assign them an editorial or something that ran in a popular magazine or a blog. And then we look at the original research they’re talking about, and we pick up on the discrepancies. It’s not that Mueller and Oppenheimer was badly designed, it’s just they were looking at some effects that don’t always hold up with replication. And that speaks to this idea that the effect size is maybe not that large. Not that, again, anything was wrong with their data, it’s just you have this now you see it, now you don’t quality with some of these effects. And that kind of tells you that maybe this isn’t the hugely overriding consideration. And subsequent studies too have talked about this storage function of notes. It’s neat to think that you remember as a function of note taking without having to go back and study. But in reality, that’s what we do with notes, we go back and we study them. And so here’s this big elephant in the room like, well, are they taking good notes? And if they’re not taking good notes that capture key points, that they are going to want to go back and study actively, then picking up a little bit here or there because it was more memorable during note taking is not as big an issue. So that’s a big like, “Okay, what have you heard? Let’s look at the original research.”

Rebecca: Having the opportunity to talk about these things with students is exciting. And I’m sure the students are really into it, because it connects to their direct lives. And diving into the research makes a lot of sense in the context in which you’re teaching your course within psychology. So it seems like a natural fit there. How might other academic fields adopt some of the ability to talk about these things in their own classes where maybe cognitive science is not or psychology is not, the fundamental underpinning of what they’re doing?

Michelle: That’s, I think, something that I think is really exciting and why I am so excited to be able to share with your Tea for Teaching audience is I’ve really come to believe that that maybe there is something that is more versatile here beyond just the psychology frame and just a senior capstone in psychology. And I think that this is where faculty creativity can come in. I think the fundamental things that I think are so promising… Well, first of all, this is just a topic that is really under discussed, and it’s under discussed in a serious way. It’s not like students have not ever heard anybody critique technology. They’ve heard that. They’ve heard, “Oh, it messes with their sleep that it messes with their social relationships.” They’ve heard a lot of this, but it’s kind of swept under the rug in a way or even treated as “what serious person would ever think about these sorts of things?” So, that said, this is something that, and it’s something that students are doing all the time, even pre-pandemic. Most students do use technology of one form or another and are on one or more social media platforms. And so this is in and out of their lives all day long. So I can only think that there are critical frames and key concepts within a variety of disciplines that could map onto this, even if a faculty member doesn’t have the opportunity, or the interest, to say develop a whole course. Well, perhaps this could be a vehicle for discussing, for example, experimental design. How do you set up a study to really get at things like “What are the impacts of heavy cellphone use?” You do have certain individuals who self select to use technology in a particular way. And that’s something that you see crop up again and again in the research literature. Or if we’re talking about our own personal relationships, classes that have a focus on health can perhaps use one of these sub areas as a springboard for discussion. And so this is just really what I found, is that students who might otherwise be very quiet or, when things are framed in a purely very divorced from reality academic way, they may hang back, but who doesn’t get hooked into a discussion of some of the impacts of technology on our life. So I think it can be a vehicle for those things. And I think that it might be a little bit of a stretch in, say, a physical sciences class where we’re really discussing empirical context. But even there, it can be folded into discussions of effective studying very well, as long as we don’t just have that, again, very superficial tech’s bad, just get rid of it all and do everything on note cards. There’s a lot more to it than that.

John: Students are going to be interacting with technology, not only in their classes, but in their future careers. So having them think about those issues can be a really useful thing to learn, no matter what discipline they’re studying,

Rebecca: It seems like a good hook. It’s something that everyone can relate to, in some context. I was doing an exercise in my own class not too long ago about storytelling, and how brands present stories around what they’re presenting to people. And I use Spotify and Pandora as the examples. I’ve never seen a class so excited, [LAUGHTER] because it was talking about this technology platform that they can connect to. So I can imagine, when you bring up social media or other things that they feel really connected to, it immediately is a hook to talk about anything more complex.

Michelle: Absolutely. And that’s precisely the kind of dynamic that I’ve seen. And if I could throw out a kind of a discipline-specific example, there’s a concept that I really started weaving in more of over the last few iterations of the class. And this is a concept from psychological sciences research and quantitative analysis that really can be very slippery. But it’s a big, big part of contemporary ways that we analyze data. And it’s a concept of mediators and moderators. And so it’s jargony… and essentially mediators, when you have a correlation between two things, and you want to know, does A cause B? Or is there something else in the middle does A cause B causes C, and we have these great techniques for untangling those relationships. And moderators, on the other hand, is the relationship or is the correlation stronger in the presence of a particular variable or for, say, a particular group of people than others? And so yeah, you read that in a textbook and you go, “oh….” and yet, it’s one of the things that we really… I mean, experimental design, and how we can interpret our data is just radically more sophisticated when we can just not say, “Well, these two things happen together, but for whom is this relationship stronger,” and so on? So there are a lot of studies on the effects of technology that have one or more of these involved. And yeah, it just clicks for students when they see it play out in this relatable domain. So, for example, we have a study that I incorporate really early in the course. It’s got a word in the title, “Technoference” in relationships. So it’s a study of your perception that your partner in an intimate relationship uses their phone…. and when you’re talking to them… [LAUGHTER I think, will have a little bit of recognition if we’re in a relationship. That’s part of contemporary relationships, right? And they look at overall well being and how that relates to being in a relationship where your partner’s on the phone all the time. Now, it’s not a perfect study. And that’s part of what we look at. It was only among women who were in opposite sex relationships, and there’s a lot of self report and all that stuff. But you can say that “Okay, now they have a mediator. It’s not that the phone itself is degrading your life’s wellbeing but here’s this chain of causality of when your partner’s using your phone all the time when you’re talking, then you’re not as happy in your relationship. There’s conflict and then your overall wellbeing in your life goes down.” And then, in that context, you go, “Oh, Okay, I get it. Here’s what a mediator is.” And then we can talk about moderators, we can say, “Well, what about individuals who are in same sex relationships? What about men? What about couples who have been together for 25 years versus those who just got together six months ago?” Oh, okay. Now we understand moderators. So yeah, similar to you, Rebecca, I’m just saying, once you bring in some of these things, is not just dropping in sort of pop culture, it’s really taking a substantive look at these things. But yeah, then you springboard into concepts that are otherwise just really abstract.

Rebecca: Do you have some examples of things about learning related to technology that we might be able to slip into any discipline’s classes? …some of the stuff about attention, or good study strategies, or anything that’s maybe mediated through technology, but would relate to anybody.

Michelle: Definitely, the relationship between attention and memory and learning. Now, like I always say, when I’m talking about these topics, memory is not the only important aspect of learning. Learning is not all about memorization. But we now know that when you remember more, we have a broader knowledge base in an area, you’re better able to think critically and think in some sophisticated ways in that area. So that’s all good stuff. So that’s one piece of it. And in order to acquire any new memories, pretty much, for practical purposes, you have to be paying attention. And this is what devices and technologies have been so well engineered at this point to take away from us. So yeah, when you talk about a life skill, you’re going to need this for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. We have to think about, alright, how do we kind of shepherd and be stewards of our own attention. And I think, from a teaching perspective, too, it’s not that we have to constantly entertain students to grab their attention back from whatever it’s wandering off on, or similar that we just have to stand up there and be like, “Well, you have to pay attention… unbroken for an hour and 15 minutes… and all violations will be punished.” There’s different paths between those, but just to share with students that “Yeah, using phones is probably not changing the way our attentional systems work.” They work the way they have for many, many millennia. However, there’s a lot more competition for that now. So having them think about what are their strategies going to be. For some students, they come up with very creative cold turkey types of situations or types of strategies. I had one student say that I put my phone in a dropbox outside at night when I’m studying, and if I want to use it I have to go out there, which may not seem like a big deal, but in Flagstaff, it could easily be three degrees Fahrenheit and ice falling out of the sky, it’s cold out here. So we have students who say, “Well, you know what, I’m gonna be a little bit more subtle. I’m going to use one browser for my classwork and one browser for fun and social media.” And it’s just a little subtle cue that kind of tells you, “okay, we’re in work mode, or we’re not in work mode.” It’s not as much prescribing the answers as getting students themselves involved in saying, “Well, here’s how I’m going to manage this.” So those are some of the things that we would share. And when it comes to learning strategies at work, I’m always going to be evangelizing retrieval practice in one form or another. Lots of ways that that can look… everything from a Kahoot! quiz to sitting and talking with your roommate to try to bat back and forth what you remembered. Lots of different things you can do but, it shows too, there’s a link between you have to put in some active effort for your brain to pick up on that information and store it away in memory if it’s going to. So yeah, there’s sort of a complex of interrelated principles and take homes, there.

Rebecca: The one thing that I was immediately thinking about when you said about phones being really good at taking away your attention. I immediately thought as a designer, what a great example of how to get someone’s attention? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Yeah.

Rebecca: …not only to think about how to manage attention and think about what you’re paying attention to, but how do designers actually manipulate that? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: See… perfect. There’s a cross-disciplinary connection.

John: The importance of attention is a topic that I think all students recognize is a problem. But I don’t think they fully understand quite how much of a problem it can be. Or at least my perception is there’s still a lot of misperceptions about the ability of students to multitask effectively. And I know that’s something that you address a bit in your classes.

Michelle: I do. And a related project that we’ve discussed on some other podcasts is the Attention matters project and I’m happy to report that project is still just perking along like crazy. We still have lots of faculty who are involved with it. So to kind of give a little background on it. Attention Matters was a concept that came out of a great conversation I had with my very smart and dedicated colleague, John Doherty, who’s an instructional designer and a librarian here at Northern Arizona University. And I had been going around and trying to teach a little, almost guest lecture, roadshow for interested faculty to spread these ideas to students of how to study effectively and how to have a plan for not getting distracted in the middle of class and stuff like that. And we talked about it. And we put together an online module that can serve so many more students. This semester, I have several really smart research assistants, undergraduate research assistants, who are in this module, moderating it and helping it run. And for those who know what MOOCs are (massive open online courses), it’s a little bit like that, except it’s specific to our institution. And so, in this, it’s a way of reaching out to students, they oftentimes will earn a little bit of extra credit in their classes for faculty who really want to spread these ideas to their students. They work through these modules that do touch on some of these key ideas about… as far as multitasking, we tend to be very overconfident. You can’t learn by osmosis, you do need that directed attention. Instead of highlighting and passively hoping things soak in, get in there and do retrieval practice. There’s also a little piece of Attention Matters, by the way, that talks about driving safety, which was not really something we set out to do. But I feel like it’s, again, a relatable everyday example that people can say, “Oh, my gosh, I was in a bike accident by a distracted driver,” or “I’m very careful about this.” And students are very adamant, and have strong views that do funnel back to that idea of: if you let it, devices and distraction of all kind can really take over and create some serious consequences. So, that’s yet another way that we’ve been working to bring these ideas to students throughout the years. And yet another thing that’s given us a fascinating window into what students are already doing to cope with these things, and some of their unexpected attitudes and ideas about them.

Rebecca: The thing that a lot of folks are doing is they’re teaching remotely or trying to jazz things up in synchronous online classes is trying to play with the idea of gamification in their classes, which certainly comes from technology, and often from video games and then some experience around that. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty might use gamification in their classes? Or also how that works on students?

Michelle: Yeah, games and gamification has been such a topic for so long in how can we use technology for education? I know it’s funny, when I was doing research for Minds online, I actually went to a Musee Mecanique in San Francisco, as a sort of a background research. It’s this amazing Museum, that’s just whatever the technologies of the time were, and it goes back like 100 years, all these different games, physical games you can play there.

Rebecca: It’s a cool Museum,

Michelle: Oh, you’ve been there.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Michelle: Oh, my gosh.

John: I was too.

Michelle: People have used photography in games and gamification. They’ve used all these different ways of using tech to play. So this is not a modern concept. And so we’ve seen lots of attempts throughout the years to also harness it for learning… some more successful than others. It’s such a deep theme in those connections between mind-brain-learning technology. And so students, here too, they get pretty excited about it. And that’s a good thing for faculty who are looking to use games and gamification. Now it’s another where I think drilling a little bit below the surface is really beneficial. It’s pretty clear to me, from the research and literature so far, that what makes games effective, and what makes them so compelling, you know, elicits the time, effort and attention that you need for learning, it’s not the superficial stuff about the experiences, not the music, and it’s not just calling it a game. It’s not necessarily tacking points onto something, although points and scorekeeping is usually a part of most compelling games, for sure. But there’s deeper things about getting really rapid feedback, there’s the opportunity for friendly competition. And that’s something that I’ve really seen this year, because I’ve also been using quite a few quizzes and polls and things like that in my courses, too, that are remote, is that you don’t have to attach a grade to the game to get some students really into the idea of competition, while other students, there, it’s more anxiety provoking, or it’s just too much because they’re already in so many high-stakes competitive exams, where they can play for fun. And so those are some of the aspects that are important when people are thinking about selecting a game, setting up a game, bringing gamification in some way. It doesn’t have to all be cheesy, let’s make everything look like a video game. But really, that idea too, that mistakes are part of it. While we’re playing a Kahoot and you get an answer wrong, whatever, we’re doing something else in five seconds, and it’s not a big issue like a test question is. So there’s definitely that. And I would say, too, that students here as well, they can be a great source for insight. So talk to your students. Say “What aspects of this game are more appealing? less appealing?” and so on. And games and game culture too, this is something that I really get a sense that they’ve never had a serious, let alone academic, conversation about the role of gaming in their lives. Yet for many students, that’s an important part of their identity. It’s what they do to relax. It’s what they do to socialize now, quite frequently, especially with distancing happening. So, as weird as it might sound, let’s take games seriously. Let’s take games seriously as an important aspect of students’ lives. Let’s take it seriously as a road to learning. And let’s just keep exploring that because the more research that gets done, the more effective and beneficial features we find associated with games.

John: And the most popular games are those that students can work through. And no matter what their prior knowledge with that type of game, as you said, provides them feedback. And that feedback is targeted so that they can use that to improve and the level of the games are set so that it’s neither so challenging that they give up and get discouraged, but not so easy that they don’t have the sense of challenge. And that seems like a really good way of perhaps thinking about how we should design our classes in general, whether we include explicit gamification aspects or not, creating an environment that encourages students to actively want to engage with the material, and where they can see progress and see how they’re advancing. That is, in general, something that I think is a really important thing for us to contemplate at least in course design.

Michelle: Agree 100%, agree 100%. And that’s exactly what makes games compelling. What is about social media that makes people return to it again, and again, and again, hundreds of times in a day? And what features can we extract and adapt in the service of learning?

Rebecca: One of the things we talked about with Ken Bain last week was an example about the arts and how that might change someone’s thinking… an experience with a piece of artwork. So, I used that kind of example, to inspire a little activity with my students this morning. And I asked them, “Can you talk about a piece of artwork that has influenced your thinking?” And I gave them some categories. And I’m teaching an interaction motion design class, but I included visual art, but games were one of my categories. And some of the students put some really interesting examples about how certain games have gotten them to really contemplate interesting ethical questions, relationship questions, really interesting stuff. And they wrote really thoughtful responses. I had them basically write the name of the game and just a sentence about how it impacted their thinking. But there were some really thoughtful responses. And it was really almost surprising to me how deep some of those quick summaries of their experiences had been with games.

Michelle: Yeah, that’s perfect. And without the conversation, you wouldn’t have that window.

John: For many years, we’ve all heard lots of arguments from faculty about whether technology should be or should not be used in classes. The pandemic, to a large extent, has shut those down completely. And that’s been, for many of us, quite a bit of a relief not to have to deal with those arguments all the time. However, as we begin to move back into a more traditional onsite teaching environment where more instruction is taking place in regular classrooms again, what are some of the things that people may have learned about interacting with technology effectively during the pandemic, that may perhaps lead to improvements in how we teach our classes regularly?

Michelle: That is such a meaty question, and I think it’s one we’re going to see so much just rapid development of reactions. it ties into the whole question right now of what does instruction look like post-pandemic or whatever the next stage of the pandemic is? But yeah, what a good time to think about this. And you know, I can look at it too through the lens of faculty experience, I was kind of fortunate to have had my Zoom baptism completely by accident earlier in spring of 2020. Because I had set up this idea of having a lot of guest speakers in one class, and I got a huge response, which is wonderful, but I needed to bring them in. And I had always kind of said, “Well, if I’m going to Zoom, I’m going to kind of sidestep that. I’m going to let somebody else drive.” And I had to get over that really fast. And so I do think that it illustrates the value of some targeted, not totally strategically planned, practice with technology tools. And that’s just the kind of bedrock cognitive processes that, when you have something like being able to just run Zoom, or Collaborate or something like that, or have an online poll, your ability to do that while monitoring a classroom or answering questions, you got to have the practice in first, and our students are the same way. So we can think about, alright, whatever we’re going to have students interacting with or using or if it’s us that are using something, having that practice upfront and expecting that, once we’re on the other side of the learning curve, it looks very, very different. So that is one big part of it. On a much more conceptual or abstract level. I think that, this whole year, we’ve really needed to look at the students and their goals and why they’re there in the class in the first place, wnd why are they taking the course. That’s something I’ve written about in some of the shorter articles I’ve put out this year. I think the pandemic teaching was distinctive for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that you just can’t keep persisting with “Okay, I’m the learning cop here and I’m going to make sure everybody does things because I’m watching you.” At the end of the day. I found if my students… I hope they’re not, but yeah, they are in Zoom, they could be doing other things… they may be minimally attentive, and that is not good for their learning. And I do a lot of things to have a lot of different shifts in gears to bring in gamification. I’ve done a lot of things to do that. But ultimately, if the student wants to check out, they can check out to an extent. And I’m not saying I’m okay with that, but I think that we are going to be meeting students much more in the middle, instead of having a more adversarial relationship to their learning, I’m here to enforce what you have to know. I mean, we have to collaborate to have something like remote teaching the way we’re doing it, to have that work at all, there has to be more of a collaborative approach to it. So I know that that’s a very top-level conceptual type of answer. But I think that in a lot of things, we’re going to be saying, “Well, you know, what, if this is something that helps some students, and if I’ve talked to students about why they’re here, and they’re purpose driven, ‘I am here to actually learn and take something from this class because I need it for the next class.’” Well, that’s a great basis to springboard off of, instead of “how do I write the policy in my syllabus that will prevent any kind of behavior I see as undesirable.” And you know, so many people were already moving away from that, which I think is incredibly fortunate given what we’ve been through in the last year. But this may be, if not a tipping point, something else that pushes us more in that direction of saying, “Well, what are the policies there to do?” Yes, students have to pay attention to learn. And that is very, very clear during remote pandemic teaching, as well as everywhere else. But let’s maybe take some different approaches and have a different philosophy of how we get there.

Rebecca: One of the things that I also hear you hinting at Michelle is that during the pandemic, we’ve all had a lot to manage, we’ve had a lot of cognitive load. And so we have to prioritize, and we have to decide what’s going to win our attention. And so students have the same problem all the time, just like we have the same problem all the time, we’re just more aware of it now. They have multiple classes to balance, they might have family concerns, they might have jobs, and at some point, they’re making choices about what they’re going to attend to, and what they can’t attend to. And I think sometimes we always hope and wish that they’re attending to whatever we’re putting out in front of them. But that might not be the best choice for them at a given moment, based on the other things that are going on in our lives. And we just often don’t think of our students in that kind of holistic point of view.

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. That’s such an eloquent example of this way of thinking, and the things that we have learned and the shift in mindset that we may be on the cusp of. And that’s another thing that really underlies the approach to talking to students about technology that I’ve really come to adopt, which is the same-side instead of opposite-sides stance. Like you said, we do struggle with some common things. I’m caricaturing a little bit, but I think we’re playing off of an older mindset where it’s us, we’re were older, we’re in this position of authority, and here’s how we like to do things. And here’s this young generation, and they think, very alien to us, and they want to do something else, and we’re going to make them come over to our side… saying, look, we all get distracted. In class, I’m frequently saying, “Well, yeah, here’s something unpleasant that happened to me on social media,” even if I don’t tell them all the details. [LAUGHTER] The point is, yeah, I get misunderstandings and hurt feelings on social media, too. I end up in the social comparison that tends to be so toxic on places like Instagram. I get really, really distracted and sidetracked because I’m using the same computer for 20 different things all at once. And so let’s work together to see how we can address those challenges. And yeah, so I think that what you’re describing is, I think, a very healthy way forward.

John: Now that faculty have had a chance to get more insight into students lives, perhaps now faculty will be more understanding of those things in the future, because the classroom environment is somewhat separated from all that it was much easier to ignore those things and maybe faculty will be more likely to treat students as human beings, perhaps in the future.

Rebecca: Are you implying that the classroom is real life?

John: Well, maybe it may more closely resemble that as we move back into more traditional classroom settings.

Michelle: Yes, and I’m all for that.

John: We always end with the question, and it’s particularly relevant now, “What’s next?”

Michelle: As you mentioned at the top of our interview together, I am in the very final stages of completing the Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology book. So I’m really excited to having that book be coming out in the not too distant future. And I’m really throwing myself into a brand new professional role, which is as the Co-editor of the Teaching and Learning Series with West Virginia University Press. Now, this series has just drawn so many dynamic thinkers with so many practical and also evidence-based ideas that we can all use in teaching and learning and so it was a tremendous honor to be invited to take that role on and I’ll be working with the other editor of the series who founded the series and launched it all, Dr. James Lang, who has just been tremendously influential in the area of bringing evidence-based effective pedagogical strategies to so many people in higher education. He’s been this tremendous leader in that area. His writing is also amazing. So what an honor to get to work with him and with West Virginia University Press. Stepping into that role has taken up a lot and it’s been wonderful already. So that is, for the most part, what’s next for me.

John: And I think we could say the same about your writing based on your earlier book, as well as recent comments that Jim Lang made on Twitter about how much he enjoyed the clarity of your writing and your exposition in this new book and how much he’s looking forward to that being released.

Michelle: Oh, thank you, that’s so nice to say and being able to teach students and to talk to students for so many years about these issues was the inspiration that gave me ideas to work with. So, it all comes around.

Rebecca: Well, thanks, as always for joining us, Michelle, and sharing some of your insights and some of the work that you’ve been doing.

Michelle: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Michelle. And we’re looking forward to talking to you about this book as it gets closer to coming out.

Michelle: Absolutely.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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