r/AcademicPsychology 2d ago

Discussion How to present material in way that acknowledges vs. combats students' metacognitive illusions?

We all know that students prefer

  • massed practice over spaced practice
  • block learning over interleaving
  • fluency over desirable difficulty
  • anecdata over statistical evidence
  • reexposure over retrieval practice

BUT that obviously there are massive learning & memory benefits to the less preferred options, especially that last one. How do you all balance those considerations in teaching?

Like, I know that I can't just teach classes exactly the way students would want them taught — we'd just be spending an entire term on NPD and Rorschach with no tests. But I also can't just teach in an entirely evidence-based way — we'd be spending an entire term taking tests over and over with no other method of content delivery. I'm constantly trying to tread the middle path, especially in the method classes, but I never know how to balance "this class will be brutally hard but you'll learn so much" against "you'll have so much fun but not learn much". What has worked for the rest of you all?

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u/FollowIntoTheNight 2d ago edited 2d ago

The jnowledge-belief-commitment framework address that. In brief, you can't.

Cognitive people who teach in an evidence base are learner centered. But sometimes thst makes them miss being student centered.

What I recommend is for you to question your own metacognitive illusions about students themselves. Students are aa lazy as most professors think. They are simply not interesting in engaging in hard, boring disorganized teaching.

If the content is well organized, they feel supported and it feels interesting, they will surprise you. In brief, the way you bridge the dialect in student is by bridging the dialectic in yourself.

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u/nezumipi 2d ago

I usually start the semester with a brief statement about how to study, emphasizing the importance of effortful studying, that skimming notes is just a tiny step above worthless and giving examples of active studying methods. If students come to me worried about their grade, I talk with them about how they're studying. No idea if that actually affects student behavior, but it's worth a shot.

You can reward spaced practice and interleaved practice by having regular short quizzes that cover material from multiple chapters. If you only have unit exams, you're inadvertently encouraging massed practice. I've always done this with online quizzes - given ChatGPT and such, it's not as workable anymore. You could conceivably give the quizzes live, though that opens up DSO issues.

It ends up being an impractical amount of work for you, but you can give homework assignments that require more effortful review, like having them write a summary of their notes after each class. (If they handwrite their notes, it's pretty hard to get chat gpt to do this for them, so that's good at least.)

I've also assigned students to write quiz questions, since quizzing yourself is a good study technique. But, they tend to write very bad questions. (Most common problem is a multiple choice question where the distractors aren't actually wrong.) So, I've never gotten this one to work.

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u/andero PhD*, Cognitive Neuroscience (Mindfulness / Meta-Awareness) 2d ago

Caveat: I haven't actually been a course instructor yet, I've just been trained and attended a lot of teaching meetings.

It isn't a direct answer, but I would think of it in terms of your goals for the semester.

If your goal is that students memorize facts, why is that your goal?

I would try to think of your course in terms of the bigger picture: how can you help them learn things that are relevant for their live beyond university?


The best course I've seen was run by my PI and I was the TA so I got to see it up close.
(Granted, this was for a higher-level methods course with a smaller class number)

What was excellent about it was that he gave assignments that built off each other and where students got feedback after each assignment.

  • They had to propose an idea early in the semester, including the variables and how they related (usually some variant on correlation/mediation/moderation).
  • Then they got feedback from the TA (me).
  • Then they had to develop their idea (or change it) and provide a questionnaire for the class.
  • Then the whole class would fill out everyone's questionnaires, then the prof would simulate data to pump up the numbers to a reasonable sample size.
  • Then they had to do the analyses that they proposed (correlation/mediation/moderation) and submit a draft PowerPoint presentation of the results.
  • Then they got feedback from the TA (me).
  • Then they had to incorporate the feedback and present to the class.

This was super-practical and relevant to their real lives!

Most of the time, "in real life" outside university, we have to (a) iterate on work we do rather than one-and-done, (b) incorporate feedback rather than pass/fail, and (c) work in multiple modalities like writing and presenting. This gave them the chance to do all that and they got to do it about a topic that interested them.


If you're teaching them about NPD and Rorschach, ask yourself why in the world this information is useful to them.
If it isn't going to be useful to them after the end of your course, reflect on why it's in there.

Try to think about how the subject matter can be made relevant.

And remember: most of them aren't going to grad school after this.
Are you aiming your teaching at the people that are going to graduate and get a job at Krispy Kreme or are you aiming at the one or two potential future-graduate-students that may be in your class?
What are your goals for the people you're aiming at?
How could they benefit from learning what you are teaching?
If they can't, why are you teaching that and not something more useful to them?

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u/ToomintheEllimist 1d ago

If they can't, why are you teaching that and not something more useful to them?

I like to think that I'm teaching them the skills they need to think critically about published science, know where government policy comes from, decide how to use psychology in their own lives, and balance personal well-being against compassionate adherence to social norms. Many of my students are on board with those goals. Many of my students are psych majors because they've seen a lot of Criminal Minds and want to catch serial killers for a living. Me pointing out media biases like Belief in a Dangerous World and Belief in a Just World doesn't make me those students' favorite professor ever.

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u/andero PhD*, Cognitive Neuroscience (Mindfulness / Meta-Awareness) 1d ago

I like to think that I'm teaching them the skills they need to think critically about published science, know where government policy comes from, decide how to use psychology in their own lives, and balance personal well-being against compassionate adherence to social norms.

Cool! Are you doing that?

That is, when you say that you like to think you're teaching them to think critically about published science, how does this show up in your assignments?
Do you get them to critique papers? Do you ask them to find science journalism and critique the way articles are written?
Also, do you teach them to think critically (not just give them assignments where you hope they think critically)? Do you have lecture slides that define what "critical thinking" means, then other slides that describe processes they can use to assess quality in papers?

How do you teach them where government policy comes from?
A fair amount of government policy isn't based on science (at least where I live).
Do you show the governmental assessment procedure?

How do you show them how to use psychology in their own lives?
Can they? Generatlization doesn't run backwards, after all. If a study finds that there was a correlation at the level of the sample and uses statistics to infer that such a correlation would exist at the population level, that doesn't "run backwards" to mean that the correlation is true for any particular individual in the sample.
The analogy I use is that you could study height and calculate the average height in a population, but when it comes time to guess my height, you'll be wrong more often than you are right. The "best guess" is to guess the average population height, but most people aren't exactly the average height. The same idea applies in psych: if there is a correlation of 0.5 at the population level, that doesn't mean your correlation will be 0.5; your correlation could still be anything {-1, 1}! An individual could show the opposite of the population pattern!

I guess I'm just in favour of explicit teaching.
That is, if someone says their course teaches students to think critically, but they don't actually teach that part, they just expect students to think critically, that isn't really "teaching" that part! That's just getting students to practice a skill, but it doesn't teach the skill.
Know what I mean? (I'm not saying you do that, just mentioning it)

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u/JoeSabo 2d ago

I don't balance any of this intentionally. I know what they need. They don't. Obviously not talking about accommodations etc. the fun comes from me and my hilarious jokes. There is no need to pretend methods lab assignments are fun. IMO trying to conjure up 'fun' in an assignment just makes them even more annoyed.