Abstract
European Society for Psychology Learning and Teaching (ESPLAT)
By the time this editorial is published, we will have had the conference of the European Society for Psychology Learning and Teaching (ESPLAT) in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This will be the first conference of the newly founded society, a successor of the EuroPLAT Network, which had its last conference in Salzburg, Austria, in 2017. Maybe you have been a long-time attendee of ESPLAT and EuroPLAT conferences (e.g., in Stockholm, Edinburgh, or Vilnius) or you have just heard about the new society and have attended the ESPLAT conference for the first time. Anyway, we hope that you will all become members of ESPLAT, because our aim is to build a strong and growing community that is dedicated to the teaching and learning of psychology. The PLAT journal is the medium of scholarly communication of ESPLAT and beyond, and our goal is to develop the journal in terms of a larger number of submissions, higher citations rates, and greater impact factor. To achieve this, we have to make sure that PLAT is available at many institutions and for all interested persons. We will make an effort to investigate to what extent this is the case through a survey among ESPLAT conference attendees and ESPLAT members.
Farewell to Dana Dunn
Dana Dunn, a long-term Associate Editor of PLAT, is to leave the editorial team. Dana has informed us that he is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Congratulations, Dana! We are sure you will do your job there as brilliantly as you did for PLAT. Besides his good judgment regarding manuscripts, Dana has always lived up to his remarkable motto: “Better never than late.” Therefore, with him, a quick turn-around of manuscripts is guaranteed. However, if you do not hear from him soon, you might never do. This has never happened during his time at PLAT. We wish you all the best for your new position!
The Current Issue
The current issue of PLAT contains five research articles, three reports, and one book review. Moreover, you will find the abstracts of the current issues of Psychology Teaching Review and Teaching of Psychology.
The first article investigates the strongly discussed issue of learning styles. Wininger, Redifer, Norman, and Ryle provide a content analysis of 20 commonly used introductory textbooks in educational psychology and find that most of them cover learning styles. The analyzed textbooks differ in the extent to which they draw on empirical studies when discussing learning styles, as well as in their recommendations concerning matching learning styles and instructional methods.
Cummings and Sheeran investigated the effects of peer-assisted learning, going beyond prior studies by controlling for academic motivation and personality. The results of this study indicated that academic motivation, personality, and other control variables explained about half of the effects of peer-assisted study sessions on academic achievement. Moreover, effects of attendance on achievement were partly explained by personality.
In times of debates about the replicability of research results and a new public skepticism towards research, it is important to shed light on attitudes towards research. Howard and Michael examined the psychometric properties of the Attitudes toward Research Scale in graduate students. In prior samples, the instrument had been shown to have a five-factor structure with usefulness of research, research anxiety, positive feelings about research, relevancy of research to the students’ daily lives, and difficulty of research as factors. The authors did not find this structure in first-year graduate students and conclude that the inferences made from this measure may be less useful when studying graduate students’ attitudes.
Closely connected to attitudes towards research is the issue of misconceptions. In a quasi-experimental design, LaCaille, LaCaille, Damsgard, and Maslowski investigated the effectiveness of refuting mental health misconceptions in undergraduate abnormal psychology courses. They found that the myth-debunking intervention was more effective with regard to correcting misconceptions than usual class procedures.
Hillbrink and Jucks examined how students and early-career academics in psychology view research and teaching. They used an innovative method in that participants were asked to rate and comment on pictures representing images of teaching and research. Differences between students and early-career academics showed that the views of these groups are in line with the changed roles they take at university.
In the first report, Davis and Fromuth describe the articulation and assessment of goals in the development and use of a general psychology custom textbook devised by their psychology department. Results of an evaluation among students and faculty revealed higher satisfaction with the custom textbook as compared to a traditional text, as well as consistency between faculty and students in the perceived helpfulness of different components of the text.
Yalch, Vitale, and Ford examine the benefits of implementing student reviews of peers’ written work in an undergraduate psychology course. An evaluation showed that the more critical students were of their peers’ writing, the higher their grades were on their own writing. This effect held when controlling for grades on previous written assignments and the effect of feedback received from peers on their written work.
Smith and Capuzzi report on implementing a mindset intervention to reduce statistics anxiety. Comparisons between an experimental and a control group suggested that receiving the intervention resulted in students’ mindsets becoming more growth-oriented and that this was related to a decrease in anxiety and an increase in course grade.
Moreover, you will find a review by O’Siochru of the book Action research in learning and teaching: A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities by Lin Norton. The review comes to the conclusion that this book is an essential guide to pedagogical action research.
Please also pay attention to the abstracts from Psychology Teaching Review (PTR25(1)) and Teaching of Psychology (ToP46(2, 3)) that you will also find in this issue.
I hope you enjoy reading this issue of PLAT!