Abstract
The Way Back to Teaching and Learning Face-to-Face
After online teaching prevailed during the last semesters, most students and instructors are keen on meeting face-to-face again. However, it will not be easy to get everybody back into class. Some students liked the new freedom that came along with online teaching. Others are happy to go back to some of their classes but would like to learn at home for others. Cannot the course material be provided via the internet and be available at all times? Cannot instructors provide videos or at least audio tracks along with their slides? Why is it necessary to come to this particular class? Such discussions will take place among students and instructors. Will instructors have good arguments for face-to-face teaching? Or will they as well prefer to stay online? It was one thing to get teaching online and it is another to get students back in class. I believe that psychology is in a very good position in this respect, because our students are interested in human interaction and the teaching of psychology is usually of high quality. The more we offer excellent learning opportunities face-to-face, the fewer discussions about sense and nonsense of class attendance we will have. Some new ideas of how to improve psychology teaching and learning might be found in this new issue of PLAT.
Change in Editorial Team
After many years as Associate Editor, Jörg Zumbach decided to said farewell. Jörg has done a lot for the development of the PLAT journal and the ESPLAT society. He hosted the EuroPLAT-reunion conference 2017 in Salzburg, where the European Society for Psychology Learning and Teaching (ESPLAT) was founded. As a member of the first Executive Committee, Jörg engaged in the many small and large steps that need to be taken to get a new scholarly society on its way. Without his initiative of bringing the PLAT network people together again, ESPLAT would probably not exist today. Thank you, Jörg, for all that you have done for the teaching and learning of psychology! As new members of our team of Associate Editors, we welcome Maria Tulis-Oswald from the University of Salzburg, Austria, and Hannah Hausmann from the University of California, USA. Along with the change in the team of Associate Editors, there is also change among the permanent reviewers represented in the Editorial Board. It is so important to have this group of international experts in psychology learning and teaching, who know the journal and its standards well and support authors in making the best of their work.
The Current Issue
The current issue of PLAT contains three research articles and three reports. Moreover, you will find the abstracts of the current issue of Teaching of Psychology.
The benefits of repeated testing for retrieval performance are among the best corroborated findings in learning psychology. Barenberg and Dutke investigated the effects of retrieval practice in an authentic educational context with high ecological validity. Results showed that the well-known testing effects could not be replicated under the field conditions in this classroom. The authors discuss the role of specific design and measurement features for observing this desirable effect.
An interesting question is how textbooks present psychological methods that are controversial. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a widely used method which is heavily discussed among experts. Bartels and Schoenrade find in their inspection of introductory psychology textbooks, that the controversy about the IAT's psychometric properties and other issues are largely ignored. The authors point at the implications of this practice.
Argyriou, Benamar und Nikolajeva describe an online learning format that was used under pandemic conditions to teach a cognitive psychology course. The authors were especially interested in the relative importance of different online blended learning activities for exam performance and found that participation in online quizzes was the strongest predictor.
Teaching statistics in psychology is always challenging. Sarafoglou, van der Heijden, Draws, Cornelisse, Wagenmakers and Marsman report on an effort of teaching statistics holistically, that is, by allowing students to work with real data and to answer concrete statistical questions. Students participated in a Bayesian research project on ordered binomial probabilities. They experienced the entire empirical cycle as well as open science practices. The authors express their belief that a research project is an ideal opportunity to integrate the theory and mathematics of Bayesian inference with hands-on experience.
Urizar und Miller present a curriculum for a health psychology course aiming to engage students and encourage the use of active learning strategies. To this end, students worked with health technologies such as biosensors, biofeedback, wearables and more. A small-scale evaluation showed that students were positive both about the teaching approach and what they had learned from it.
If exams are not only expected to show students’ theoretical learning, but also their practical performance, simulation-based methods can be used. Glatz, Bergbom and Edlund provide guidelines for implementing Objective and Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) in the clinical psychology training context.
Please also pay attention to the abstracts from Teaching of Psychology (ToP49(1)) that you will find in this issue.
I hope you enjoy reading this issue of PLAT!