Teaching and Learning Psychology in Times of COVID and Beyond: Special Issue of the ESPLAT Conference 2021

In September 2021, the second conference of the European Society for Psychology Learning and Teaching (ESPLAT) was meant to take place in Heidelberg, Germany. However, due to COVID-19, the conference was hosted online. Participants from all over the world presented and discussed the newest approaches and evidence along the conference's theme of “Teaching and Learning Psychology in Times of COVID and Beyond.”

ESPLAT 2021 conference broadly focused on how the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the teaching and learning of Psychology. Key themes included how online tools can be used to organize teaching during the pandemic, how psychology educators can help to debunk myths and identify illogical reasoning, and how our experiences during the pandemic will influence delivery of teaching in the future.

The Current Issue

The current issue contains four articles and four reports based on contributions from the ESPLAT conference 2021. Moreover, this issue contains the abstracts of recent articles published in Teaching of Psychology (ToP49(2)) and Psychology Teaching Review (PTR28(1)).

Refutation and Epistemic Change

Rosman and Kerwer addressed in their article mechanisms of how to foster students’ epistemic beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing. Conducting an experimental study, they showed that specifically reflection might be a promising strategy to address epistemic doubt (of students’ current beliefs) and in turn to induce epistemic change. Students should be provided with opportunities to reflect on their beliefs once they start to question them.

It is important to debunk misconceptions about psychology in preservice teachers. In her article, Tulis presents a one-term intervention study within an introductory psychology course. The results show that refutational texts reduced misconceptions compared to meaningful control learning tasks. This study reveals the importance and efficacy of early interventions in teacher education.

Student Wellbeing

COVID-19 and the associated rapid shift to online teaching posed various challenges to psychology students. In their article, Schauffel and colleagues aimed to identify the predictors of “technostress” related to different aspects of online learning. A range of issues, such as ICT competency, technical problems, workload, and coordination difficulties predicted technostress, and students’ need for autonomy partially mediated some of these associations.

In their report, Richmond and Cranney discuss the effectiveness of online resources aimed at promoting students’ self-management skills, and whether just-in-time prompts can promote students’ engagement with these resources. The authors highlight that some just-in-time prompts can increase students’ engagement, however, engagement decreases over the term.

In another report related to student wellbeing, Morris and Cranney describe the design, delivery, and student ratings of different psychological science of wellbeing units. The units focus on articulating and applying theoretical and experimental approaches to psychological issues related to self-management, academic success, and wellbeing. They compare a flipped classroom design with an online design. The results showed high overall satisfaction ratings regardless of mode of delivery.

Effective Online Teaching Methods

In response to COVID-19, Hakelind and Sundström introduce a digital OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) to assess the complex clinical skills of students undertaking a Clinical Psychology MSc programme. In their report, the authors assess the students’ and examiners’ perceptions of the digital clinical OSCE. Students and examiners rated the digital OSCE as realistic, valid, and an overall positive experience. However, students perceived the digital OSCE as stressful.

To address repeated critique, Friedrich and colleagues tested in their article whether gender fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of video lectures, using the “glottal stop” and the suffix “innen” in the German language. The findings show that gender fair language did not make video lectures significantly less comprehensible or impact the aesthetic appeal. The authors conclude that there is a need for further studies using different topics, samples of people, and languages, to explore the effects of gender fair language.

In their report, Schützler and Christ identified three groups of psychology students that might need special support while learning statistics: (1) Students with fear of statistics; (2) students whose school time was a long time ago; and (3) students who had previously failed the statistics exam. The authors gave these students the opportunity to participate in small, supervised online groups to discuss learning strategies, problems, and fears. When comparing these students with students who did not participate in any support group, the authors did not observe any specific effects on grades or attitudes. However, interest and activity in the groups were low.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue of PLAT! Please also pay attention to the abstracts from Teaching of Psychology and Psychology Teaching Review that you will find in this issue.

As a final note, we also would like to announce the next ESPLAT conference with the theme of ‘Learning and Teaching Psychology in a Changing World’ is already scheduled for the 14th to the 16th of June 2023. Make sure to come to Umeå in Sweden to visit the conference. Due to the hybrid conference format, you can also follow the conference contributions online.