R3 2.16 October 4, 2024 Transferable Skills, Engaged Students? Scaffolding, JiTT, and Success in a Required-But-Intimidating Course
Redesigning a cognitive psychology course to highlight skills students will use in the future may raise performance - especially for the students who need it most
This issue’s article touches on teaching in my own sub-discipline, cognitive psychology. While I find the study of cognitive processes endlessly fascinating– no surprise there – students tend to have a range of reactions to it. Some are as besotted as I am by the revelations about how we think, remember, and understand and the ingenious research techniques used to uncover those findings. Others see a lot of odd and arbitrary-seeming experimental paradigms, heaps of details with little way to figure out which are important and which aren’t, and a hefty dose of when-will-we-ever-use-this. This leads to a similarly broad range of student performance, up to the point where some students’ dreams of a career in psychology are imperiled all because of this one required course. Read on to learn how one team of instructors grappled with redesigning their cognitive psychology course to address these challenges, and what their findings say about relevance in teaching more generally.
In this issue, I also want to share a useful resource, a new book that I started reading last week en route from a keynote presentation: A guide to curriculum mapping: Creating a collaborative, transformative, and learner-centered curriculum by Jennifer Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams. From what I’ve seen so far, the volume offers a systematic approach to uncovering and organizing the most important objectives of courses (or other learning experiences), and then using that information to refine how different courses fit together in a program of study. This kind of program-level analysis isn’t something I consider myself an expert in, since in my own work I’ve mostly focused on the design of individual courses. But just a few chapters in, Harrison and Williams have already brought me up to speed on the basics of curriculum mapping, and given me lots of talking points about why this work is important. I’d recommend it for anyone who’s tasked with planning and strategizing in the academy, especially those who are dealing with accreditation and similar projects. I particularly appreciate how the authors incorporate learning theory in a down-to-earth, student-focused way, along with the detailed systems they offer for getting the most out of mapping.
The mapping concept is very big on transfer, meaning the process of getting students to acquire information and skills in one context and then use them in a new context. As I mention frequently in my books and talks for faculty, this is a lot harder to accomplish than it may appear. New things we learn start out highly bound up in whatever context we learned them in, and that new learning can seemingly evaporate when the context changes. Besides being a pitfall in teaching and learning, transfer also gets to the heart of preparing students for future success, whether in subsequent (and presumably more demanding) courses they take down the line, or in the work they’ll be doing after graduation. Lastly, transfer is yet another facet of the motivation theme that has cropped up a lot in this year’s R3 Newsletter. Students will naturally be more engaged in the hard work of learning when they can clearly see the links between today’s material and tomorrow’s application of that material, and so I think transfer is a promising avenue to follow as we seek to spark engagement.
Citation:
Miller, L. M., & Favelle, S. (2024). Emphasizing transferable skills in undergraduate cognitive psychology is associated with higher grades. Teaching of Psychology, 51(3), 291–297.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283221083867
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
This article reports on an extensive redesign of a foundational cognitive psychology course, which typically presents particular challenges due to the complexity of the material itself and lack of obvious connection to the careers and interests that psychology majors tend to gravitate toward. The course in question had a persistent fail rate of approximately 20% before the redesign. Changes to the course emphasized transferable skills through scaffolded assignments with reviews of key skills timed to align with these assignments, which all led up to a culminating APA-style research paper. Materials and instruction also highlighted points of connection between these skills and application within professional activities such as drafting grant proposals. These changes correlated with improvements to student performance, particularly for students who were not performing as well initially.
Research Questions:
- Does a teaching framework emphasizing the connection between the culminating assignment and professional applications, coupled with just-in-time review of skills needed to succeed on the assignment, improve outcomes?
- Does this framework improve outcomes for students on the lower end of the performance spectrum – i.e., those most at risk for failing the course overall?
Sample:
218 undergraduate students enrolled in an upper-division cognitive psychology course at an Australian university.
Method/Design:
Numerical and categorical grades were analyzed before and after the redesign. Comparisons were made between the course of interest and others in the same degree program during the same time period, to identify trends associated with the redesign specifically and distinguish those from other trends applying to student performance in general during that time period.
The redesign involved several key features and strategies relating to transferable skills:
- Scaffolding the culminating research paper so that students were progressively guided through different components of the project
- Reviewing key skills at the time they would be needed through refresher activities
- Emphasizing the value of communicating about a complex topic, and of using a standardized format, in various professional contexts
- Emphasizing other connections between material and possible future professional activities (e.g., for grant applications using a set format where deviations make a proposal ineligible for funding)
Key Findings:
There was a significant and substantial improvement in student grades associated with the redesign. Fewer students failed the course after the redesign, over and above the expected improvement brought about by higher average grades overall. This pattern suggests that students on the cusp of failing were disproportionately helped by the redesign.
Choice Quote from the Article:
In guidelines developed for psychology educators and scholars, Naufel et al. (2019) argue that psychology instructors can teach transferable skills by offering opportunities for application of skills implicitly through assessments as well as explicitly helping students to identify and reflect on the skills developed (Joy et al., 2015). Here, we use these guidelines in combination with aspects of problem-based learning (Hmelo- Silver, 2004; Koppietal.,2010)and the benefits of working with real scientific data (Ruuskanen et al., 2018) to develop a course delivery framework for improving academic outcomes and laying the foundations for transferable skills for students. An important component of our approach is the just-in-time teaching (JiTT) delivery of information to support complex learning and skill development (Van Merrienboer et al., 2003). Research has shown that JiTT information presentation leads to strong and efficient learning in tertiary education contexts (Hulshof & de Jong, 2006; Kester et al., 2004). We wish to test the idea that emphasizing real-world relevance, transferrable skills, and the development of those skills in an abstract and theory-heavy psychology course can lead to better academic outcomes.
Why it Matters:
As I mentioned at the top of today’s issue, I can certainly relate to the challenge of teaching the introductory cognitive psychology course, having done so myself on and off for thirty years (starting with leading recitation sessions as a graduate TA). There’s so much to appreciate about the field, but I also can understand how someone new to it would see it as dry and anything other than engaging. I can also see how this problem would be accentuated by a perceived disconnect between the material and the path that a student is envisioning after graduation. As the authors of the study mention, undergraduate study in psychology leads to an unusually diverse array of careers; I’d add that a large proportion of these are in hands-on, helping professions, which do seem completely unrelated to the studies of list recall, visual detection, abstract reasoning and the like that are standard fare in a cognitive psychology class.
All of that is pretty specific to teaching cognitive psychology, but I suspect that most disciplines and majors have a course that’s beset by the same set of problems: the perception that the material is abstract, too challenging, and utterly impractical for advancing toward the career skills that students actually want to develop.
And so, it’s encouraging to think that concentrating specifically on transfer can be a force not just for maximizing learning, but also motivation and engagement. I appreciated that the techniques they used in this article to accomplish this included some established and well-researched ones: scaffolding, with lower-stakes assignments building toward a higher-stakes one, and aligning the timing of review to when the skills are actually needed for assignments. This all goes well beyond simply telling students that the course content might relate to a future career, or offering examples of where the material might relate to a real-world situation.
There are also some interesting analysis techniques in the article, ones that others might be able to adapt to take a fine-grained look at student success in their own courses and fields. These include focusing on different time epochs to get a handle on changes due specifically to a given intervention, identifying impacts specifically on students who are on the brink of failing the course, and comparing trends over time across different courses to further establish that improvements were due to the redesign and not to other, more global factors affecting student performance.
Most Relevant For:
Faculty teaching foundational courses in psychology and other social sciences; instructional designers; faculty, staff, and leaders working on career readiness initiatives
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
It’s important to distinguish between this article’s systematic approach to transfer and simply making course content more crowd-pleasing or broadly relatable. I also want to respect the range of opinion surrounding career preparation within academic fields. Some educators resist tailoring course content to workplace readiness, especially if that workplace is not directly linked to academic study within the discipline. I agree with various critics that faculty shouldn’t be prodded to shape courses around vague notions of workplace preparation—particularly when they don’t have the interest or the substantial expertise that will let them do that effectively.
In my case, for example, I have zero experience or training in administering psychotherapy, so I would never try to contort my material or assignments to teach students how to do that. I might not shy away from connecting topics in memory to, say, recovery from psychological disorders, or helping students develop skills in analyzing empirical research that would serve them well in graduate study in a different specialization. But I would be mindful of the boundaries around my expertise and what I can realistically teach students to do given my own professional experience (which does not include ever having worked in a helping profession).
All that said, this article invites us to consider areas where student disengagement stems from a disconnect between a course and the reasons students pursue their degrees in the first place. These insights could spark valuable discussions among faculty about core career competencies and how they can be addressed across courses – a process that would contribute a lot to curriculum mapping as well as to refining degree plans and pedagogy in general.
One point that I wondered about while reading was how the scaffolded activities fit within the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) framework. While the activities were broken down and tied to the final assignment, I would have liked a bit more clarity on how much of the approach responded to student performance or requests for help—which are also elements of JiTT, as I understand it.
Additionally, it would be interesting to connect these techniques to more direct measures of engagement and motivation, in addition to performance. A last small point to keep in mind is that the data were mostly collected in the period right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency remote instruction. Student motivations or challenges may have shifted since then, and it’s worth considering how these interventions would work in today’s context; to their credit, though, the authors do discuss the issue and explain how they adapted the approaches while classes were online.
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Bransford, J. D., & Schwartz, D. L. (2001). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with multiple implications. Review of Research in Education, 24(AERA), 61–100. https://aaalab.stanford.edu/papers/Rethinking_transfer_a_simple_proposal_with_multiple_implications.pdf
Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains. American Psychologist, 53(4), 449–455. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066X.53.4.449
Harrison, J. M., & Williams, V. R. (2024). A guide to curriculum mapping: Creating a collaborative, transformative, and learner-centered curriculum. Routledge.
Little, J. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2015). Some learners abstract, others memorize examples: Implications for education. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 1(2), 158–169. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000031
Tripp, B., Cozzens, S., Hrycyk, C., Tanner, K. D., & Schinske, J. N. (2024). Content coverage as a persistent exclusionary practice: Investigating perspectives of health professionals on the influence of undergraduate coursework. CBE Life Sciences Education, 23(1), ar5. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.23-05-0074
Van Merrienboer, J. J., Kirschner, P. A., & Kester, L. (2003). Taking the load off a learner’s mind: Instructional design for complex learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 5-13.
File under: psychology; social sciences; transfer; career readiness; motivation; engagement