Educational Psychology Course Research Articles

Calibration and Academic Performance in Students of Health Sciences

PurposeAccurate metacognitive control is an essential component of effective clinical reasoning, as the inability to accurately pass judgment over knowledge has been associated with greater diagnostic error than lack of knowledge or poor memory. As such, it is necessary for educators of students in health sciences to assess metacognition in addition to academic performance. Calibration is a quantitative measurement used to operationalize metacognitive control, as it indicates the relationship between perceived and actual performance. MethodThis study explored the relationship between local-level calibration and academic performance in 34 students of health sciences in an authentic, classroom setting. The class was designed to have five quizzes across the 15-week semester. Performance on each of the five quizzes was used to track academic performance of each student over time. ResultsStatistically significant correlations are reported between local-level calibration and performance on five quizzes. Local-level calibration scores accounted for 51-81% of the variance in quiz scores throughout the 15-week semester course. DiscussionThis study was able to generalize the previously reported relationship between calibration and academic performance as found in laboratory settings and educational psychology courses to students of the health sciences. These findings translate metacognitive research into the health sciences to further the theoretical framework for research in the area of clinical reasoning.

Differences of Effectiveness of Jigsaw Learning Methods in Heterogen and Homogen Group

Jigsaw is one kind of cooperative learning method. This method has been known as an effective method in schools either for junior or college students. This study aims to describe the differences of the effectivity of the Jigsaw method that a group formed based on gender, ability, ethnic and group formed as a homogenous group. The research method was experiment comparative. The subject of this study is a college student who enrolled in Educational Psychology courses. The result of this study is the effectivity of both groups formed in the jigsaw method has no significant difference. So, to conclude this research, teachers in schools should more concern in group dynamic than the component of groups.

Dundee MSc Educational Psychology Course Update

Dundee MSc Educational Psychology Course Update

A Different Ball Game: Physical Education Students' Experiences in Librarian-led Wikipedia Assignments

Wikipedia editing assignments in the classroom provide unique transformative learning experiences to students and educators alike. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In lieu of a traditional essay or research paper, professors are increasingly asking their students to edit Wikipedia articles. This active and collaborative pedagogical approach encourages the development of a host of student skills: information literacy, critical thinking, media literacy, collaboration, online communication, writing, and critical digital literacy skills.This study examines Kinesiology and Physical Education students' perceptions, attitudes, and experiences before and after completing a librarian-led Wikipedia assignment. Using modified pre- and post-surveys the authors surveyed 63 Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) students completing a librarian-led Wikipedia assignment in an Educational and Counselling Psychology course. While overall the experience was positive and met most student expectations, they are not committed to editing Wikipedia in the future, nor are they necessarily in favour of replacing the traditional research essay with Wikipedia editing assignments.

Knowledge Monitoring Calibration: Individual Differences in Sensitivity and Specificity as Predictors of Academic Achievement

Knowledge monitoring is an important metacognitive process, which can help students improve study habits and thereby increase academic performance. Which is more useful in predicting test performance: knowing what you know, or knowing what you do not know? Two distinct constructs of knowledge monitoring calibration, sensitivity and specificity, were used along with the more traditional Goodman-Kruskal gamma correlation to predict performance on tests in an undergraduate educational psychology course. The gamma correlation provides a measure of how good one is at judging both items one knows and items one does not. Measures of sensitivity and specificity distinguish between the two. Students in an undergraduate educational psychology course completed a 50-word knowledge monitoring assessment to measure sensitivity, specificity, and gamma. These measures were then correlated with test and final exam scores in the course. It was found that sensitivity, a measure of correctly identifying known items, was the most useful in predicting overall test scores as well as final exam scores. Specificity, on the other hand, had no significant impact on exam performance. Results suggest that sensitivity and specificity may be more meaningful measures of knowledge monitoring calibration when it comes to predicting academic achievement, as well as being better adapted for missing values in any one cell of the data. Further research is recommended to determine in what other situations the measures of sensitivity and specificity may be useful. Findings presented in this study can also be used to help guide attempts to improve student metacognition and strategies.

연구 및 교재 분석을 통한 교육심리 교과목의 내용 영역 탐색

본 연구는 교원양성기관의 교직 교과목 중 「교육심리」수업을 계획하고 실시함에 있어서 고려해야 할 교육심리학의 주요 내용 영역을 탐색하는 것이 주된 목적이다. 이를 위해서 최근 10년(2008년~2018년) 동안 교육심리학회지에 게재된 444편의 연구와 같은 기간 동안 국내에서 출간된 58권의 교재 내용 영역을 분석하였다. 본 연구에서 확인한 주요 연구결과를 살펴보면 다음과 같다. 첫째, 학습자(개인차, 발달, 동기), 학습, 학급관리, 평가와 관련된 내용은 교육심리 연구와 교재에서 차지하는 비중이 공통적으로 높게 나타났다. 따라서 이 영역은 앞으로도 지속적으로 교육심리 수업에서 비중있게 다루어야 할 것이다. 둘째, 발달 영역 중 진로발달과 발달적 차이, 개인차 영역 중 창의성, 다양한 학습자 영역 중 다문화 학생 및 감수성, 학습 영역 중 자기조절학습(사회인지주의), 학급관리 중 긍정심리와 관련된 내용은 현재 교육심리 교재에서는 다소 비중이 낮았다. 하지만 최근 연구가 많이 이루어지고 있는 분야이므로 앞으로 수업에서 더욱 비중 있게 다루어야 할 것이다. 마지막으로 수업이론이나 교사 영역, 다양한 학습자 중 장애와 관련한 내용은 최근 연구와 교재에서 다루는 비중이 적은 것으로 나타나 교육심리 수업에서 다소 비중을 줄이는 것을 검토해봐야 할 것이다. 이상의 결과를 토대로 다른 교직 교과목과 차별화되는 교육심리학의 고유한 내용 영역을 확인할 수 있었다.

Mangiare a scuola: un’indagine in alcune scuole italiane

The field research involved a survey in the contexts of school canteens, with the aim of identifying methods and good practices in school catering. 23 schools in the Marche region of Italy were involved in the survey, and the research reached 600 pupils, 81 teachers and 48 canteen operators. The research was designed and carried out by a group of 23 students from the course of Educational Psychology of the University of Macerata, with a survey methodology that saw a desk research on the Italian regulations dedicated to the school catering sector, the use of a structured observation checklist for canteens, the administration of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. The analysis of the data describes a fragmented framework in the organization of school canteens, which, from a regulatory point of view, respect the parameters and rules of school catering, from the point of view of the educational approach to food have different characteristics. The research seems to confirm the lack of a common approach to food education, affirmed by the Ministry of Education itself in a national research on school catering (MIUR, FoodEdu 2018), highlighting strengths and weaknesses on which to leverage on aim to pursue the goal of a programmed and widespread and high quality nutrition education in all schools in Italy. As an answer to the issues raised from the data harvesting, we propose a food education project called Edueat - promoted by the training company Laboratorio delle Idee S.r.l. and scientifically supervised by the University of Macerata. The project aims to promote food education through the use of the senses, play and skills development, within the framework of the major theoretical references of Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Strumenti digitali per l’apprendimento scolastico

Given the speed with which the modern world changes and digital tools become part of everyday life, even the teaching and learning of them must be introduced to the lower age – at primary school. But before developing the skills in the pupils, the teachers in the first place must know how to use digital tools, knowing how to use them in the teaching of subjects other than the computer science. Digital competence is then required not only for the business purpose, but more and more often we are faced with the need to know how to learn and improve our knowledge in the professional field through digital tools. Based on this analysis we formulated our research question: how prepared are the students of primary education in the digital environment? Could they think and write projects for children in the area of knowledge of the territory through digital tools? To help our students prepare and achieve this goal during the course of Educational Psychology with the students of the fourth year of Primary Educationat the University of Macerata, we have created the “Digital education and discovery of the territory” workshop, proposing to the students to use some innovative tools and thinking about how they could be included in the activity of primaryschools that concern the study of the territory they belong to (the city, the province, the region). The work has been dividedinto 3 phases. During the first phase, tools were presented that would be used (The application MyCicero developed in our Marche region, Maps of OpenStreetMaps and Vikidia) The second phase was both individual and collective work on the cognitive map that concerned the term “Promoting the territory”.The theme of promotion and knowledge of the territory it belongs to is part of the primary school curriculum and certainly help schildren to understand their roots and appreciate them. During the third phase the students had to think and write a project that they could help thepupils learn something about their own territory through the digital tools mentioned above.The digitalage or information era, as we understand it, is the historical phase characterized by the widespread diffusion of the various digital products and the whole series of social, economic and political changes that occurred with the advent of the digitization of most of the access to information. Today’s children are already born in the digital age and must be ready to use it also in learning that makes our work in the preparation of their future Teachers even more important.

Tapping the Sources of Self-Efficacy: Promoting Preservice Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy for Instructing English Language Learners

The primary objective of the current study was to examine the effects of an intervention to promote preservice teachers’ sense of efficacy for teaching English language learners (ELLs). Participants were undergraduates enrolled in either a “non-intervention” or “intervention” section of an educational psychology course. Results revealed that those receiving the invention had a higher sense of efficacy for instructing ELL students than those who did not, but that participants in both groups had a higher sense of efficacy for students in general than for ELL students specifically.

Comparing badges and learning goals in low- and high-stakes learning contexts

Digital badges (i.e., digital credentials for achievements) have been suggested as a useful and scalable implementation of gamification. Digital badges (hereafter “badges”) provide two potential supports for learning: (1) badges provide support for motivation by rewarding achievement and (2) badges provide implicit learning goals. The present paper describes two experiments in which we investigated whether badges can support self-regulated learning by comparing their impact on learning with students given explicit goals for student learning, a key factor in self-regulated learning. Specifically, we compared the effects of badges and goal setting in a low-stakes learning context (Experiment 1; online extra credit unit) and a high-stakes learning context (Experiment 2; introductory Educational Psychology courses). In these two quasi-experiments, participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: badge only, goal only, badge + goal, or control (i.e., no badge, no goal). Learning was measured by comparing performance on topics related to Turkish Culture (Experiment 1) or Educational Psychology (Experiment 2) at pre-test and post-test. Somewhat surprisingly, the results from both studies demonstrated no significant improvement in learning between groups. The discussion suggests that caution should be taken when incorporating badges in learning contexts and provides guidance on the conditions under which badges may be most effective for supporting learning.

Adaptability: An important capacity to cultivate among pre-service teachers in teacher education programmes

Teaching is characterised by constant change and occurs in a dynamic and unpredictable environment. Being able to adapt to meet the novel and changing situations that occur in these everchanging environments is an important capacity for thriving and effective teachers. This is known as adaptability, or the capacity of individuals to adjust their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in response to new, changing, or uncertain situations (Martin et al., 2012). Although a growing body of research has demonstrated the benefits of adaptability for teachers and students (e.g. Collie & Martin, 2017; Parsons & Vaughn, 2016), limited work has considered the role of adaptability among beginning teachers, and how this capacity can be fostered in pre-service education courses. The present article thus examines the nature of adaptability and proposes a range of strategies that can be employed to foster this capacity in the context of pre-service educational psychology courses.

Conversational functions for knowledge building communities: a coding scheme for online interactions

The aim of this study was to develop a coding scheme rooted in the Knowledge Building model, named Conversational Functions for Knowledge Building (CF4KB), to analyze students’ interactions in an online undergraduate course. In order to develop the coding scheme, we analyzed students discourse and identified the kinds of “Conversational Functions” students performed. Connecting these identified functions with Knowledge Building Model principles, we developed the coding scheme to analyze knowledge building [In the present article, we used “Knowledge Building” to indicate the theoretical model and “knowledge building” to refer to the activity of the community members.] activity. Applying the resulting coding scheme, two independent judges coded 186 messages posted into Knowledge Forum by 26 students (5 men and 21 women) attending the online course of Educational Psychology at University of Valle d’Aosta to develop the coding scheme. The inter-coder agreements obtained were 77.3 and 78.0%, with Cohen’s K = 0.68 and 0.66, respectively for Specific and Global Conversational Functions level. The theoretical implications and possible uses in different contexts for future inquiry of this instrument are discussed.

Teaching Educational Psychology to Develop Creative and Transformative Teachers

In recent years, there has been much discussion about the content, pedagogy, and purpose of educational psychology. Specifically these discussions have focused on identifying the essential components, concepts, and theories that should be associated with educational psychology courses as well as how to make educational psychology relevant to future teachers. While these issues are important, they are nonetheless difficult to address and are often influenced by the context of the school communities. We suggest educational psychology should help prepare teachers to be creative decision-makers in their classrooms and school communities. In other words, educational psychology should help future teachers adapt and function successfully in any school environment. This perspective highlights the artistic nature of teaching informed by Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence and Transformative Teaching. In this article, we present an overview of scholars' perspectives on educational psychology and share our experiences teaching educational psychology courses with a creative decision-making approach.

Teachers' Opinions and Recommendations on Educational Psychology Course: A Qualitative Study

This study aims at determining opinions and recommendations of teachers about educational psychology course. The study was carried out with qualitative research approach. In the study, interviews were conducted with 15 teachers. For data collection, the application form developed by researchers was applied to the participants, and collected data were analysed with content analysis. Results show that the teachers mostly hold the view that the course content is necessary in teaching process and useful in recognizing students. On the other hand, some participants reported that the course is inadequate in implementation. It is seen that the teachers mostly have positive views in this regard. The teachers made some suggestions about the course content such as some subjects in the content should be organized and content should be adapted to practice. In relation with the way of teaching of the lesson, the teachers pointed out a positive view as associating with everyday life and negative opinion as teaching methods and techniques and factors affecting the efficiency of the course. Regarding the way of teaching, their recommendations include effective use of teaching methods and techniques, placing students in the centre and efficient instructors.

Students’ Temporal Distributing of Learning Activities in Psychology Courses: Factors of Influence and Effects on the Metacognitive Learning Outcome

Studies demonstrate that students’ study behavior is frequently dysfunctional, because they tend to cram shortly before examinations. This behavior is antithetical to spaced learning and can impair academic achievement. We investigated the extent that the temporal distribution of learning activities (a) varies as a function of the organization of the course, (b) is subject to individual differences and (c) affects the metacognitive learning outcome. Participants of four lecture-like educational psychology courses ( N = 259) were presented with learning materials stored on the university’s online learning platform. New materials were published weekly and access to these materials was automatically registered. The students completed either a test at the end of the semester (in two end-term-test courses) or fulfilled written assignments throughout the semester (in two multiple-assignment courses) . Students in the multiple-assignment courses accessed the materials more continuously than students in the end-term-test courses. Cluster analyses in the end-term-test courses revealed students primarily accessing the materials late in the semester and students accessing the materials continuously throughout the semester. Continuous access was associated with more accurate metacognitive monitoring. The results are discussed in the context of the relation between metacognitive monitoring and the regulation of study behavior.

Taking an educational psychology course improves neuroscience literacy but does not reduce belief in neuromyths.

Educators are increasingly interested in applying neuroscience findings to improve educational practice. However, their understanding of the brain often lags behind their enthusiasm for the brain. We propose that educational psychology can serve as a bridge between basic research in neuroscience and psychology on one hand and educational practice on the other. We evaluated whether taking an educational psychology course is associated with increased neuroscience literacy and reduced belief in neuromyths in a sample of South Korean pre-service teachers. The results showed that taking an educational psychology course was associated with the increased neuroscience literacy, but there was no impact on belief in neuromyths. We consider the implications of these and other findings of the study for redesigning educational psychology courses and textbooks for improving neuroscience literacy.

Micro VS Macro Goal Framework in College

This quasi-experimental study focused on the research hypothesis that students’ individual achievement goals toward each instructional component predict their perceptions of classroom goals. A total of 173 college students from an introductory educational psychology course participated in this study. Elliot and Church’s [23] achievement goals questionnaire and Urdan’s [21] perception of classroom goals were administered at pre- and post-measures during one academic semester. Multiple regression analysis was employed to determine whether or not students’ individual achievement goals toward each instructional task predicted their perceptions of classroom goals. The results showed that participants’ achievement goals toward in-class activities were significantly associated with their perceptions of classroom goals.

Educational Exchange: Investigation of a Videoconference-Based Instructional Program for Educational Psychology Undergraduates and Fifth Graders

An innovative learning partnership took place between undergraduates in an educational psychology course and fifth graders at a local elementary school. The goals for the partnership were: (a) to use videoconferencing to provide educational psychology students with a window into a live classroom, thus allowing opportunities to see theories and principles in action; (b) to give fifth graders opportunities to experience videoconferencing, to practice presentation skills, and to observe a university environment; and (c) to create a model for a videoconference-based collaboration between a K-12 teacher and an educational psychology professor that could be replicated by others. Videoconferencing offers an affordable strategy for bridging theory and practice, as well as promoting collaborative learning communities between K-12 schools and universities.

The effectiveness of a learning strategies program for university students.

University lecturers often complain about their students’ lack of learning strategies, but not many universities in Spain offer specific courses in this area. Studies on their effectiveness are also rare. This study presents the results of a Learning Strategies Course implemented at the School of Teacher Training and Education, University of Oviedo, Spain. A quasi-experimental design was used with an experi-mental (n = 60) and a control group (n = 57) of students on the Educational Psychology course. A Spanish adaptation of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ): the CEAMR2 was used as a pre and post-test measure. Group A (EG) received training in learning strategies, while group B (CG) received no training. Post-test measures showed significant differences in five out of the ten learning strategies assessed: elaboration, organization, repetition, self-questioning and study space, and also an improvement in one out of the six motivational scales: control of learning beliefs. The results suggest that learning strategies courses with proven effectiveness should be offered to university students.

Undergraduate Students’ Preferences for Constructed Versus Multiple-Choice Assessment of Learning

Students (N = 161) in seven sections of an undergraduate educational psychology course rated ten performance-assessment options in collegiate courses. They rated in-class essay exams as their most preferred assessment and multiple-choice exams (in-class and out-of-class) as their least preferred. Also, student ratings of multiple papers and a term paper did not differ significantly from the rating for in-class essay exams. Overall, students preferred constructed forms of assessment over more objective assessment. With minor exceptions, student ratings of assessment preferences were generally consistent across gender and academic levels. In the main, student ratings of assessment options did not significantly correlate with exam performance in the course.