Category Archives: My Updates

It’s been a while since I actually made a post on my website updating my academic life. Well, since the education and technology class has finished, that’s pretty much what I am back to. We’ll see if I can keep up.

Anyway, this summer it looks like I’ll be teaching two classes in the Psychology Department: Health Psychology and Intro to Research Methods again. I’m excited to develop a student-focused Health Psych class from the ground up. I am also excited to re-tool and revamp my research methods class from last year. I’m probably going to use a new book which I believe might be better and more approachable.

However, the best part of teaching research methods again is the ability to implement part of the education and technology final project. Take a look at the video my colleague, Molly Metz, and I made below (it’s intentionally silly):

So we can’t really implement the personalized adaptive learning platform in 6 weeks, but I can implement and integrate the ZAPS portion (or something like it) into the class in that time, just to make sure the students know what the class is about, as well as understanding the need for psychological science at such an early part of their college career. We will pretest attitudes and interests, move through the ZAPS process, finishing up with a small paper and a posttest of attitudes and the like, then compare the pretest and posttest for any changes. Hopefully there’s a publication in there somewhere (Teaching of Psychology seems like the appropriate place, no?). And more importantly, hopefully the new perspective in this type of course will lead to better prepared students in the upper-division classes and lab classes at UCSB. One can only hope that becomes truth.

My health psych class won’t be as technologically advanced, but I do hope to get the students interested in health psych by having them participate in a health behavior change assignment for the 6-week session. College students are full of bad habits, so maybe a few of them will continue to change their behavior after the course is completed. Showing them real studies with important health implications is also important–my goal is to only use the book as a support, not a complete resource for the course. I find this boring and predictable.

There is apparently lot’s of work to be done in the next couple of months, since both classes are the first session of summer school! And then a trip to Berlin for a conference! 2013 is one heckuva year!