Teaching Materials

Open Educational Resources used in my teaching

Currently, all of my courses use OER textbooks and course material. Some I have created myself, some I have remixed (to varying degrees) and some I use as is.  All have Creative Commons licenses and are able to be reused in your classes!

Open Educational Resources that I have remixed or reused

Below, please find OER that I have used in my courses. Rarely do I use an OER text as is, I prefer to remix it! If you are looking for an OER text, I suggest searching in Open Textbook Library.

Innovative Assignments

Below, please find sample instructions for assignments from my courses. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you'd like an editable version. 

Developmental Psychology

This is a selection of the assignments used in my Developmental Psychology courses, which weave the ideas of culture and context throughout the entire course. 

• Intergenerational Learning Project This project allows students to choose from one of three options to interact with a different generation around the ideas of equity and learning. Through a grant from Ascend at Aspen Institute, student parents can receive tickets to a local museum or aquarium to complete this assignment with their children. 

• Research Deep Dives In these projects, students learn about researchers from historicaly marginalized groups including some of their personal life and how that may have affected the work they have done. 

• Babies BINGO In this assignment, students watch the 2010 documentary about the first year of life in 4 different cultures and find evidence of things listed on the BINGO card. 

• Social Cognition documentary In this assignment, students choose from a list of documentaries about historically marginalized people and analyze how implicit bias may develop against these people. They also learn about the IAT, including its limitations. 

Social Psychology

This is a selection of the assignments used in my Social Psychology course, which takes a thematic approach focusing on travel and tourism.

• Research Activity: Observe a Group In this activity, students observe a public space and try to Identify tourists v locals. Importantly, they are to explain how they label them, based on our course reading on non-verbal behavior. They also look for evidence of group dynamics including a leader within the group.

• Research Activity: Travel Influencers on Social Media In this activity, students examine the social media (or blog) account of a travel influencer and look for the aspects of persuasion that we cover in class. 

• Discussion: Is Hawaii more Individualistic or Collectivistic? In this discussion, students rate Hawai'i on a scale of 0 (completely collectivist) to 100 (completely Individualist), provide evidence for their rating, and then discuss each other's ratings. 

Research Methods

This is a selection of the assignments used in my Research Methods courses, which are all writing intensive.

• Discussion: Operational Definitions In this assignment, students develop operational definitions for happiness, Intelligence, and self-confidence. Then they meta-cognitively share how they developed their definitions and interact with their peers in the class.

• Research Critique In this assignment, students get experience reading an academic journal article (annotated by me) about a naturalistic observation study done on the beaches In Hawai'i. They then choose 4 of 5 questions focusing on the methods of the paper. 

• Photovoice & Leo Pa'i Ki'i  Students learn about Photovoice, a type of participatory action research method, and Leo Pa'i Ki'i (an Indigenous adaptation of Photovoice). 

• Evaluating Personality Tests  Students take several freely available personality tests, read about the controversy, and then evaluate the tests for themselves. 

Videos used in my courses

I have found It valuable to break up my course material with embedded videos. Please find some of my favorites below. You can find even more on the Videos page.