Sample Teaching Materials

You can find below sample teaching materials and activities that I use in several of the courses I have taught.

In lecture courses, I give frequent, brief exams every 3-5 weeks. Each exam consists of multiple-choice and/or short-answer (100- and 200-level courses) or essay (300- and 400-level) questions. Multiple-choice questions target material from both required readings (about 10% of exam materials) and lectures. These questions require students to recognize key take-aways from course materials, apply core concepts to new scenarios, and summarize main research findings. Short answer and essay questions require students to evaluate arguments, summarize research studies and their conclusions, and identify key concepts from stories or scenarios. Please see samples of exam questions below.

PSY 100 - Intro to Psychology sample exam questions:

1. A research team does not randomly select people to participate in their study on how advertisements change people’s eating habits. Instead, they recruit subjects from their community. What limitation does this lead to for their research study?

a. Their measure would not be objective and so would not be considered scientific

b. Their findings may only apply to people in their community

c. There is nothing wrong because most researchers do not use random selection

d. This introduces confounds, such as people’s age in each group

2. Based on course materials, which best describes why exposure to only women nurses and only men doctors is problematic for young children?

a. they recognize adults as authority figures, so they incorrectly infer that men would want them to be doctors and women would want them to be nurses

b. they are in the concrete operational stage of development, so they do not realize that a person is the same person regardless of how they are dressed

c. they are trying to form gender role schema, so this exposure leads them to accidentally conclude that doctors are men and nurses are women

d. it is not problematic because children do not focus on career paths until high school

PSY 152 - Science of learning sample exam questions:

1. On the Lumosity website, they have short videos of scientists in lab coats discussing different cognitive processes and how these processes are targeted in the Lumosity games. What type of reasoning error are they relying upon?

a. Claims from authority

b. Using anecdotes as evidence

c. Correlation does not equal causation

d. All of the above

2. Would having you all drink coffee before this science of learning exam increase students’ scores? Design an experiment that could test this question. Make sure you include all the necessary components of an experiment.

PSY 331 - Psychology of Learning sample exam questions: 

1. If a person’s task is to draw a 12‑inch line while blindfolded, which of the following types of feedback would probably produce the fastest learning?

a. being told “Correct” if an attempt is within 1 inch of the desired length

b. being told "Incorrect" if an attempt is more than 0.1 inches from the desired length

c. being told “Long” if the attempt is too long, and “Short” if the attempt is too short

d. being told the exact amount an attempt is long or short

2. Abigail and Thomas are roommates who are both scared of snakes. Their therapist suggests that to face their fear, they should get a pet snake so they can get used to snakes being near them. After about a month, Abigail is comfortable with snakes and can even take her pet out of the cage. However, Thomas' fear of snakes has increased and he now dreads even being in his house. In this situation, what could explain the fact that the same stimulus (getting a pet snake) led to habituation in Abigail but sensitization in Thomas? 

PSY 452 - Cognitive psychology sample exam questions: 

1. Claude recently experience a stroke that caused serious damage to his frontal lobe. He now has a difficult time communicating with his family. It take him a lot of time and effort to produce the words that he wants to say, causing him to get frustrated. Claude is experiencing _________.

a. Wernicke's aphasia

   b.  Broca's aphasia

   c. Primary progressive aphasia

   d. Global aphasia

2. Choose ONE of the three heuristics below that were proposed by different fields of psychology. Explain what the heuristic is. THEN describe how the field's general approach to understanding the mind is reflected in their perspectives specific to problem-solving.

1) Behaviorists - trial-and-error learning

2) Information-processing - means-end heuristic

3) Gestalt - problem representation

This is an in-class activity for my cognitive psychology lab course. It encourages students to start thinking about how they can answer questions they have using experiments and causal reasoning.

Before completing the activity, I give students an example of an experiment I could create to answer a real-world question I had (Can people tell the difference between DVDs and Blu-Rays) and then provide feedback to students about their ideas as they work through the activity.

In-Class Activity - Real-World Experiments

1.  What is a question/claim you have encountered in your life that could be tested in an experiment?

2. Explain how you would conduct the experiment (you can assume you have unlimited resources).

3. What is your IV and its levels? What is your DV?

4. Write a hypothesis on how your experiment should turn out if the claim is supported.

5. Assume that you find the evidence you need to support the claim. What further questions/issues would remain? Come up with at least 3.

I use this writing assignment in Introduction to Psychology to allow students to critically evaluate a published news article and view first-hand the errors that are made whereby we assume that correlation equals causation.