(Cover image by Stocksnap on Pixabay)

by Brandon Whittington & Caitlyn Niebrugge

Caitlin Niebruegge is currently a junior at the University of Missouri in Columbia and is majoring in Psychological Sciences with an interest in clinical psychology. Her passion for all things psychological began during her senior year at Fox High School, where she took an AP course in the subject and got an introduction to the vast world of the human mind. She decided to start her academic journey at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. There, she was Phi Theta Kappa’s Vice President of Scholarship and Fellowship, earned a spot on the Dean’s list for multiple semesters, and graduated cum laude with her associate’s degree in psychology. Now, furthering her education at Mizzou (MIZ!), she is involved as a research assistant in the Family and Child Development Lab analyzing and correcting EEG data. Caitlin aspires to have her own clinical practice one day, diagnosing and treating patients of all ages and backgrounds. When she is not busy studying or analyzing data, she can be found hiking at Capen Park, picnicking at Stephens Lake, or grabbing a slice from Shakespeare’s with friends.

Dr. Brandon Whittington is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, MO.  He also serves as the faculty advisor for the Xi Zeta chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, the national honor society for two-year colleges and occasionally assists with data analysis alongside the college’s department of institutional research.  Brandon primarily teaches introductory psychology courses to first-year college students with a wide range of majors and also teaches educational psychology classes to teacher education students.

Prior to joining the faculty at Jefferson College in 2016, Brandon practiced as a school psychologist in public school districts in the St. Louis area for five years.  He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2015 and is a proud community college alumnus, as he graduated from Rend Lake College in 2001.  Brandon is passionate about the role community colleges play in higher education and works to demonstrate in his classes how psychological science can help students improve their learning, teaching, and work. Brandon resides in St. Louis with his wonderful wife, two German Shepherd dogs, one grumpy cat, and spends most of his spare time cooking or watching cooking shows on YouTube.

Background

Like many faculty members, my (Brandon) first year of teaching was filled with a host of embarrassing and mostly self-inflicted challenges.  I focused almost exclusively on detailed lectures, read from handouts, and ignored much of my training in educational psychology.  Fortunately, I channeled my frustration into the literature where I began a deep dive into Teaching of Psychology and other great resources, which eventually led me to the Learning Scientists blog.

With the help of so many brilliant scholars of teaching and learning, I began making changes to my pedagogy to integrate research-based strategies.  My first major change was to devote time to effective study strategies in class and share data with students from my own courses.  For example, I created optional practice tests for students to use to aid retrieval practice and found that students who used the practice tests scored more than one letter-grade above those who did not.  I also pulled data from Canvas that revealed students who implemented more spaced practice by completing practice questions more frequently throughout the week likewise obtained higher exam scores. Readers of this blog likely don’t need me to tell you that simply sharing this data with students did little to change their study habits or performance.  As noted by the Learning Scientists (1) and others (2, 3) it can be challenging to compel students to alter well-ingrained study habits and simply telling students what they should do more of is unlikely to promote effective change.

Over the last several years, I shifted my focus to model and practice effective study strategies for my students, again, based on effective practices from learning science (4, 5, 6). Classes often begin with me instructing students to take out a clean sheet of paper and write what they can remember from previous classes. Although I frequently use application-based multiple-choice questions via the PollEverywhere app, a recent study (7) inspired me to sprinkle in more open-ended questions. I no longer have students complete chapter quizzes in Canvas, but rather “daily retrieval practice” with only a few questions assigned at the end of each class to promote more spaced retrieval. Students also know that I will frequently ask them to generate their own examples of concepts from the book, answer how and why questions, and create drawings, charts, and infographics.  These are just a handful of changes I made over the years and despite my best efforts, many of my students still do not space out their practice.  A review of assignments in Canvas still indicates a burst of activity in the last hour before they are due! 

A Spaced Practice Challenge

During the previous academic year, I had an exciting opportunity to take over as faculty advisor of Jefferson College’s chapter of Phi Theta Kappa (PTK), the national honor society of community colleges. We are required to complete a service project on our campus each year and when we began exploring ideas, I immediately thought of a campaign to promote effective study strategies across campus.  Students were receptive to this idea and I reached out to Cindy and she agreed to consult with us on our project.  We decided to focus the project on spaced practice, as using the other effective strategies will likely have minimal impact if students only cram immediately before exams.  Cindy came to campus to share the research on spaced practice as PTK students finalized plans for a “spaced practice challenge.”.

After a great deal of thought and conversation, PTK decided to conduct a challenge where students were required to log two hour-long study sessions a week for the final three weeks of classes to successfully complete the challenge. Students logged study sessions via a Google form overseen by PTK. We offered multiple incentives to encourage student participation in the challenge such as extra credit from select professors, as well as prizes for the top contributors including ear buds, stuffed animals (Squishmallows specifically), college apparel, and more. Students were also able to log multiple study sessions for different classes if they so chose in order to increase their chances of earning a prize. Sixty-five students participated in the project and logged 316 study sessions over the three-week period.  Among these students, 21 successfully completed the challenge, logging two study sessions per week.  Three rock star students completed the challenge for two different classes.

A Student’s Perspective

From a student’s perspective (Caitlyn), it is honestly not very surprising that only about 30% of students who originally participated in the challenge followed through to the very end. In fact, I would say that is actually an impressive number. As a self-admitted procrastinator and poor studier, like many of my peers, I have found that I am personally more likely to study if I am intrinsically motivated (i.e. I am genuinely interested in the subject, I want a better grade in the class, etc.) or have otherwise made studying a habit for myself. In this particular project, we have inherently targeted a demographic of students who are neither intrinsically motivated nor have likely made studying a habit given that we provided rewards to encourage their participation. Therefore, it is not necessarily a shock that so few students lasted through all three weeks. I obviously can’t speak for every student who participated, but I would guess students may have thought it wasn’t worth their time to follow through the entire challenge. Studying can be very difficult and time-consuming, and some students might have eventually come to the idea that cramming would get them the same results in a shorter amount of time with less effort, so they stopped participating. This was also a project completely based on the remote contribution of participants. We might have found more success in student completion through in-person study sessions on campus, or something else that would make the project more community-based. Although, one PTK student attempted to form study groups for the project in his Sociology class and despite initial interest conveyed by his classmates, zero students signed up for potential group study sessions.

Moving Forward

Our project highlights many of the challenges in promoting change in student study habits; in particular, it demonstrates the difficulty motivating students to implement spaced practice and avoid procrastination.  Moving forward, we plan to refine our project to collect outcome data to see if students who complete a similar project see benefits in their performance.  We are also interested in integrating retrieval practice into the challenge and provide students with more specific retrieval-based tasks during study sessions.  Finally, we are interested in what factors predict student participation in a challenge including previous grades, motivation, and social media use.  If results are consistent with my own previous extra credit projects, students who are more likely to participate have higher course grades than those who choose not to.  If any readers of the blog have suggestions or are interested in collaborating on a similar project in the future, please reach out.  We would love to hear from you!

References:

(1) Kaminske, A. N. (2019). Can Students Change Their Study Habits? The Learning Scientists. https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/8/1-1?rq=change

(2) Balch, W. R. (2001). Study tips: How helpful do introductory psychology students find them? Teaching of Psychology, 28(4), 272-274.

(3) Oreopoulus, P., & Petronijevic, U. (2019). The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging and What We Can Learn From It. EdWorkingPaper: 19-102. Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai19-109.

(4) Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

(5) Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2015). Practice tests, spaced practice, and successive relearning: Tips for classroom use and for guiding students’ learning. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(1), 72–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000024

(6) Brown-Kramer, C. R. (2021). Improving Students’ Study Habits and Course Performance With a “Learning How to Learn” Assignment. Teaching of Psychology, 48(1), 48-54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628320959926

(7) Boysen, G. A., & Osgood, P. N. (2024). Test Format, Learning Confidence, and Perceptions of Teaching Effectiveness. Teaching of Psychology. Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283231226187