Creating a Learning Community: Developing Critical Thinking Skills in First Year Psychology Majors

Background: The poster illustrates the creation of a seven-credit cluster that included research skills, writing, and psychology to develop research and content competencies in first-year students majoring in psychology at a four-year institution. The faculty designed assignments that would build on each other and blend skills, knowledge, and critical thinking to allow students to understand the importance of connecting learning through the curriculum and reinforce content knowledge through multiple exposures and applications. The poster illustrates the planning, implementation, results, and lessons learned/challenges.

Description: Planning took a year by defining common skills students should have gained by the end of their first semester. Coordination of assignments was critical in ensuring success. The aim was to teach students how to research, write, and create an empirical research report and poster. A scaffolded approach was used to allow learning and applying concepts in different circumstances. For example, in the research skills course, the students learned to write an annotated bibliography, expanded in an annotated bibliography in the writing class, and elaborated in the psychology course. At each step, students received multiple feedback from the faculty. The project's evaluation included various formats: work assessment, discussions among the faculty, reflection papers, and overall improvement of the students during the semester.

Conclusion: Some of the challenges encountered by the faculty were unexpected. For example, due to COVID, the courses had to migrate to a virtual environment. Some issues were unforeseen; for instance, it took students a while to understand that the three classes were part of the cluster, resulting in many emails. Despite this, the faculty saw an increased level of knowledge during the semester. Comments from students reflected they supported this cluster approach and how beneficial it was to them. The faculty is reworking the project to correct the issues encountered, and the cluster will be re-offered in fall 2021.