APA Top 20 Principles Badges--New Program

For those of you not familiar, for several years, the American Psychological Association has had a series of principles that are most important in education. What is new is that the APA Center for Psychology in Schools and Education (CPSE) is recognizing schools that successfully promote the 20 principles with a "badging" program. The program allows schools to demonstrate programs that illustrate one or more domains of the Top 20 principles and then can "Badge" their website.



Schools apply online with a written statement and specific samples of evidence showing how their chosen “Top 20” Badge category and its respective set of principles are reflected in their classrooms school-wide. In order to assist applicants, examples of successful use of evidence are provided in the application. All complete submissions are evaluated by members of the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education, and in addition to a badge, participating schools receive written feedback from the coalition, including suggestions for improvement.

These "Top 20 Principles" can be found here and are in the graphic below.

The principles focus on several domains:
1) thinking and learning
2) motivation
3) social-emotional learning
4) classroom management
5) assessment

In short, this is an excellent way to bring psychology not just to your classes, but to your entire school. To check out the process and to learn more to convince your principals to participate, click here.

posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Share

Ethically Teaching Psychological Assessment

A while back I posted a blog post about a website that I came across that would be great for our personality units - a website of really cool, original TAT images. I was pumped, but received a message regarding the post from someone much-less-enthusiastic about the post as I was. (I have since deleted the post due the concerns raised.) 

Dr. Ian MacFarlane of Austin College agreed to help educate me (and you, I hope) on why using original TAT, Rorschach or questions from actual IQ tests can be a real ethical dilemma. He also offers some great suggestion on what we CAN do. Here's what he had to say:

Ethically Teaching Psychological Assessment

With so much information at our fingertips, we can easily get primary source material to enrich our classrooms. Showing students pictures of the actual shock machine from Milgram’s study or grainy footage of Watson with Little Albert helps bring concepts to life in a way lecturing cannot. There is one area of psychology, however, where we must practice restraint and actually avoid exposing students to original material: psychological assessment. There are numerous places online where you can find the entire set of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards or sample items from intelligence tests. Our natural instinct is to use this source material in our classrooms, but the problem is psychologists still actively use these assessments in clinical practice. Exposing our students to these stimuli in non-clinical settings can change their responses to these tests if they encounter them later. Thus we need to convey how the assessments work without showing students the exact stimuli used. I offer you a simple method for doing so.

When I teach projective assessment, I usually cover the Rorschach and the TAT. For an in-class activity I take an image I find online to use as an example and have my students write a response as if they were actually being assessed. For Rorschach cards, search “inkblot images” in Google Image search or your favorite image search engine. Since I pass the images out to students for them to refer to later with their notes, I make sure to use an image licensed for reuse via Creative Commons (another search option in Google Image). Here’s an example from Flickr user BradleyLeese and another by DeviantArt user OmniSentinel. Be wary, as a lot of the actual cards are posted all over the web, but you can check the images you find against Wikipedia to be sure it’s not one of the originals. If you want to go a step further, you can have students actually make inkblots of their own. Margaret Peot has a page explaining how to do this as well as several examples. The instructions for the test are to explain what you see in the image.

For the TAT demo, I make sure to search only black-and-white images, and while the real TAT uses drawings exclusively, I don’t think that is essential to understanding the test so I also use photos if I like them. Here you can be creative with search terms, but I like to have multiple people interacting. Here’s an example of a photo I found when I searched for “conversation” (courtesy Flickr user Das Fotoimaginarium), and here’s an example of an engraving in the public domain from 1878 by Ridgway I found when I searched for “arguing.” Searching for images with these types of terms vastly reduces the likelihood that you’ll pull an actual stimulus from the TAT. The instructions for the test are to describe what led up to the moment you are witnessing, what are the characters thinking and feeling, and how does the situation resolve itself?

Explaining the objective assessments, like the MMPI, is typically more straightforward, but it is still important to not use actual items from the assessment. A demo I like to use when I introduce the empirical keying method of the MMPI starts by asking students to raise their hands if they enjoy going to concerts. I inform those who raised their hands they just received a point on the mania scale of the MMPI. While the other students snicker, I inform them they received a point on the hypochondriasis scale. I ask them to make sense of that, and eventually we get into the process used to develop the MMPI. I tell them afterwards that I made up the question, but it still illustrates the process nicely and gets them to think about psychometrics and the importance of norm groups.

Using these simple methods will allow you to confidently simulate the experience of taking a projective assessment while protecting the integrity of these tests so they can continue to be used in clinical settings.

Thanks to Dr. MacFarlane for educating me (Sorry, again!) and for the great suggestions. Ian MacFarlane, PhD (Follow him on Twitter at @I_MacFarlane) is an assistant professor of psychology at Austin College in Sherman, TX. He teaches general psychology, research methods, and several clinical psychology courses.

---- Posted by Amy Ramponi 

Share

Grading: Making the Mundane Less...

When I was a small child, I used to like to play school. My favorite parts of the pretend school day were writing on the chalkboard and grading papers. While chalkboards have been replaced with whiteboards, the seemingly endless grading has not disappeared. In what ways can teachers make the mundane and endless task of grading less so?

I've discovered (maybe new to you, likely not...but I thought I'd share anyway) a few tricks to the trade that might make your grading tasks easier, or, if nothing else, might save an awful lot of paper and keep your desk a bit tidier.

Classmarker - this is a website in which you can house exams for your students, you can push out tests on the day of an exam electronically. It is quite slick, because the questions can be randomized as well as the options randomized, so it gets rid of many cheating possibilities. Students get instant feedback and the exams scores can be easily transferred to the grade book. I really like the paperless options and there's never any lost test sheets. A free Classmarker account give you 100 tests a month, with other pricing options starting at $20. With a switch in many's teaching philosophy to a "Growth Mindset" - this also makes retakes a breeze. No more looking for the copy of the test they want to retake from under the piles and piles on your desk.

The drawbacks: well, cost, for one. If you have many sections, 100 tests a month likely isn't gonna cut it. So you'd have to take the paid options. Another drawback I found was that many of my kids had a difficult time remembering passwords and keeping that straight. Despite directions to change it to their school password or to write it down, there were always a handful that couldn't recall their password and thus class time was spent working on that. Other drawbacks include the worry by some AP teachers that "AP tests aren't taken online so I don't think this works for me." I see both sides to that argument, but in the wise words of my colleague Brad, "Kids nowadays don't know how to fill in a bubble sheet on a standardized test? Ummm....no." Students may not like the option of an online test - it doesn't give them opportunities to cross off options like a paper-pencil test, which some kids like. Also, it doesn't allow for kids to skip questions and come back to them as easily as a paper-pencil version. A final drawback I found was that typing in all the exam questions (as I don't think it allows me to upload from the test bank I use for many questions) was time-consuming.

Socrative - I enjoy Socrative very much for short quizzes or formatives in my class. I love the spreadsheet of scores that gets sent to you right away. I love that you can put the explanation in to the questions so kids know what the right answer is right away if they get it wrong. I like that they can go through a quiz several times for repeated practice (if they so chose) and I like that it is paperless and easy to find on the site if they miss a quiz and they need to come in and make one up. (Again, not going into the files on a computer, printing it off, running to get the printed copy, and then having to hand grade it.) The drawbacks to Socrative are that they do have to have a device that hooks up to wifi or that you have to be 1:1, the fact that some kids like the paper-pencil option to cross off distractors. Socrative is FREE and in my honest opinion, glorious!

Zipgrade - (full disclosure, ZipGrade recently generously donated free subscriptions to the EPIC conference held at UWGB). Can I just say that I love this app? I have it downloaded right to my phone and it has completely gotten rid of the fact that I ever have to run upstairs to use the archaic scantron machine EVER again. Zipgrade is an app on my smart phone that allows me to scan student multiple choice papers and give them an instant score and instant feedback. The key is stored right in my phone so any time a kids needs to make up a test all I have to do is pull the key right up and there it is! (No more looking for the scantron key). It is also super helpful that I (or my kids) can scan their paper right when they finish a test and then start working on test corrections right away if they so choose. I have also seen a dramatic increase in kids staying after on the test day to ask questions on what they got wrong while everything is fresh in their head. Zipgrade saves the student's score right in the app on my phone for an easy transfer to my Infinite Campus grade book. It isn't totally paperless, as you have to print off the "bubble sheets" for students to mark their answers on. There are diagnostics that are great for analyzing your questions. Another benefit is that if a student looses their "bubble sheet" you have a scanned copy saved right in the app. A small drawback I have noticed is that when students use pencil sometimes the glare from the pencil lead's shineyness will cause my iPhone camera to "miss" the mark and mark it wrong, so I have to be careful to check kid's papers twice to make sure there aren't any lighting issues. Overall, I'm super happy with Zipgrade and its inclusion in my classroom. Another drawback is that it isn't free. The small price of $6.99 for a year is totally worth it, IMHO. 

Akindi - our school district has moved to using this site. Since I'd bought a year subscription to Zipgrade, I don't know too much about Akindi. I believe Akindi is very similar to ZipGrade. Akindi has free trials with benefits to its use including analytics, customizable scan sheets, and other benefits I am interested in hearing about from my colleagues. (They just started using this - so I'll check in with them soon.) Akindi is not free, and I had a difficult time finding out on their website just how much it is, exactly, a year. 

GradeCam (full disclosure, Gradecam donated free year memberships to the EPIC conference held at UWGB, as well.) I don't personally use this product, but after investigating the website it seems like many benefits to it, for sure! This product is a purchased product, but for a few dollars a month, it seems like they give you a lot of great tools to assess students. I really like that you can put standards in, and that there's an option to transfer to the gradebook and also export options. Gradecam offers free trials for teachers, so it certainly seems worth taking a look at their site and seeing if it is right for you and your classroom. Gradecam states on their website the following, additional, benefits: immediate personal feedback, sharing assessments with other teachers in real time, use of any web or smart phone camera, and easy links to state and common core standards. 

What other options are out there? What do you like to use for quick, painless assessments or for longer ones? What are the benefits and drawbacks to what you're using? Are any of you stuck with Scantrons? Email me if you want to share your experiences with any online or app grading systems at amyramponi@gmail.com

Here's to hoping you're spending your Sunday watching football with a crisp Oktoberfest (or warm apple cider for me), and NOT grading papers. 

- Posted by Amy Ramponi 

Share

Standards Based Grading Resources

This post may be of limited use/interest to many folks, but I just sent it to the AP Psych listserv, so I thought I'd post it over here too in case anyone is interested.

I started to get interested in researching assessment and grading practices because of a comment made by one of my psych students. After we finished going over a developmental psych test, the class took the day before, this student said "Hey, I think I know more about developmental psych now as a result of going over the test!" I mentally patted myself on the back, but then she said "And isn't our grade supposed to be the way you operationally define our learning?" Warning bells went off in my head, but I said yes, it was. Then she said "So shouldn't our grades improve?"

That student was kind of teasing me, but after that I got very interested in my grading practices (and ended up changing some of them). Below is a list of authors I like to read on this topic - if anyone else has favorites, add them in the comments?

- Ken O'Connor http://www.oconnorgrading.com/ - Lots of detail about "troubleshooting" grades. There is a danger that some of his writing can come across as "preachy" or unrealistic (esp. the A Repair Kit for Grading book) but definitely worth reading and thinking about.

- Thomas Guskey http://education.uky.edu/EDP/guskey - If anyone is talking about changing report cards ("Standard Based Reporting"), Guskey is the author to read.

- Sue Brookhart http://www.ascd.org/professional-development/oscb/faculty/Brookhart-S.aspx - I think she's writing the best stuff right now about formative assessment (descriptive feedback, etc.)

- AND finally, there is a thriving online conversation about standards based grading via Twitter and Blogs. I think much of these bloggers ideas are more accessible and more useful than the published pieces from the authors above. I love reading about the creative ways teachers are using the "spirit" of standards based grading in REAL classrooms. The Think Thank Thunk blog is the best place to start (but there are many others)
http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/?page_id=114

posted by Rob McEntarffer

Share

Poll Everywhere

This post comes to you from the Pacific Northwest! I (Rob) got to work with some FABULOUS teachers at the AP Psych Institute in Bellevue, WA, and we worked with an interesting website this morning: Poll Everywhere
http://www.polleverywhere.com/

This site allows you to post a multiple choice question for folks (students and/or teachers in a prof. development course, etc.) who can then text in a certain code and "vote" on one of the options. At our institute we used poll everywhere as part of a discussion about "Formative Diagnostic Items" - a formative assessment technique that helps teachers quickly gather data about student misconceptions.

(By the way: My participants are the BEST participants ever in the history of AP Psychology institutes. So there)

- posted by Rob McEntarffer

Share

Diagnostic Items, Formative Assessment, NCSS

I get to present a session at NCSS this Saturday about "Diagnostic Items in The Psychology Classroom". Its a formative assessment technique (written about by assessment guy Dylan Wiliam and psychology guy Stephen Chew) that involves single "big" multiple choice items. The items are designed to uncover student misconceptions about big, key ideas in psych. (see the presentation if you're interested in more detail and examples)

I'd love some suggestions for "big ideas": What are the big concepts in your classes that students HAVE to understand in order to move on? I'm thinking of things like control group, operational definitions, inferential stats, conformity/obediance, genetics/hereditability, etc. Please put suggestions for big ideas in the comments!

I'm going to ask the participants in this session whether I can share their diagnostic items with you all, so I hope to post an update after NCSS. Hope to see some of you there!

Share

MIT Open Courseware - Introduction to Psychology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT undergraduate and graduate course content. All course material is free and open to the public.

The OCW includes an Introduction to Psychology course from 2004 with Professor Jeremy Wolfe. While the site includes MP3 audio files of Professor Wolfe's lectures, lecture notes, required readings, and much more, the most interesting aspect of the site is the previous course midterms and final exams in the Study Materials section. Professor Wolfe has a unique form of assessment with each exam centered around a specific story. For example, the 2000 final exam is based on Harry Potter. For 2001, Professor Wolfe used The Lord of the Rings.

The Study Materials section can be found at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-00Fall-2004/StudyMaterials/index.htm. To find the course homepage go to http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-00Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm

Share