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Beyond Standard Lectures
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“I think they were a great interactive way to get personally involved in the cognitivedifficulties we were learning about in class.”
● “CogLab was easy to do and interesting because it provided concrete demonstrations
of phenomena discussed in class.”
Although a majority of students liked the CogLabs, a number also indicated that we may
have assigned too many of them or that it was too difficult to initially set up their CogLab
accounts. Our experience is that the latter issue results from students failing to read and
follow the instructions carefully, so instructors need to be prepared for such concerns.
Kershaw’s Summer 2005 class (n = 50) rated the demonstrations used in class. Two of
their favorites were the Stroop (1935) effect and a demonstration of false memory (rating =
4.4/5 for each activity). Finally, students tend to think that PRS is an effective way to
engage with some of the course material. In fact, roughly 75% of students in Pellegrino’s
classes thought that we used PRS the right amount each class period and on the right
number of days in the semester.
Conclusions and Applications to Other Courses
Actively engaging students in the process of generating data and predicting and
interpreting results is an effective way to promote critical thinking about constructs that
are often otherwise abstract. Students can complete online CogLabs prior to class or
engage in in-class activities through demonstrations or the use of the personal response
units. Students then become more engaged with the course material by actually experi-
encing the cognitive phenomena they would otherwise only read or hear about. They
gain experience in scientific reasoning by making predictions and evaluating the possible
meaning of results.
In addition to the learning benefits gained by students via these activities, instructors
benefit as well. From an instructor’s perspective, the activities are generally easy to incorporate
into the normal flow of the class, especially once one has some experience doing so. Some
materials such as the Wadsworth CogLab system or PRS units can be bundled with text-
books. Other materials, such as the in-class demonstrations, take minimal resources. We
have used these activities in cognitive psychology classes ranging from 25 to 150 students.
In addition, activities such as these are easy to implement in other courses. For instance,
Wadsworth and other publishers now offer online laboratories in many disciplines. Materials
aside, we believe the critical thinking benefit of such activities is creating an environment
conducive for students to connect personal experience with data and theory and providing
them with the opportunity to discuss and reflect on their interconnections.
Analysis of Empirical Articles and Connection to Class Content
One activity we use in our cognition courses to promote critical thinking asks students to
analyze empirical journal articles and think about how they connect to course content.