I think that I am able to relate to students well.  Students indicate that I am easy to approach and students often come to office hours to discuss difficulties.  I have good rapport with students, and I am often able to ask students’ advice about course design and content delivery.  Students almost universally appreciate some elements of the course design, such as online quizzes.  Other elements such as class discussion and activities are more mixed, with about an equal portions of students like class discussion and activities. Most students would like more lecture.  I am thinking about experimenting with more lectures next semester.

Some students have difficulty drawing meaning out of activities, even if I provide explicit explanations.  Other students find it difficult to participate in class discussions.  A few students found it difficult to ask questions that lead to deeper understanding of the material.  They, for the most part, were only able to contradict statements that I had made by making comments such as “ no it’s not” after statements made by me about course material. Those students had a difficult time accepting the research that supported the theory.  I tried to explain to this group of students that it is good to question research findings.  That type of critical thinking helps science develop, but blanket denial without any elaboration doesn’t help to further understanding.  I tried to help the students develop what they were trying to say, but the students were not able to further their argument.  I explained to the class that it was important to understand the standard theory before trying to dismiss it.

This group of students’ dismissive behavior was annoying the rest of the class.  I needed to do something to improve upon this situation.  I decided to ask the particular group of students to meet with me during office hours.  I found that the argumentative behavior was not based in critical thinking, but the students were angry with me for presenting a statistical technique that they did not have the background to understand.  That particular technique is necessary to understand one of the major modern theories of personality and is based on correlations, which should have been covered in Introduction to Psychology.  The students assured me that the technique was not covered in their Introductory Psychology course.  I gave the students individual lessons to help them understand the statistical technique.  That seemed to reduce their anger towards me.   I also explained to the students that I would not allow them to derail the class by their negative statements.  I told them that disagreeing with the research design or asking questions about the outcomes were welcome, but statements that did not lead to further learning were not.  I told them that I would be happy to discuss their concerns during office hours, but not during class time, because it was unfair to the other students who were interested in learning about personality theories.

One area that I am planning on improving is course information delivery.  In my current course, I use a set of slides that are very visual.  Some students have a difficult time to listen and distil information for recording in their notes.   In my course evaluations, students asked me to put more writing on the slides.  As a compromise between simply reading my slides and visual cueing, I decided to form my notes into an outline and to give students a skeleton version of my outline with headings and spaces to fill in.