Adventures in Teaching: Concept Demonstration Final Project for Intro Psychology
Although there is much to change in my intro to psychology course I taught for the first time this semester, one thing I know I will keep next semester is the concept demonstration project that students did at the end of the semester.
For this project, students were told:
Your main objective in the concept demonstration is to demonstrate your knowledge of at least one psychological principle or concept you learned in class to your classmates in a fun, unique, engaging, and novel way and to show how that concept relates to the real world. The concept demonstration is an open assignment, and you are encouraged to think outside the box. The assignment is open in that you can demonstrate your concept in any way that you choose. Some suggestions include a video, game, demonstration, presentation, diorama, poster, research project, poems, illustrations, book, etc. However, I encourage you to explore other options that aren’t presented here!
(Concept Demonstration Project - Goal)
In the end, I was incredibly impressed with the quality of many of the concept demonstrations I received. Some of the highlights included:
- A video on conformity that was professionally made and very high quality.
- A presentation on a student's experiment with hypnotherapy to improve his pole vaulting success. Across 4 practice sessions, he used hypnotherapy with 2 of them and found it useful to avoid bailing out or running through his attempts.
- A poster on a student's experiment using positive reinforcement to help potty train her niece.
- Many thoughtful and creative posters on a variety of psychological concepts like sleep, motivation, growth mindset, and more.
- Illustrated children's books explaining concepts to children (e.g., sleep, Autism)
- Illustration of the nervous system (complete with audience interaction!) and various brain components (i.e., the brain and its lobes, neurons, brain stem); see image below.
Logistics of the Assignment
Students were given formal instructions to the assignment in mid-October after they had been exposed to some of the earlier topics. They had two sub-assignments due as part of the assignment: first, they had to let me know what the topic of their presentation was in early November and second, they had to let me know the delivery mode of their presentation in early December.
In the first section of the class, I had 6 pairs of students out of my 39; in the other, I had 3 pairs of students out of my 37. In the first section of the class, I had 9 students present in-person; in the other, I had 6.
I decided to have one day of in-person presentations (e.g., videos, presentations, demonstrations) and the other day as a gallery walk (e.g., everyone set up their demonstration project on a table or the wall that we all then walked around and viewed much like you would in a gallery). For the gallery walk, we rearranged the classroom with tables in a circle at the perimeter of the classroom and put all the chairs in the middle. We started off at one demonstration project and then rotated clockwise until we were back to where we started. To encourage active participation on everyone's part, I asked students to write down either one thing they learned or one thing they liked about the demonstration, and it had to be something no one else had written about yet. I then let them "vote" on their favorites by giving them three pennies (you could also use stickers) and telling them they can place them on any of the presentation(s) they liked best.
Grading Rubric
The original version of this assignment was much more open-ended and I have now revised it given some of the things I saw. For instance, I let students write essays and I will no longer accept that because they were not up to the high quality I saw from the other types of assignments. I also added an attendance requirement because I had many students not show up on their non-assigned day, which I did not feel was fair to other students. I also had a few students not show up to their assigned day; one let me know early and they presented on the opposite day, the other let me know late the night before and I didn't have a rule in place to deal with it.
Students were equally weighted on five criteria. Each of the criteria, and the wording for the highest rating, are shown below. Notes of what I saw in the projects are also discussed.
- Knowledge of the concept: shows a sophisticated understanding of the concept. Only 2 students had projects I was unclear what their concept was.
- Organization of the content: the entire demonstration was clear and organized; there is a clear and logical order to the information presented. Some presentations, posters, and especially essays were very disorganized and hard to follow.
- Delivery of demonstration: the delivery of the demonstration was of high quality and there is little need for improvement. Most delivered their presentations well. In the future, I may combine this with the organization criterion.
- Application to the real world: presenters made clear the application of their concept demonstration to the real world (e.g., your major, school, life, family, etc.). There were a few instances in which students just presented information but didn't make it absolutely clear how it related to the real world.
- Creativity and effort: thoughtfully and uniquely presented; clever at times; ample effort is displayed. Not surprisingly, there was a clear continuum of effort displayed; however, in one case I commented that it looked made last-minute and the student told me they had worked on it for a few days. It did not appear so, but this goes to show how difficult this criterion is to grade.
If you are interested in the assignment, I have attached the one-page instruction sheet below. If you use it, please comment below or email me with how the assignment went! If you made adjustments, I'd love to hear how those adjustments went, as well.