University System of Maryland: Maryland Course Redesign Initiative
Frostburg State University
Course Title: General Psychology
Contact: Megan Bradley
Frostburg State University (FSU) plans to redesign General Psychology, the first required course for psychology majors and also required for five other majors. In the General Education Program (GEP), this course is one of five that satisfies the social sciences requirement. Of these course options, General Psychology has the highest enrollment with approximately 67% of all students taking it. The average annual course enrollment is approximately 900 students with 50 students per section, and the (drop-failure-withdrawal (DWF) rate is 12%. On average, 12 sections are offered in the fall semester and six in the spring (occasionally a summer section is offered). This course is taught by both full-time faculty (50%) and adjuncts (50%).
The redesign of General Psychology will address several academic problems: staffing issues, course drift, redundancy of effort, and lack of active learning. First, fiscal constraints at the university have resulted in the department relying on an increasing number of adjuncts who may or may not receive proper guidance in course development. Additionally, in the past two years, the department has had to rely on master's level graduate students to teach the course as full instructors. Second, since General Psychology is not standardized, each instructor creates his or her own version of the course. Thus, multiple versions of General Psychology are taught by a variety of instructors at differing skill levels, resulting in "course drift." This drift may result in overall lower course quality. Third, instructor's use of time is inefficient and leaves little time to assist the student who may need extra help. Instructors spend a lot of time on redundant tasks, grading exams by hand and entering grades. Finally, the course’s lecture-based approach does not promote motivation, interest in course content, active learning, or account for different learning styles, which may contribute to the 12% DWF rate. It is the redesign team's goal to become more efficient and effective through the course redesign.
Using the Replacement Model, FSU will collapse three sections of 50 students into one section of 150 students and will reduce the number of in-class meetings by half. During the in-class meetings, interactive activities will be used for most of the period rather than lectures. In-class activities will be designed to promote active learning and to follow-up and coincide with course material for the week. Additionally, the in-class meetings will prepare the students for the next week's topic. For the remainder of the time, technology will be used for assessment and discussion of weekly topics. Via online assessment, students will receive immediate feedback on their performance and areas in need of improvement. Undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) will help with peer tutoring, discussions, other learning activities assigned online, and technology issues that arise.
The redesigned course will enhance quality in several ways. The redesign of General Psychology will improve the standardization of the course, which will help prevent course drift. Further, the redesign will enhance quality by providing more learner-learner interaction, instructor-learner interactions, and active learner-content interaction. With the use of time-saving online assessment, instructors will have more time to interact with students, either in-class or in the online environment. Using online discussion forums, students will be divided into small groups where they can interact with each other, the instructor or the ULAs. The use of class time for activities rather than merely lectures will promote active learning and collaboration on small group projects. These types of interaction have the potential to promote student satisfaction with instruction, which will lead to increased motivation, interest, cohesiveness, and learning. Additionally, the use of online assessment will provide immediate feedback to the students and direct them to supplementary materials. Instructors and ULAs will evaluate student progress and feedback aimed at providing guidance to students who may need extra help. Students will have greater engagement with psychology content. Using the online class time, students will be linked to interesting content that is discussed by experts in the field of psychology and applicable to their lives.
The psychology department will assess the impact of course redesign in spring 2008 by comparing two redesigned sections of 100 students with two traditional sections of 50 students each. A common end-of-course comprehensive multiple-choice exam will be the main tool used for assessing the effectiveness of instruction. The test will contain a representative sampling of questions for common chapters covered and contain three types of questions: knowledge, critical thinking, and applications questions. All questions on this exam will be different from those found on previous quizzes and tests. However, the form of questions will be similar to ones previously used in that they will have similar prompts for directing students to access their knowledge, to think critically about the material covered, and to apply their knowledge. The redesign team will investigate training students to improve their abilities to answer critical thinking and application questions using practice and test questions often involving simulation of everyday and professional applications of psychological knowledge and thinking. In addition to the common final exam, the DWF rates will be analyzed. The same techniques will be used following full implementation of the redesign by comparing learning outcomes in the fully redesigned course with those collected from the traditional format in spring 2008.
The redesign of the General Psychology course will produce cost savings in several ways. Fewer instructors will be needed to teach the course since the number of sections will be reduced by a third, from 18 to six requiring as few as one full-time faculty member (vs. nine) and three adjuncts (vs. nine) to teach the course. This change will allow full-time faculty to teach upper-level courses. The cost-per-student will be reduced from $89 to $32, a 64% decrease. Interested full-time faculty will contribute their expertise to the redesign of the course, standardizing it and enhancing the quality. With improved consistency, adjuncts will be able to teach the course without concern for course drift and will receive training to help them with the teaching process. Since the department is not staffed at full capacity, the cost savings from the redesigned course may be used to fund new full-time faculty.
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