TEACHING PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS ALONGSIDE RESEARCH DESIGN: AN ACTIVE LEARNING EXERCISE USING A PSYCHOLOGICAL QUESTIONNAIRE (THE PESIS)

Active learning strategies encourage engagement in learning. We describe student involvement in a small active learning exercise, designed to increase understanding of research methods and terminologies and social prejudice in a health psychology context. Seventy-five first-year students were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a New Zealand university. After students had completed a psychological questionnaire (The PESIS) designed to identify prejudice, the tutor analysed the results and presented quantitative findings to the class for small-group discussion. Results of the questionnaire revealed some social prejudice against AIDS and homosexuality in the student-group, and the concepts of implicit and explicit prejudice was discussed in the tutorial. However, the main focus of the exercise was on the students engaging in a tutor-led discussion of research methods associated with using a questionnaire for a psychological investigation. The tutorial exercise provided a practical application for using a questionnaire for data-gathering, and provided a basis for discussion of research concepts such as: Statistical significance; interaction effects; trends; social desirability in responses; ability to generalise results; random assignment to groups; extraneous and confounding variables; and limitations of particular study designs. The present active learning exercise where participants completed a questionnaire and then discussed group results, enabled a spirited discussion of how various research methods and concepts themselves must be understood when interpreting research results. For similar studies in the future, pre- and post-testing of research methods would help to clarify efficacy of such an exercise.