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What is the purpose of a Psychology Today blog entry? I assume there are lots of answers - good, bad, and ugly - to this question, and here I would like to like to mention a specific answer that falls in the good category that I have stumbled on during the past semester: to teach psychology students about new findings in psychology. Maybe you readers who are teachers figured this out long before I did, but it nonetheless came as a revelation to me.
I teach a large (N > 250) course in Positive Psychology at the University of Michigan, and I am always trying to refine the course and what it asks of students. There are papers, assignments, in-class and out-of-class exercises, and the other usual suspects in a university course for senior majors. I assign a textbook and other readings. Deciding on the other readings is always a challenge. I have often relied on scientific journal articles, because it is important for students to understand how research findings are introduced to the discipline.
But often these journal articles are long, detailed, and - sorry colleagues - boring beyond belief. Mind you, my students have the ability to read, analyze, and extrapolate, but I don't not want them to get bogged down in these articles. And they often do.
So, while I have continued to assign research articles this semester, I have done so much more judiciously than in the past, privileging "classic" articles that have stood the test of time because they are well-written and interesting. And I have made up the slack with two or three Psychology Today blog entries per week. I do not assign the rants and raves. I do not assign the celebrity assassinations. I do not assign the blog entries that ooze sex. There are still plenty of excellent essays from which to choose, and in particular, I ask students to read those that describe in an accessible way a new study and its implications. I also provide the original citation, and I know that some number of my students actually read the original article. I suspect that the relevant blog entry helps them navigate the details.
Is this an effective teaching strategy? I think so. We just had our midterm exam, and I did an item analysis of the exam questions and found that those about the blog entries were likely to be answered correctly, overwhelmingly so in most cases - and much more so than questions about lecture material, the textbook, and scientific journal articles. I don't think this is because the questions I posed about the blog entries were simple. I think it was because the blog entries cut to the chase, and my exam questions (I can only hope) are about the chase.
My goal as a teacher is to have students do well on an exam, and asking students to read Psychology Today blog entries obviously serves this goal. These essays are terse, interesting, and practical. And what's wrong with that? I'd like to know.
