Creating Synergies
Did you find reading & discussing the literature to be helpful?
“Absolutely – it was great to become accustomed to the lit search process, and the articles were very interesting and really put our research in context. I even realized how difficult it may have been to implement some of the studies I read, now knowing the research process first-hand.”
(Research assistant)
From 2004 through 2007, I have been actively researching cognitive and developmental psychology as a graduate student at the University of Virginia. Though research has to be my main focus, I have worked on weaving teaching into my research, and research into my teaching.
Bringing the Lab Into the Classroom
The most straightforward way to bring research and teaching together, of course, is to discuss one’s research in class. Even when not teaching a class independently, I’ve found several ways to do this. In review sessions, I’ve been able to expand on recapitulations of the lecture by mentioning more details of the research with which I am familiar (be that through my own experiments or my literature review). One semester I also had the opportunity to give a short presentation in lecture on my research into children’s perception of language. When teaching my own discussion sections, of course, I had even more opportunities to discuss my work. Although I did not feel it was appropriate to hijack the entire course into my subspecialty, I did feel it enriched the students’ experience to intersperse some comments from an “insider” perspective. As such, I shared anecdotes about the realities of experiments with children and families, and again details beyond what their textbooks could cover, such as the controversy over certain results. Finally, even when teaching gifted middle-schoolers about psychology, I chose to focus intensely on the process behind the findings, and the experience of actually conducting research: by speaking about my own research, by each day bringing in other UVa researchers as guest speakers, and by each day discussing another step of the scientific method, so that by the end of the course students were presenting findings from experiments they themselves had chosen, conducted, and written up (see course plan).
Bringing the Classroom Into the Lab
In my child psychology laboratory, six to eight undergraduates work for course credit each semester. We have a general policy of involving them in all aspects of the research: discussing literature and interacting with children, for example, instead of just photocopying. I personally have been responsible for supervising 1-2 students in a semester, and have also been active in lab-wide initiatives. I have been asked to contribute to the revision of the lab manual, and to draft a “contract” for RAs (framing our goals and setting clear expectations). I also initiated and developed an evaluation we used mid-semester to check their satisfaction with the workload, training, degree of autonomy, etc. (see Survey for RAs). Finally, I created a wiki where graduate students (and undergraduates considering graduate school) could access information about journals in our field, life in academia, etc.
With my own students, I have taught experimental skills (training in data collection, ethics and experimental design), and broader academic skills (how to conduct literature searches, the lengthy process of publication, etc.). At all times I have stressed both the hows and the whys of our work: reading journal articles and meeting to discuss them, or talking through decisions on the next phase of our project. I have also strived to promote my students’ autonomy. They were the most productive team in the lab — calling the greatest number of families to schedule, and running the greatest number of participants – and they maintained high quality throughout, enough for us to not to see in the data any confounding experimenter effects (differences in how experimenters conducted sessions).
Next page: Investment in Teaching
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