The Docsplainer

Image: No Leaf Left Behind, Guilford College Magazine (2022, October 9) ©️Guilford Communications.

When I teach Introduction to General Psychology, I’m not just teaching the parts of the brain. Or the disorders. Or even just sharing my clinical experience. I (along with other people teaching Intro) also teach freshmen (and even high-school students taking their first college courses for credit) how to take a class. Any class, not just mine. And getting started on the right foot is half the battle.

Almost all professors teaching intro-level courses do this to some degree or another, but psychologists are uniquely positioned, precisely because we study learning, to do this.

To be sure, there are units in this one-semester foundation course specifically on learning and memory, but we actually start teaching how to learn on the first day. It’s a goal for professors of psychology all across the nation (Gurung & Neufeld, 2022). We start with using Drop/Add week more to set students up for success than to actually start delivering content.

I walk my students through this step by step, but if you are taking any AP course in high school or a college class, you can also make sure you:

1. Familiarize yourself with the course before you start. What are its stated purpose and goals? If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know what what direction to set off in, never mind whether you are making any progress?
2. Make sure you know how to navigate the learning management system (e.g., Canvas, Google, or D2L) if there’s any on-line component to the course at all. At a minimum, know how to check your grades and read your feedback, how to keep track of due dates, and how to communicate with your instructor. Set up your notifications. Do the tutorials provided by the company and/or your school.
3. For heaven’s sake, create a study schedule that takes into account not only classroom hours but when you will study for each class (7.5h total per 3-hour course each week!) and when you will live your life. Daily routines have to be incorporated if your study schedule is going to be sustainable or survivable.
4. Get on board with the chat your instructor provides. Set your notifications so that if anything important pops up in your messaging or email apps right away.
5. Be thoroughly conversant with the syllabus. A good one tells you everything you need to know to start out on the right foot: What you’ll do, how you’ll be graded, when all this will happen, how to get help if you need it… This is where you figure all that out, so don’t skimp on it. Bookmark the important stuff so you can find it again later.
6. Introduce yourself and meet everybody else. Again, don’t skimp on this. Your professor and peers are probably the most important resources in the whole course, and if you don’t know them, you can’t benefit from that–or be of benefit to anyone else. The things your prof shares here will give you important insights into how they decide what’s important, for one thing. And if we don’t know you, we can’t teach you as well, so bring your whole self to the class at the jump. Belongingness is positively associated with success and happiness (Cohen, 2023): Set yourself up for a win here.
7. Check out the textbook, especially being sure you actually have access: Students can put off starting the reading only to find out with an exam looming on the horizon that they don’t even have the darn thing. Read the introductory material, then look over the chapter names and major headers in it to see if it covers anything you’re interested in, because you can still switch courses or sections if it looks awful. Again, get an idea of where you’re going before you start. Having an overview gives your memory places to slot in facts, making them stickier. If you need the text reader, be sure it works, and that you can stand it (I once had one with a reader so robotic it made me want to put my fist through the wall. You don’t want to spend an entire semester in a state of simmering rage.)
8. Beyond organizing your time, think about how you’re going to organize projects and materials. Do you know what kind of organizer/planner you’re going to use? Do you have a note-taking app already up and running, or a notebook system and notebooks? (Your school likely provides these free via Google or Microsoft.) If you’re already into project planners, all to the good. If not, A Kan-ban Board and a timer will save you, especially when you have projects and papers going in five or even six classes at once!
9. Think about goals: What would you like to get from the course? If you go into a class with this sort of thing in mind, it provides infinitely better and more sustainable motivation than simply checking off a box on your graduation requirements list or even shooting for a certain grade. It’s called intrinsic motivation and if you can find one, you’ll have a heckuva lot more fun, get a lot more out of it, and, weirdly, you’ll find that the grade will take care of itself if you quit worrying about it and just focus on what you can learn.
10. Mind your ethics. Set expectations for ethical, professional behavior. What are your aspirations? Your lines in the sand? Who is it that you want to be, now and tomorrow? This will save you having to re-decide every crunch-time and reduce the risk that you will take shortcuts or behave badly under pressure. Study not only your student code of conduct but also your future profession’s ethics: Most fields expect you to have been behaving ethically all along, which means you need to be prepared to start now. Know, for example, whether you are expected to report cheating should you become aware of it.

My students have (anonymously) contributed other, more general bits of advice to a virtual bulletin board we call The Wisdom Wall. You can check it out yourself here.

Good luck to you! The start of a semester is always an exciting time!

And if you have any further questions or suggestions of tips to add, drop ’em here.

Doc

---

References

Cohen, G. L. (2023). Belonging: The science of creating connection and bridging divides. W.W. Norton.

Gurung, R.A.R. & Neufeld, G. (Eds.). (2022). Transforming introductory psychology: Expert advice on teacher training, course design, and student success. American Psychological Association.

If this was helpful in any way, please…