What Do Students Remember About Introductory Psychology, Years

What Do Students Remember About Introductory Psychology,

Years Later?

Bridgette Martin Hard

and Joshua M. Lovett

Duke University

Shannon T. Brady

Wake Forest University

A course in introductory psychology (Intro Psych) has potential to cultivate valuable

knowledge and skills, especially for ﬁrst-year students. The present research is a ﬁrst

step at understanding this potential by surveying college seniors who took Intro Psych

during their ﬁrst year. We aimed to discover students’ perspectives on what they

learned, a sense of how much they actually retained, and whether students’ course

experiences predicted their academic behaviors as seniors. When asked what they

learned from the course that helped them in other courses and in life, both majors and

nonmajors described how Intro Psych shaped their study skills, knowledge, and

perspectives on the social world. In a retest of items from their ﬁrst midterm, students

showed high performance (70% correct) compared to previous studies, with psychol-

ogy students (majors and minors) showing better performance than nonpsychology

students (81% vs. 69%), d ⫽ .74. Finally, we found that students’ performance on a

multiphase term project in Intro Psych predicted their self-reported project management

skills as seniors (r ⫽ .32, p ⬍ .001). Students’ enjoyment of the course, measured by

their evaluations of the instructors, predicted self-reported project management skills

(r(148) ⫽ .294, p ⬍ .001) and also later study skills (r(148) ⫽ .266, p ⬍ .001).

Together, these ﬁndings support the importance of Intro Psych and highlight the need

to further clarify and expand our knowledge of its long-term impact.

Keywords: Intro Psych, knowledge retention, long-term outcomes

Introductory psychology (hereafter Intro

Psych) is the gateway course to the discipline of

psychology, introducing millions of college stu-

dents each year to a ﬁeld that tackles fundamen-

tal questions about human behavior and expe-

rience using scientiﬁc methods. Due to both its

reach and its content, Intro Psych is poised to

make a lasting impact on students’ education,

and potentially their lives. But what do students

learn from Intro Psych? What, if anything, lin-

gers after the ﬁnal exam: terms and deﬁnitions,

skills, and/or new perspectives on the world?

The American Psychological Association

(2014) has developed guidelines for Intro Psych

that suggest what students should learn (Gurung et

al., 2016). These guidelines recommend that Intro

Psych courses be designed on a foundation of

scientiﬁc methods, cover content representing ﬁve

major psychological domains (biological, cogni-

tive, developmental, social and personality, and

mental and physical health), and incorporate spe-

ciﬁc cross-cutting themes that include, among oth-

ers, the application of psychology to everyday life

and real-world situations. Accordingly, students

should walk away from Intro Psych with en-

hanced scientiﬁc literacy, foundational knowledge

representing the breadth of psychology, and the

ability to apply this knowledge to their lives. Oth-

ers have recommended that the course should also

develop essential skills, such as interpersonal and

This article was published Online First January 10, 2019.

Bridgette Martin Hard and Joshua M. Lovett, Department

of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University; Shan-

non T. Brady, Department of Psychology, Wake Forest

University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-

dressed to Bridgette Martin Hard, Department of Psychol-

ogy and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC

27708. E-mail: [email protected]

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This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology

2332-2101/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000136

critical thinking skills (Landrum, 2017; Strohmetz

et al., 2015).

Scholars clearly have high expectations for

the big ideas and skills that students should

develop in Intro Psych. In the present study, we

sought to understand the long-term inﬂuence of

Intro Psych by surveying senior undergraduates

who completed an Intro Psych course in their

ﬁrst year of college. In the sections that follow,

we ﬁrst describe why Intro Psych has the po-

tential to be such an inﬂuential course, particu-

larly for ﬁrst-year students. Next, we describe

what we know, and do not, about what students

gain from the course. Finally, we present our

empirical approach, which examined what stu-

dents think they learned from Intro Psych, a

sense of what they actually retained, and

whether their experiences in the course as ﬁrst-

years predicted their academic behaviors as se-

niors.

The Signiﬁcance of Intro Psych

Intro Psych is the second most popular un-

dergraduate course in the United States (Lan-

drum & Gurung, 2013). Its popularity extends

to high schools: Nearly one in three high school

students take a psychology course by the time

they graduate (Nord et al., 2011). The reach of

the course is only expected to increase, given

the projected growth in employment for psy-

chology-related professions (nearly 20% by

2024; Clay, 2017) and a rising emphasis on

psychology for students going into medicine

(Mitchell, Lewis, Satterﬁeld, & Hong, 2016).

Not only is Intro Psych popular, but it has the

potential to powerfully inﬂuence the millions of

students who take it. The course imparts content

that is relevant both to students’ developing

knowledge about themselves and others and to a

wide range of other disciplines. As a hub sci-

ence (Cacioppo, 2007), psychology is deeply

interconnected with other major sciences, such

as economics, education, and medicine. Intro

Psych has the potential for great inﬂuence be-

cause, as a gateway course, it disproportionately

serves college students in their ﬁrst year, argued

to be a “sensitive” period of development (e.g.,

Blakemore & Mills, 2014; Brady, Hard, &

Gross, 2018). For many students, the ﬁrst year

of college can be particularly challenging: Stu-

dents must adjust to a new, demanding environ-

ment in which they do not entirely know what to

expect. These features of the ﬁrst-year experi-

ence mean that a student’s trajectory can be

shaped more dramatically during this time than

in later years of college. For example, social–

psychological interventions aimed at ﬁrst-year

students, such as those targeting belonging, can

have lasting beneﬁts, improving students’ aca-

demic performance and well-being years later

(Stephens, Townsend, Hamedani, Destin, &

Manzo, 2015; Walton & Cohen, 2007). Relat-

edly, ﬁrst-year experience courses (e.g., “ﬁrst-

year seminars”) are associated with students’

ﬁrst-year GPA and retention in college (see

Permzadian & Credé, 2016, for a review), illus-

trating the potential for courses taken early in

college to have a lasting impact. Thus, like any

introductory course, Intro Psych has the poten-

tial to teach students foundational skills for later

coursework and shape their impressions of what

college is like. Intro Psych may even be an ideal

course to carry this hefty responsibility, given

that its content is directly relevant to academic

success (e.g., memory and learning), interper-

sonal success (e.g., social inﬂuence and cogni-

tion), and well-being (e.g., emotions, stress, and

mental health).

Current Understanding of Intro Psych’s

Impact on Students

And yet, we know little about whether and how

Intro Psych beneﬁts students in the long term,

especially for those who take the course in their

ﬁrst year of college. The existing research primar-

ily focuses on students’ acquisition of speciﬁc

content knowledge and suggests that lasting ef-

fects are less robust than instructors hope (see

Gurung & Hackathorn, 2018, for a review). While

students are more likely to remember concepts

and principles that were introduced with vivid,

novel instructional techniques, such as in-class

demonstrations (VanderStoep, Fagerlin, & Feen-

stra, 2000), both classic and recent research indi-

cates that students quickly forget course content

(Eurich, 1934; Greene, 1931; Gustav, 1969; Her-

man, 2010; Landrum & Gurung, 2013). For ex-

ample, in one study (Landrum & Gurung, 2013),

students performed with about 56% accuracy on a

comprehensive test of representative concepts

from their Intro Psych course, taken just two years

earlier. Even psychology majors enrolled in a cap-

stone course performed at a “D” level (63%) on

the test.

62 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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Assessing how much content students retain

from Intro Psych is important, but so too is

assessing the broader skills and perspectives

that students may gain. Beyond speciﬁc facts

and deﬁnitions, what do students learn and take

with them, years after the course has ended? An

ideal way to assess the long-term impact of

taking Intro Psych in one’s ﬁrst year of college

would be to randomly assign students to take

the course in their ﬁrst year, perhaps through a

lottery approach, and then to assess their knowl-

edge and skills at various points during college

compared to waitlisted students who may or

may not take the course in a later year. Such an

effort would be most feasible at an institution

where Intro Psych is oversubscribed, and would

be strengthened with standardized assessments

of the knowledge and skills the course is in-

tended to teach. Researchers could examine

how experiences in the course predict perfor-

mance on those assessments both in the short

and long term. The American Psychological

Association is working to create standard as-

sessments of this nature (American Psycholog-

ical Association, 2017), but results using them

are likely years away. What can we learn in the

meantime using available research methods that

are relatively easy to implement?

The Present Study

The present study aims to extend previous

research on Intro Psych by addressing three

questions, outlined below. The measures for the

study were included in a broader research ef-

fort

that followed up with senior undergradu-

ates who had taken Intro Psych three years

earlier when they were ﬁrst-year students.

First, what do students describe as the most

useful knowledge, skills, and perspectives

gained from their Intro Psych course, years after

course completion? In the survey, students were

asked to describe what from the course they

found most useful to them in college and in life

more broadly. Given previous ﬁndings that

memory for speciﬁc content fades quickly (e.g.,

Landrum & Gurung, 2013), we expected that

students would describe “big picture” insights

and perspectives rather than speciﬁc terms,

studies, or theories. We also examined whether

students who went on to major or minor in

psychology would describe different knowl-

edge, skills, and perspective than those who did

not.

Second, what do students actually retain from

Intro Psych in terms of speciﬁc content? Previ-

ous studies (Landrum & Gurung, 2013) have

approached this question by having former Intro

Psych students retake a cumulative exam with

items that were representative of the previous

exam they had taken. Students may or may not

have seen these the items when originally taking

the course. In the present study, we gave stu-

dents a subset of test items from their very ﬁrst

exam in Intro Psych, which covered research

methods, the biological bases of behavior (i.e.,

genetics and evolution, the nervous system, and

brain), sensation and perception, and learning.

Students had all responded to these test items

previously, and we were able to compare their

prior performance as ﬁrst-years on these items

to their current performance as seniors. Based

on previous ﬁndings, we expected that students

would forget considerable content in the years

since taking the course, and thus perform worse

on the retest than on the original. We also

expected that students who went on to special-

ize in psychology as majors or minors would

perform better on this retest than those who

didn’t, primarily due to repeated exposure to the

content in later courses.

Third, is having had a better experience in Intro

Psych as a ﬁrst-year student (i.e., performed bet-

ter, enjoyed it more) associated with more adap-

tive academic behaviors in students’ senior year?

To address this question, we ﬁrst focused on stu-

dents’ study strategies. In this particular course,

students attended lecture three times a week and

read 15 chapters in a 16-chapter textbook. There

was relatively little overlap between the content

covered in lectures and the content covered in the

textbook, so students were required to do consid-

erable self-study. In such an environment, stu-

dents had to quickly develop their study skills and

strategies. Based on the experiences of the course

coordinator (the ﬁrst author) in teaching the course

for many years, we compiled a list of the most

common strategies that students reported using in

the course, and asked students about their ten-

In addition to the questions for this study, the broader

research effort also included measures to assess possible

long-term effects of a test anxiety intervention (Brady et al.,

2018).

63WHAT STUDENTS REMEMBER ABOUT INTRO PSYCH

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dency to use these strategies years later, as seniors.

Next, we focused on students’ ability to manage

course projects. In their Intro Psych course, stu-

dents completed a project designed to give them

experience thinking like a psychologist—

speciﬁcally, students were required to propose an

original research idea, outline the methodology to

test it, and discuss implications of possible results.

The project was intentionally structured to model

adaptive project management approaches, in that

it had several different phases, included multiple

rounds of feedback, and required students to at-

tend ofﬁce hours at least once. Students thus ex-

perienced the potential value of breaking large

projects into manageable steps, and seeking feed-

back from the instructor along the way. The grade

on the project was largely based on a ﬁnal, revised

research proposal, and most of the students in our

sample performed extremely well (M ⫽ 91.2,

SD ⫽ 3.68, Range ⫽ 80 to 99). We expected that

success with this experience might be related to

better project management skills later in college.

To ﬁnd out, we asked students to rate their current

approach to course projects by responding to

questions that were inspired by the goals of the

Intro Psych research proposal project.

Method

Participants

We invited 237 senior undergraduate stu-

dents who had previously taken Intro Psych to

participate. These students had taken Intro

Psych during their ﬁrst year (either Fall or Win-

ter quarter) at a selective, private university. Of

those invited, 156 (66%) completed the relevant

questions for this study.

Students who responded to the survey had

performed slightly better in the course (overall

grade ⫽ 89.5, SD ⫽ 5.21) than ones who did

not (M ⫽ 87.4, SD ⫽ 5.82), and this difference

was signiﬁcant, t(234) ⫽⫺2.69, p ⬍ .01, Co-

hen’s d ⫽ 0.38. Although the sample overrep-

resented higher-performing students, the demo-

graphic composition of the respondents was

representative of the original sample. A slight

majority of the respondents were women

(63.5% compared to 58% in the original sample,

␹

⫽ 1.41, p ⫽ .23), and about a quarter were

students from underrepresented racial–ethnic

minority backgrounds (27% compared to 29%

in the original sample, ␹

⫽ .20, p ⫽ .65).

Although we did not collect students’ ages,

most seniors at the university are 21 or 22 years

old.

Course and Study Design

The Intro Psych course that students took

during their ﬁrst year offered lectures three

times a week, taught by a primary instructor. A

course coordinator oversaw the curriculum and

assessments. Students were required to attend

weekly discussion sections, led by one or two

teaching assistants who were a mix of psychol-

ogy graduate students and advanced undergrad-

uates. Students’ course grades were based on

three noncumulative exams in the course (60%),

a research proposal writing project (20%), an

in-class essay (10%), and participation in their

discussion sections (10%).

In the fall of their senior year, students re-

ceived an e-mail from the course instructor and

course coordinator, inviting them to complete a

30-min survey about their experiences in col-

lege in general and with the Intro Psych course

in particular. Procedures were approved by the

campus Institutional Review Board.

Students completed the survey online, via

Qualtrics. After completing the consent form,

students responded to a variety of questions,

discussed below.

Participants were compen-

sated with a $20 gift card.

Measures

All survey questions used in the study and all

relevant data to this article, with the exception

of student academic records, are available

through the Open Science Framework at https://

osf.io/tvgky/. A full data ﬁle, which includes

data from students’ academic records, is avail-

able from the ﬁrst author.

Experience with, and reﬂections on,

psychology. Students responded to questions

about their experiences with psychology at the

university. They reported whether they were

majoring or minoring in psychology and how

Thirteen additional students partially completed the sur-

vey but did not respond to the questions that are the focus of

this study.

Students also completed other measures not related to

the current project, including questions about their level of

stress, their beliefs about stress, strategies for coping with

test anxiety, and their feelings of belonging.

64 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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many courses they had taken in psychology.

They responded to two open-ended prompts:

“What, if anything, did you learn in Intro

Psych

that has been useful to you in your other

classes?” and “What, if anything, did you learn

in Intro Psych that has been useful to you in

your life in general?”

Course content quiz. Students also com-

pleted a brief quiz that tested a subset of 16 test

items that they had completed during their ﬁrst

midterm in the course.

The original midterm

contained 50 multiple choice items worth 75%

of the exam and a written answer section worth

25%. The 16 items encompassed all of the top-

ics assessed on the original midterm: research

methods, the biological bases of behavior (ge-

netics and evolution, the brain and nervous sys-

tem), sensation and perception, and learning.

Students’ original performance on these 16

items highly correlated with their overall per-

formance on the multiple-choice portion of the

midterm, r(155) ⫽ .78, p ⬍ .001, and modestly

correlated with their performance on the written

answer portion, r(155) ⫽ .43, p ⬍ .001.

Approaches to coursework during their se-

nior year. Students also answered questions

regarding their current approaches to course-

work. First, students rated how often they used

10 different study strategies, ranging from

memorizing deﬁnitions to attending faculty of-

ﬁce hours in order to clarify material. Second,

students rated their approach to course projects

by responding to questions that were inspired by

the goals of the research proposal project they

had completed in Intro Psych. Students rated

whether, as seniors, they (1) focus on the larger

goals of the project and what they could learn

from it, (2) divide up projects into manageable

steps, (3) complete tasks a little bit at a time,

instead of at the last minute, and (4) reach out to

teaching staff for support and feedback.

Intro Psych course experience (assessed

three years previously). Students’ responses

to the online survey were de-identiﬁed and

linked to their prior data from the Intro Psych

course using a research ID number. Prior data

included the overall course grades as well as its

components: the average of three noncumula-

tive exams, a research proposal project that in-

volves proposing an original research study, an

in-class essay, and course participation.

Prior data also included responses to an on-

line course evaluation designed by the instruc-

tional team and delivered in class on the last day

of lecture. The evaluation asked students a wide

variety of questions about their course experi-

ences. Most relevant to the present research

were ratings of how interesting lectures were

and the overall effectiveness of the primary

instructor, the course coordinator, and the stu-

dent’s section teaching assistant (TA; one item

each). The ratings for the primary instructor and

the course coordinator were moderately corre-

lated, r(148) ⫽ .49, p ⬍ .001, which was sen-

sible given that they were perceived by students

as co-leading the class. Thus, we averaged these

two ratings together into a single average for the

instructor.

Results

What Do Students Say They Learned From

Intro Psych?

Our ﬁrst research question was, what do se-

nior students identify as the most useful knowl-

edge, skills, and perspectives gained from their

Intro Psych course their ﬁrst year? We used

thematic analysis—coding for major thematic

categories—to analyze students’ qualitative re-

sponses to two questions: (1) What did you

learn in Intro Psych that has been useful to you

in your other classes? (2) What did you learn in

Intro Psych that has been useful to you in your

life in general? Using an inductive approach,

the second author read the entire corpus of

responses and then generated a list of themes

that were mentioned by a signiﬁcant number of

students (i.e., more than 10% of responses).

Then, the second author created a codebook to

quantify the number of responses that ﬁt a set of

criteria for each major theme. An additional

coder also coded the responses to determine

interrater reliability, which was adequate, with

Cohen’s ␬ ranging from 0.66 to 0.83.

In the survey, the Intro Psych course was referenced by

its institutional course number. Here, and in later examples

of student responses, we have replaced this course number

with “Intro Psych.”

As mentioned previously, this project capitalized on

another research effort to assess the long-term impacts of an

anxiety reappraisal intervention (Brady et al., 2018). The 16

test items were not randomly selected, but were chosen

based on which test items had shown the largest effects of

the intervention when students were previously enrolled in

the course.

65WHAT STUDENTS REMEMBER ABOUT INTRO PSYCH

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Thematic analysis revealed two major themes

in students’ descriptions of what they learned

that was useful in other classes: ﬁrst, the devel-

opment of study skills and, second, founda-

tional knowledge for subsequent classes. See

Figure 1.

About a ﬁfth (21.2%) of students said the

course helped them identify and hone study

skills useful in other college classes. Of these,

some students described learning in Intro Psych

that applying concepts to their lives was an

effective way to learn course material. Others

reported that course content helped them iden-

tify effective strategies such as self-quizzing

and studying in environments that were similar

to the environment they would be tested in.

Illustrative responses include the following:

From [Intro Psych], I have learned that I can best grasp

material in classes if I try to envision how I can apply

concepts to the world around me.

It taught me to study hard to do well in classes. I take

more time to study with others in test-like environ-

ments and to quiz myself as much as possible, drawing

on old information.

Another ﬁfth of students (21.8%) said the

course equipped them with foundational knowl-

edge for future classes. Many students men-

tioned that the material covered in course was

revisited in greater depth in their later psychol-

ogy courses. In addition, some students reported

the course was helpful in nonpsychology

courses, such as in human biology or product

design. For example,

[Intro Psych] does a really good job at previewing

course content for other classes. Almost every psych

class I’ve taken after [Intro Psych] (if not all) brought

up a topic that was touched upon on [Intro Psych]. The

classes elaborate upon what I was introduced to in

[Intro Psych].

It was helpful to know about the different functions of

the parts of the brain for my later human biology

classes.

Some students (9.6%) mentioned speciﬁc

concepts and ideas they had found memorable

and useful, but these did not converge on any

single themes. For example, several students

mentioned growth mindset (Dweck, 2006), ste-

reotype threat (Steele, 1997), and memorization

techniques (e.g., semantic encoding; Hyde &

Jenkins, 1973) as important concepts that they

learned. A larger number of students (34%)

described learning things that seemed to capture

22% 35% 22% 22%21% 16% 23% 11%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

Study Skills Foundational Knowledge Understanding Others Interacting with Others

Percentage of Students Mentioning Theme

Psych Students (N = 23)

Non-Psych Students (N = 133)

Figure 1. Students’ qualitative descriptions of what they learned from Intro Psych showed

highly similar themes regardless of whether the students specialized (i.e., majored or minored)

in psychology or not. The only exception was that psychology students were more likely to

report that the course provided foundational knowledge that was useful in later courses. See

the online article for the color version of this ﬁgure.

66 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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the overarching content of the course, but were

too vague to be thematic, such as “the way the

mind works.”

Did students who specialized in psychology

as an academic major or minor report learning

different knowledge and skills than those stu-

dents who did not? Although the majority of the

students did not specialize in psychology, 14%

did (N

majors

⫽ 17; N

minors

⫽ 6). We found that

themes in students’ responses differed some-

what as a function of whether they specialized

in psychology or not. As shown in Figure 1,

psychology students were more likely to report

that the class equipped them with foundational

knowledge for future classes, ␹

⫽ 4.67, p ⫽

.03. No other differences were observed.

Thematic analysis revealed two major themes

in students’ response to the second question

regarding what they learned in Intro Psych that

was useful to their lives in general. Both themes

emphasized the social relevance of the course.

A quarter of students (25%) reported that the

knowledge gained in the course helped them

develop a deeper understanding of people, such

as an appreciation for how situations shape peo-

ple’s behavior, and greater empathy for others.

Students said the following:

I think it shifted my perspective on how I viewed

people I previously didn’t understand, and it helped me

understand how each of us can act differently in the

same situations.

[Intro Psych] has been helpful in helping me to be

more empathetic toward people and myself. It helps me

to think critically about how or why people are who

they are.

Relatedly, students described how the knowl-

edge they gained in the course helped them

interact better with others (12.8%). Students

wrote the following:

I think [Intro Psych] helped me challenge my imme-

diate judgements and think critically about the way I

and others think. It helps when thinking about how

people perceive things and interacting with others.

Studying emotion regulation and understanding how

people process emotions has helped in interacting with

people in healthy ways.

As with the other open-ended question, some

students (10.3%) mentioned speciﬁc concepts and

ideas they had found useful, but these did not

converge on a speciﬁc theme. One student, for

example, listed “growth mindset, bystander apa-

thy, Pygmalion effect.” A larger number of stu-

dents (35.9%) gave ambiguous responses that

seemed to describe the broad content of Intro

Psych, such as one student who said the course

helped them recognize “different behavioral phe-

nomenon[a] that occur.” There were no differ-

ences in the types of responses to this question as

a function of whether students specialized in psy-

chology, largest ␹

⫽ 1.92, p ⫽ .17 (see Figure 1).

How Much do Students Actually Remember?

How well did students remember the course

content, as measured by the 16-item quiz on ques-

tions they had previously completed during their

ﬁrst exam in Intro Psych? Did students who spe-

cialized in psychology retain the content better

than students who did not? We performed a 2 ⫻ 2

mixed design ANOVA with timepoint as a within-

subjects factor (ﬁrst year, senior year) and aca-

demic specialty (psychology students, nonpsy-

chology students) as a between-subjects factor. As

shown in Figure 2, students answered 89% of

these questions correctly when they were enrolled

in the course as ﬁrst-years (SD ⫽ 9.9%). As se-

niors, they answered signiﬁcantly fewer questions

correctly (M ⫽ 70%, SD ⫽ 17.2%), F(1, 153) ⫽

62.42, p ⬍ .001, M

diff

⫽ 18.3%, 95% CI [15.6%,

21.0%], ␩

⫽ .12. Whether students specialized in

psychology signiﬁcantly predicted performance,

F(1, 153) ⫽ 8.27, p ⬍ .01, ␩

⫽ .03, but this

effect interacted with timepoint, F(1, 153) ⫽ 7.73,

p ⬍ .01, ␩

⫽ .02. In follow-up analyses, we

found that psychology students did not differ from

nonpsychology students in their scores on these

items as ﬁrst-year students, t(153) ⬍ 1, p ⫽ .38,

diff

⫽ 2.0%, 95% CI [⫺2.5%, 6.4%], d ⫽⫺0.2.

However, psychology students performed better

on the items as seniors, answering signiﬁcantly

more items correctly (M ⫽ 81%, SD ⫽ 14.3%)

than nonpsychology students (M ⫽ 69%, SD ⫽

17.0%), t(154) ⫽ 3.26, p ⬍ .001, M

diff

⫽ 12.3%,

95% CI [4.8%, 19.7%], d ⫽ 0.74.

The superior quiz performance of the psychol-

ogy students is likely driven by the higher number

of additional psychology courses they took (M ⫽

8.00, SD ⫽ 2.76) compared to nonpsychology

students (M ⫽ 1.39, SD ⫽ 1.62), t(154) ⫽ 16.06,

p ⬍ .001, M

diff

⫽ 6.6, 95% CI [5.8, 7.4], d ⫽ 3.63.

Nonpsychology students who took no other psy-

chology courses after Intro Psych (N ⫽ 48) an-

swered 66% of items correctly (SD ⫽ 17%).

We tested whether the number of additional

psychology courses accounted for the effects of

67WHAT STUDENTS REMEMBER ABOUT INTRO PSYCH

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specializing in psychology on quiz performance

using a hierarchical linear regression analysis. At

Step 1, academic specialty (psychology stu-

dents ⫽ 1, nonpsychology students ⫽ 0) was

entered as the sole predictor of quiz performance

and was signiﬁcant, ␤⫽.123, 95% CI [.048,

.197], p ⬍ .001. Alone, academic specialty ac-

counted for 6.5% of the variation in quiz perfor-

mance. At Step 2, we added the number of psy-

chology courses taken to the model, which

explained 4.5% additional variance in quiz perfor-

mance, and this change in R

was signiﬁcant, F(1,

253) ⫽ 7.66, p ⬍ .02. Critically, when number of

psychology courses was included in the model, it

was a signiﬁcant predictor of quiz performance,

␤⫽.020, 95% CI [.006, .034], p ⬍ .01, but

academic specialty was not, ␤⫽⫺.009, 95% CI

[⫺.128, .110], p ⫽ .88. This provides strong ev-

idence that psychology students performed better

on the quiz because of their additional coursework

in psychology.

Predictably, ﬁrst-year performance on the

items predicted senior-year performance,

r(155) ⫽ .33, p ⬍ .001, 95% CI [.18, .46].

Students who answered more questions cor-

rectly while taking the course answered more

questions correctly several years later.

Does Experience in Intro Psych Predict

Later Academic Behaviors?

Given that many students reported that the

course helped them to develop academic skills

for other courses, was there any evidence that

better experiences in the course as ﬁrst-years

predicted more effective approaches to their

college coursework in their senior year, such as

greater use of study strategies and more adap-

tive project management skills?

Table 1 pro-

vides descriptive statistics for students’ initial

performance in the course, as well as their rat-

ings on course evaluations. Table 2 provides

descriptive statistics for each item measuring

students’ study strategies and project manage-

ment skills, as well as the averages across items.

Degrees of freedom vary somewhat across analyses due

to missing data from when students originally took the

course.

90% 81%89% 69%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

First-Year (enrolled in course) Senior Year (follow up)

Performance on 16-item Quiz (% Correct)

Psych Students (N = 23) Non-Psych Students (N = 133)

Figure 2. Overall, students performed less well on a subset of 16 exam items as seniors than

they had on those same items when enrolled in Intro Psych as ﬁrst-year students. Students who

specialized in psychology (i.e., majored or minored) did not perform differently on the test

items than nonpsychology students when enrolled in Intro Psych their ﬁrst year of college.

They did perform better as seniors on the same test items, however. Error bars show ⫾1 SEM.

See the online article for the color version of this ﬁgure.

68 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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Neither students’ overall Intro Psych course

grade, nor their grades speciﬁcally on exams, pre-

dicted their use of study strategies—either overall,

r(154) ⫽⫺.023, p ⫽ .78, or for any speciﬁc study

strategy, smallest p ⫽ .134. Did students’ enjoy-

ment of the course, speciﬁcally their ratings of the

course on the end-of-term evaluation, predict later

study strategies? We found that overall ratings of

the course instructors did predict overall use of

study strategies, r(148) ⫽ .266, p ⬍ .001, 95% CI

[.12, .42], and more speciﬁcally predicted the

strategies of quizzing oneself, r(148) ⫽ .219, p ⫽

.007, 95% CI [.06, .37], and attending ofﬁce hours

to ask about confusing material, r(148) ⫽ .174,

p ⫽ .03, 95% CI [.01, .33]. Ratings of how inter-

esting lectures were, of their section TA, and of

other features of the course did not predict study

strategies.

What about students’ approaches to course

projects? Overall course grades in Intro Psych

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics for Course Performance and Evaluations

M [95% CI] SD N

Course performance in Intro Psych during ﬁrst year

Course Grade 89.59 [88.76, 90.43] 5.24 154

Average Exam Score 87.83 [86.65, 89.01] 7.45 156

Research Project Grade 91.20 [90.62, 91.78] 3.68 155

Section Participation Grade 94.06 [93.19, 94.93] 5.46 155

Evaluation ratings of Intro Psych during ﬁrst year

Lectures Overall: Satisfaction with the “interestingness and engagingness” of lectures

(scale: 1 ⫽ very dissatisﬁed to 5 ⫽ very satisﬁed) 4.72 .48 148

Instructor Rating: Average overall effectiveness rating for the instructor and course

coordinator (scale: 1 ⫽ poor to 5 ⫽ excellent) 4.77 [4.71, 4.83] .38 148

Overall Effectiveness of Teaching Assistant (scale: 1 ⫽ poor to 5 ⫽ excellent) 4.27 [4.15, 4.39] .73 148

Table 2

Descriptive Statistics for Study Strategies and Project Management Skills

STUDY STRATEGIES

How much do you use each of the following study strategies before exams at [Institution Name]?

(1 ⫽ Never,2⫽ Sometimes,3⫽ Most of the time,4⫽ Always)

MSDN

Memorizing deﬁnitions 2.36 [2.23, 2.49] .80 156

Re-reading the textbook 2.17 [2.05, 2.30] .78 156

Reviewing lecture slides 3.38 [3.27, 3.49] .71 146

Reviewing my own notes 3.30 [3.17, 3.43] .84 156

Rewriting notes 2.06 [1.89, 2.23] 1.07 156

Creating mnemonics 1.78 [1.66, 1.90] .76 156

Studying with friends 2.14 [2.01, 2.27] .82 156

Quizzing myself 2.65 [2.51, 2.79] .90 156

Reviewing prior assignments or problem sets 3.13 [2.99, 3.26] .86 156

Attending ofﬁce hours to ask about confusing material 2.32 [2.19, 2.45] .84 156

Average: Overall use of study strategies 2.53 [2.47, 2.59] .38 156

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Please rate your agreement with each of the following statements:

When working on a course project...(1⫽ Strongly disagree,7⫽ Strongly agree)

...Ithink about the overall goal of the project and what I am supposed to learn from it. 4.74 [4.52, 4.95] 1.37 156

...Itrytobreak the project into smaller, more manageable steps. 5.49 [5.30, 5.67] 1.18 156

...Idoalittle but at a time, rather than putting off tasks to the last minute. 4.11 [3.85, 4.36] 1.62 156

...Ifeel comfortable reaching out to my instructor or TA for support and feedback 5.08 [4.85, 5.30] 1.43 156

Average: Overall project management skills [4.71, 5.00] 156

69WHAT STUDENTS REMEMBER ABOUT INTRO PSYCH

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did predict adaptive project management skills

during the senior year, r(154) ⫽ .24, p ⫽ .003,

95% CI [.08, .38]. As shown in Table 3, all

aspects of course grade correlated with later

approach to projects, but students’ grade on the

research proposal project was the mostly

strongly correlated, r(154) ⫽ .32, p ⬍ .001,

95% CI [.17, .45]. Ratings of the course instruc-

tors also predicted more adaptive project man-

agement skills, r(148) ⫽ .294, p ⬍ .001, 95%

CI [.14, .44], but ratings of the section TA (who

most directly mentored students on the project)

did not, r(148) ⫽⫺.03, p ⫽ .76.

Discussion

The present study represents a ﬁrst step to-

ward understanding the inﬂuence of Intro Psych

by surveying senior undergraduates who com-

pleted the course in their ﬁrst year of college.

We aimed to generate insight into what students

think they learned, how much detail they actu-

ally retained, and whether their experiences in

the course as ﬁrst-years predicted any of their

academic behaviors as seniors. Although the

study has a number of limitations, it provides

initial evidence of the lasting impact that Intro

Psych may have on students, hopefully inspir-

ing additional, more rigorous research efforts.

Students Report Learning Skills,

Knowledge, and Perspectives

Years after the course, students described

how Intro Psych shaped their skills, knowledge,

and perspectives. Students reported that the

class fostered effective study strategies and

foundational knowledge that they applied to

other courses. More broadly, students said the

course shaped their perspectives on the social

world by helping them understand and interact

more effectively with others. By and large, stu-

dents who went on to specialize in psychology

reported gaining similar ideas and skills when

compared to nonmajors.

This similarity between majors and nonma-

jors may reﬂect that their Intro Psych course

was designed to serve majors and nonmajors in

similar ways, as has been recommended by the

American Psychological Association and by

prominent scholars in the scholarship of teach-

ing and learning within psychology (Gurung et

al., 2016; Halpern, 2010). Alternatively, majors

and nonmajors may report learning similar con-

cepts and skills because they tend to have sim-

ilar interests in an Intro Psych course. Prior

work suggests that students in Intro Psych, re-

gardless of their intended major, tend to value

concepts that are relevant to their immediate

needs as students, such as academic and inter-

personal success. Zanich and Grover (1989)

found, in their surveys of students just before

and after taking Intro Psych, that students grav-

itate toward these topics regardless of their ma-

jor, and remain similarly interested in these

topics after the course is over. Our ﬁndings hint

that these interests are reﬂected in what is re-

tained years after the course has ended.

Content Knowledge Lingers, Especially

for Majors

In comparison to previous studies, we found

evidence of relatively strong retention of course

concepts. We retested students on concepts

originally presented on their ﬁrst midterm and

Table 3

Correlations Among Course Performance, Evaluations, and Outcome Measures

1 2 3 4 5 6789

1. Course Grade —

2. Average Exam Score .981

ⴱⴱⴱ

—

3. Research Project Grade .544

ⴱⴱⴱ

.420

ⴱⴱⴱ

—

4. Section Participation Grade .450

ⴱⴱⴱ

.356

ⴱⴱⴱ

.284

ⴱⴱⴱ

—

5. Rating of Lectures Overall ⫺.009 ⫺.020 .024 .026 —

6. Rating of Instructor Effectiveness .131 .109 .145 .138 .166

ⴱ

—

7. Rating of TA Effectiveness ⫺.050 ⫺.070 .106 ⫺.030 .053 .144 —

8. Study Strategies ⫺.009 ⫺.033 .048 .120 ⫺.023 .266

ⴱⴱ

⫺.032 —

9. Project Management Skills .239

ⴱⴱ

.201

ⴱ

.316

ⴱⴱⴱ

.234

ⴱⴱ

.075 .294

ⴱⴱⴱ

⫺.025 .382

ⴱⴱⴱ

—

ⴱ

p ⬍ .05.

ⴱⴱ

p ⬍ .01.

ⴱⴱⴱ

p ⬍ .001.

70 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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compared their performance across the two

tests. Students experienced a 21% drop in per-

formance compared to their performance as

ﬁrst-year students, but still earned what would

have been a passing grade of 71%—meaning-

fully higher than the 56%–63% performance

rates found in other studies (Landrum & Gu-

rung, 2013). Still, and consistent with prior

ﬁndings, students performed better on the retest

if they were majoring or minoring in psychol-

ogy. Nonmajors performed better if they had

taken more additional courses in psychology,

and students whose only psychology course was

Intro Psych scored about 65%.

There are several possible explanations for

why students showed greater evidence of reten-

tion than students in prior work. One explana-

tion relates to the nature of the sample: Students

in the present study attended a highly selective

university and likely had strong study skills that

boosted long-term learning. Additionally, high-

er-performing students were more likely to re-

spond to the survey, a self-selection bias not

found in previous studies (Landrum & Gurung,

2013). Other explanations relate to the nature of

the ﬁrst exam in an Intro Psych course. Early

parts of an Intro Psych course tend to cover

foundational content (e.g., research methods,

biological bases) that is likely to be revisited

during later parts of the course and potentially

in other courses inside and outside of psychol-

ogy. Additionally, the very ﬁrst exam in a

course, especially during a student’s ﬁrst year,

may be particularly meaningful and memorable.

Students likely study harder for this exam be-

cause they do not know what to expect.

Course Performance and Evaluations

Predict Some Academic Behaviors

Additionally, several aspects of students’ ac-

ademic behavior as seniors were correlated with

their prior experiences in Intro Psych. Speciﬁ-

cally, ﬁrst-year students who performed better

on a term project later self-reported more use of

effective project management skills as seniors.

This relationship hints at the potential for intro-

ductory course assignments to shape students’

approach to assignments in later courses. We

interpret this correlational ﬁnding cautiously,

however, just as we would teach our students to

do. We do not know whether students who

engaged well with the project (and thus earned

a good grade) developed effective project man-

agement skills, or whether students who already

had effective project management skills in their

ﬁrst year (and thus still had them in their senior

year) engaged well with the project. Addition-

ally, our measure of project management skills

is novel and quite brief. Further work is needed

to determine its reliability and validity or to

develop a more detailed and robust measure.

Of note, students’ performance in the course

was largely unrelated to their later use of study

strategies. Our measure of study strategies was

coarse and self-reported—we simply asked stu-

dents to indicate their use of a range of different

study strategies and did not capture individual

differences in studying efﬁciency or whether

students adopted the best strategy for a given

context. Future work should make use of vali-

dated measures of study strategies, such as the

Study Behavior Checklist (Gurung, Weidert, &

Jeske, 2010) or the Ten Learning Techniques

(Bartoszewski & Gurung, 2015). Furthermore,

because our sample comprised students at a

highly selective university who are likely rela-

tively skilled at studying, even as ﬁrst-year stu-

dents, the range in use of study strategies may

have been too restricted to detect a relationship

with prior grades.

Although we found a modest relationship be-

tween how much students enjoyed the course,

as measured by their ratings on course evalua-

tions, and their later outcomes, these relation-

ships were not especially revealing. We found,

for example, that students’ ratings of the course

instructors were related to using more study

strategies, on average, and with using a partic-

ularly effective study strategy: self-quizzing

(e.g., Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel, & Mc-

Dermott, 2011). Students’ ratings of the course

instructors were also correlated with their later

project management skills. Although it is pos-

sible that students were inspired by their in-

structors to develop these skills, it is equally

plausible that students who mastered studying

and tackling course projects in their ﬁrst-year

Intro Psych course also came to like their in-

structors more. There may also be a third vari-

able: Students who were more academically

engaged in their ﬁrst year both liked their in-

structors more and developed more effective

academic strategies.

There are many reasons why responses to

course evaluations may be unrelated to later

71WHAT STUDENTS REMEMBER ABOUT INTRO PSYCH

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outcomes. In particular, some work suggests

that course evaluations do not capture the true

quality of students’ learning experience. They

are inﬂuenced less by how much students learn

than by course characteristics, such as class

size, and instructor characteristics, such as gen-

der and academic rank (Johnson, Narayanan, &

Sawaya, 2013).

Limitations and Future Directions

Our study is one of only a few to follow up

with students years after they have taken Intro

Psych and provides initial evidence that Intro

Psych teaches students much more than terms

and deﬁnitions. Although the present ﬁndings

provide a promising ﬁrst look at the impact of

Intro Psych, much remains unknown. First, how

does the long-term impact of Intro Psych de-

pend on the design of the course and the char-

acteristics of its students? Our sample was lim-

ited to students at a selective private institution

with a well-funded, highly supportive Intro

Psych course. Students in this course performed

very well on average and rated the course in-

structors very positively. Our ﬁndings were also

limited by self-selection bias—students who re-

sponded to our survey were higher-performing

than those who did not. Thus, our ﬁndings may

describe the “best case scenario” for Intro

Psych: what is possible when well-prepared stu-

dents take an Intro Psych course designed to

support their long-term learning. Whether and

how these ﬁndings extend to different popula-

tions of students experiencing different Intro

Psych courses is a question for future research.

Second, how can we learn about the broader

ideas and skills that students gain from the

course without relying on self-report? Students

may not be fully aware of, or able to articulate,

the broader ideas and skills they gain from a

course, highlighting a key need for objective

follow-up assessments. For example, a vast ma-

jority of students did not mention the class

cultivating critical thinking skills, a key learn-

ing goal for many Intro Psych courses. Students

may not understand or be able to adequately

self-assess their own critical thinking. Future

work may look to include standardized assess-

ments of critical thinking skills.

A third salient question is whether and to

what extent introductory courses in other disci-

plines predict student outcomes. Are there gen-

eral academic skills and orientations that any

well-developed introductory course, regardless

of discipline, could help foster? We found that

experiences in Intro Psych during the ﬁrst year

predicted approaches to coursework years later.

Would performance in any of a students’ intro

courses, especially those taken during the ﬁrst

year, be similarly predictive? If so, are such

courses directly developing those academic be-

haviors? There is little data to address this ques-

tion. Although researchers have explored the

long-term impact of speciﬁc coursework, such

as the inﬂuence of taking college economics

classes on future civic behaviors (Allgood,

Bosshardt, van der Klaauw, & Watts, 2004),

this work does not focus on courses taken in the

ﬁrst year of college. Research on the impact of

ﬁrst-year experience courses, largely seminars,

ﬁnds that taking these courses is associated with

better student achievement and persistence (see

Permzadian & Credé, 2016, for a review), but

does not address the development of students’

academic skills. To our knowledge, no existing

studies examine the long-term effect of disci-

plinary introductory courses taken in the ﬁrst

year. Future studies could obtain data from

other ﬁrst-year courses to examine discipline-

speciﬁc impacts. Understanding how and why

different ﬁrst-year courses shape later outcomes

could guide institutions in making better curric-

ulum decisions and students in selecting ﬁrst

year courses.

Finally, how does Intro Psych inﬂuence stu-

dents with different interests and goals? We

found that students described similar “lessons

learned” from the course regardless of whether

they were majors or nonmajors, but we do not

yet know whether students carry slightly differ-

ent skills and perspectives with them depending

on their chosen major or career (e.g., health-

related professions or business-related profes-

sions).

Concluding Remarks

Intro Psych serves many students and has the

potential to cultivate valuable skills and ideas

that students can carry with them well beyond

the ﬁnal exam. Using both qualitative and quan-

titative data, the current research takes a critical

ﬁrst step to understanding the long-term impact

of the course on students’ skills, broader per-

spectives, and experiences. Given the impor-

72 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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tance of Intro Psych both to our ﬁeld and, ar-

guably, to a liberal arts education, we hope

these ﬁndings inspire new efforts to clarify and

expand our knowledge of this course.

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Received September 16, 2018

Revision received November 18, 2018

Accepted November 20, 2018 䡲

74 HARD, LOVETT, AND BRADY

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