Multimodal active learning methods for biological psychology

ABSTRACT

Historically, students struggle with biological psychology content and many educators have implemented active learning methods to increase student understanding of difficult topics. However, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has raised challenges of moving these activities to an online environment. This chapter discusses learning activities appropriate for undergraduate courses that cover a broad range of topics such as neurons, action potential, neuroanatomy, brain functions, sensation and perception and psychophysics. A panel of faculty who have previously taught these topics online presented several ways to effectively teach these sometimes-difficult topics that would benefit student learning in both the traditional classroom and the online modality. While all anticipates the instruction to be once again is in the classroom, having alternatives to the traditional classroom can increase accessibility and options for engagement in complex and often difficult content. Lastly, it opens the floor for contributions from the audience, for things that worked best for them and things that they may want to troubleshoot for future courses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)