Cognitive Foundations is an open-source, collaborative textbook edited by Dr. Celeste Pilegard. Last fall, she brought me onto her team as a subject matter expert in order to revamp “Chapter 6: Memory in Context” in preparation for the release of the second edition of the textbook. I did a lot of revising of the current material (nearly all of it overlapped with the material I taught in my PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia course) and did a good amount of original writing as well.
My department nomination for the Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars (SGTS) Program was accepted, which means that I’m going to be taking on another Associate-In position this summer! The course I’ll be teaching during UCSD’s summer session II is PSYC 162 Psychology & Law. PSYC 162 is an upper-division undergraduate course that closely aligns with my research interests, and I’m choosing to teach it over Zoom in order to gain further experience teaching in different environments.
The SGTS program allows for advanced doctoral students to receive formal pedagogical training (we have to take two course on pedagogy) as well as close, faculty-mentored teaching.
Dr. John Wixted will be my faculty mentor supervising my teaching and giving me feedback. I will also have members of the Engaged Teaching Hub at the Teaching + Learning Commons observe my classes in order to give input on the course design (e.g., syllabus, learning outcomes, class structure, etc.) as well as the learning and assessment tools that will be most effective for this lecture-based course. I have already taught in person at the undergraduate level, but I have never taught a full undergraduate course on Zoom. It will be incredibly beneficial to get formal, empirically-tested input on what strategies are most effective for in-person learning versus virtual learning, and I am eager to find out how to make virtual learning environments more engaging and dynamic.
Thank you everyone in the Department of Psychology for their support via their nomination letters, as well as to those at the Teaching + Learning Commons who deemed me a good candidate for their program.
With my name officially on the registrar, I’m happy to announce that I’m teaching a 300-person, upper-division undergraduate course during the Winter 2023 quarter! I’ve accepted an “associate-in-lieu” position in the Department of Psychology at UCSD.
The course is PSYC 144 Memory & Amnesia. The course will review basic research into the nature of memory. It will survey current research and theory concerning human memory and amnesia from both cognitive and neuropsychological perspectives. Topics covered will include short-term memory, encoding and retrieval processes, forgetting, memory distortion, implicit memory, drug effects on memory, amnesic syndromes, and the effects of aging on memory processes.
This week was the UC Psychology Teaching & Learning conference, hosted by faculty at UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis and UCLA. From the conference webpage, “[The conference] is designed for psychology instructors at all levels who are interested in developing teaching strategies and learning about pedagogy research.”
This was an informative event and gave attendees numerous tools on how to improve the classroom experience (especially in a virtual setting). Listed below are some of the helpful things I learned over the course of these two days: