Building Student Confidence and Beliefs in Post-Graduation Success Through Skills Training

Abstract

Undergraduate students need professional skills for their future careers, and incorporating skills training or labs into our classes is an important way to support these needs. Many programs aim to build research literacy, but instructors struggle with not having time, worrying about cutting content, or structuring in-class research projects. To address these, I developed a series of research-based activities for a Psychology senior seminar class called the Learn It, Try It, Share It framework. I rooted these in growth mindsets, which helped students be more open to creating these studies as part of the learning process even when they did not feel confident yet. Learn It, Try It, Share It features a series of iterative research projects, two team-based then one individual, to build soft and hard professional skills for students. Support comes from student artifacts and an end-of-semester student survey on their perceptions of their skills and their attitudes about class. Students showed growth on these skills and increasingly advanced questions in class. In the surveys, students reported building their skills in Social Psychology and in understanding and conducting Social Psychology research. They reported feeling empowered in class, feeling like the class was preparing them for the future, and feeling confident in their future success. The Learn It, Try It, Share It framework helped students engage with the research behind our Psychology terms and concepts and highlighted research as an iterative process that they can do themselves through their own trial and error. This framework can serve as a template for other instructors who struggle to add high-impact practices into their classes.