Christina’s Three Project Ideas

Supporting the Transition to College: Implementation of a Summer Workshop Series for Students with Autism
Students with autism often experience significant stress when transitioning from a supportive high school setting to the more independent college setting. While stress and anxiety have been identified as factors associated with the high student drop-out rate, no colleges have created evidence-based intervention programming to support students with autism during this transition. The proposed research will design, implement, and evaluate a summer training focused on classroom readiness, social skills, self-advocacy skills, and computer-mediated communication skills that is designed to support students with autism as they transition into college. Twenty students will be recruited to participate in this four-week workshop. A five-phase, quasi-experimental pre/post-test design employing focus groups, behavioral assessments, and standardized measures will be used to examine the program’s impact on classroom behaviors, computer-mediated communication skills, self-advocacy skills, anxiety, social support, loneliness, self-esteem, depression, and student adaptation to college life. This study will instruct future programming targeting students with autism as they meet the challenges of an increasingly complex online and offline college social environment.

Creation of a “Teaching Hub” for Graduate Student Instructors in Psychology

Doctoral students enrolled in the CUNY campuses often teach one or more undergraduate classes in the CUNY system. However, preparing to teach a new class for the first time can be a daunting task and there are few teaching of psychology websites with open-access availability for students. The Graduate Center was given the opportunity to host the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) for the next few years. This responsibility comes with an out-dated GSTA website, half-created social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook), and few in-person resources such as teaching activity guides and sample textbooks. The proposed project will take full advantage of the GSTA’s potential by transforming the nature of the online website or by creating a new website that houses teaching resources such as activities, textbook reviews, and syllabi. This website will be accessible through the CUNY system initially, but may later expand to open access of these resources.

There’s an App for That! Bringing the Experimental Psychology Lab to your Mobile Device
Similar to other introductory classes, undergraduate students enrolled in introductory psychology classes often struggle to fully understand many of the historical experiments used consistently in psychological research. In these introductory classes, students are expected to learn a multitude of researchers and theorists, in addition to memorizing the experiments the researchers conducted from within a framework of their research questions and chosen methodology. Class time is limited and students may be required to look up an experiment mentioned in class after formal class hours, or students may want to learn more about recent expansions/modifications made to the original experiment. The proposed project will design and pilot-test a mobile app that searches through YouTube videos for illustrations of appropriate psychology experiments. This app will be based on the number of “hits” received on the YouTube page illustrating a given experiment, since higher quality videos tends to receive more hits.

2 thoughts on “Christina’s Three Project Ideas

  1. Silvana

    Christina,

    I think your second idea is great! I have had the misfortune of teaching a new course almost every semester. Although it’s more courses to add to my CV, it has been an enormous amount of work each time and I often felt like I was reinventing the wheel. A site like the one you are proposing would have been so helpful. Maybe there could even be a way for instructors to suggest tips for making certain concepts more accessible to students — something like a teaching diary/journal.

  2. Maura A. Smale (she/her)

    Hi Christina, your second idea for a psychology teaching hub has some similarity to one of Aleks’s ideas, you might also find the Art History Teaching Resources site useful to browse: http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/

    For your third idea, did you have an app in mind that does something similar? Sometimes a responsive website can achieve the same goals as an app, especially if the app requires internet access, so you might want to consider a website as well.

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