Assistant Professor of Psychology Gili Freedman recently published an article entitled, "Applying Social Psychology to a Global Crisis: Student Engagement in a Laboratory Class During the COVID-19 Pandemic," in the journal Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology.
This pedagogical paper describes a project from Freedman's spring 2020 Advanced Social Psychology with Lab course and was written with two of the students in that class, India Oates '21 and Shannon Kirk '21. This class took place during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The students chose to conduct experiments examining social psychological processes related to the pandemic. After conducting their experiments, the students reflected on the experience of researching an ongoing crisis. Researchers found that students felt highly engaged in the research and appreciated learning about the real-world implications of social psychology. However, some students expressed that conducting pandemic-related research presented some emotional challenges. Discussed within the article are the potential promises and pitfalls of engaging in research on an ongoing crisis within the classroom setting.
Read the full article here.
