Return to the classroom and beyond: Developing an inclusive active learning classroom environment with statistics and programming in Psychology
Since the return of the classroom has begun and classes have shifted to in-person learning, it has become increasingly clear that the transition has both improved learning, while also revealing that some teaching approaches utilized more during the pandemic were greatly appreciated and needed by the students. Many of these techniques that helped to maximize learning in a pandemic-addled classroom, such as interactive learning, are not only beneficial for virtual learning but also in both a pre-pandemic and post-pandemic world. One of the more well-known ways to create interactive resources in statistical courses is to use the markup syntax language of R markdown to create interactive documents and presentations. This is a continuation of our goal from last year, where we plan to create interactive presentations as websites and implement them in at least three quantitative courses in the psychology department, in order to integrate interactive learning into these courses. We have seen initial success with our implementation so far with our undergraduate and graduate statistics sequence courses, and would like to increase the interactive nature of our current websites, while also introducing these websites to new classes, such as an advanced regression course taken by both undergraduate and graduate students. The websites will utilize multiple interactive components such as interactive plots using the Plotly R package and mini-quizzes using the learnr R package to maximize engagement and learning of the material in the course. Collectively, our project will benefit over 250 students per year.