Grasping Psychological Evidence: Integrating Evidentiary Practices in Psychology Instruction

Abstract

The spread of misinformation has underscored the importance of cultivating citizens’ competency to critically evaluate popular accounts of scientific evidence. Extending the prevailing emphasis on evidence in the natural sciences, we argue for fostering students’ understanding of psychological evidence and its communication in the media. In this study, we illustrate how this goal can be advanced in undergraduate psychology instruction by actively engaging students in evidence evaluation and design. We employed the Grasp of Evidence framework to document students’ evidence evaluation ideals and processes and how these changed over a course in which students engaged in a series of collaborative evidence evaluation and design tasks. Prior to instruction, students exhibited a mechanistic understanding of scientific methods, coupled with substantial reliance on personal experience. Following instruction, students demonstrated three key shifts in grasp of evidence: a shift in perception of the sources of psychological knowledge, a shift in views of scientific objectivity, and a shift in definitions of psychological phenomena. Analysis of students’ collaborative discourse highlighted three design principles that supported increasingly complex understandings of psychological evidence: collaborative critique and redesign of flawed studies, engagement with diverse sources of popular evidence, and confronting elusive conceptual constructs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As group discourse was conducted in the Moodle chat application, turns of talk were sometimes very brief. For the sake of clarity, we combined consecutive turns of talk by the same speaker, and deleted turns that were referencing unrelated parts of the conversation.

2 As one of the reviewers of this paper commented, the very notion of examining operational conditioning with infants is ethically questionable. As mentioned above, this issue was discussed in the ensuing lesson. At the same time, it is important to note that the discussion of the Little Albert experiment led to deep engagement with and attentiveness to ethical issues.