Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Vol 11(4), Dec 2025, 596-603; doi:10.1037/stl0000388
To enhance the effectiveness of signal detection theory (SDT) pedagogy, we developed and used a modified police officer’s dilemma (POD) task (Correll et al., 2002) to teach basic concepts of signal detection to undergraduate students. To assess the task’s pedagogical effectiveness for teaching SDT, we compared student learning in the task on a specific set of relevant objectives and a set of subjective learning measures after students participated in a modified POD laboratory experience versus a more traditional long-term recognition memory task. Students across different sections and multiple instructors showed enhanced learning of key SDT concepts after completing the modified POD as compared to the more traditional task, both on the objective and more subjective measures. In addition to its pedagogical advantage in teaching SDT concepts, an important benefit to employing the modified POD task is that it can be used as a tool to facilitate student reflection on racial stereotyping, profiling, police bias and brutality, and related social issues. When combined with effective classroom discussion (Brown-Kramer & Hillard, 2023; Morris et al., 2011), the POD task is an effective pedagogical tool. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)