Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Vol 10(2), Jun 2024, 133-148; doi:10.1037/stl0000279
College students’ motivations have shifted from more intrinsic to more extrinsic across time. To meet students’ needs and goals and to adhere to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) best practice guidelines, psychology professors should speak to the acquisition of job-relevant skills in their courses, especially in classes that students tend not to favor like psychology statistics and research methods. Utilizing a descriptive, mixed-methods approach, a psychology statistics professor incorporated a skills-based syllabus section and skills emphasis in her course over a 2-year span. Across six small course sections, psychology statistics students (N = 58) provided evaluations of the instructor, course, and benefits of the syllabus and course for helping them to understand and describe the skills they acquired in the course to employers and graduate schools. Student perceptions of the relevance and effectiveness of the syllabus increased significantly after rereading the skills-based syllabus section at the course’s end. From the narrative responses, three primary themes emerged: instructor behavior, course organization and content, and professional application and development. Our data suggest that introducing students’ skill sets orally and in writing on the first day—and repeating them periodically during the course—can be important for student development. Discussing skills should continue across the semester to maximize student growth, educational engagement, and postgraduation opportunities. The benefit of this nonexperimental, applied pilot study is primarily heuristic; it provides future researchers with preliminary findings that can serve as a foundational step in the future implementation of more rigorous experimental designs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)