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Teaching, Learning, and Community in Psychology

I’m thrilled to share the Spring 2026 issue of “Beyond the Blackboard,” the newsletter of the Canadian Psychological Association’s Teaching of Psychology (ToP) Section: https://miniurl.com/f91npeob

This issue reflects so much of what makes the ToP community meaningful: thoughtful conversations about teaching, recognition of excellent psychology educators, practical strategies for supporting student learning, and opportunities to connect through upcoming events, including our new ToP Journal Club.

Many thanks to the ToP Executive and everyone who contributed to this issue. I hope you enjoy reading it, and I hope it encourages more psychology educators, researchers, and students to get involved with the section!

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Participation is predictive of individual, but not group, work in the context of a blended education course. (A first to remember!)

This paper will be a first to remember for me; it’s my first paper published in 2021, and the first published under TLR In Action (our recently formed not-for-profit). It also happens to be my first paper published in The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CJSoTL), where I’m taking up my first editorial position as an associate editor. This will be a first to remember!

Click here for a link to the paper! We show that students participation grades are predictive of their grades on course work that they complete individually in a blended learning context.

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Understanding the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement

Our paper on the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement is now available online! Here is a pre-formatted version of the paper.

In this study, we provide evidence demonstrating that it is not enough for students to be physically present in class to do well in a course – students’ engagement in class, not attendance, is predictive of their achievement in the course.

Thanks to all my co-authors – Sharry Shakory, Arman Azad, Celia Popovic and Lillian Park – for a great collaboration!

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Cognition and Education

I just received my copy of “The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education” – looking forward to reading it cover to cover! I’m honoured to be a contributor, among many scholars I look up to.

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The spacing effect stands up to big data

Our new paper, “The spacing effect stands up to big data”, is now accessible here. We analyzed longitudinal data from 10,514 individuals, collected in the context of naturally occurring workplace training. Our results revealed a significant interaction between spacing interval and retention interval: the optimal amount of spacing between repeated retrieval events increased as the retention interval increased. These findings are in line with the results of laboratory studies, demonstrating the relevance and transferability of laboratory-based research to real-world contexts.

A big thank you to my co-authors for their contributions to the study, as well as Carol Leaman and the entire Axonify team for such a great, ongoing collaboration.

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Using lego in the classroom: making implicit ideas explicit

This morning I gave a guest lecture for my colleague from Engineering at York University, Jeff Harris, focused on cognitive learning strategies discussed by Weinstein, Madan, & Sumeracki (2018) – a reading that students were assigned to read before class. In class, I challenged students to build lego representations of these strategies. The purpose of this creative lego activity was to deepen students’ understanding of these strategies by making their implicit ideas about them explicit. Here’s a sample of what they came up with!

  • Interleaving
  • Retrieval Practice
  • Elaboration
  • Distributed (Spaced) Practice
  • Concrete Examples

The activity sparked interesting discussions, and helped students identify what aspects of the assigned reading material they needed to review and/or clarify. It is definitely a teaching exercise that I will use again in the future.

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STLHE 2018 cracker barrel session on supporting SoTL researchers

We had a great turnout yesterday, and very insightful discussions on how to support SoTL researchers, at our cracker barrel session: “Insights into how to best support scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) researchers //Aperçu de la façon de mieux soutenir les chercheurs du SoTL.” If you couldn’t make it to our session, attached is our handout.