THE IMPACT OF AUTHENTIC PEDAGOGY IN ENHANCING UNDERGRADUATE LEARNING AND THINKING OUTCOMES IN ONLINE UNDERGRADUATE PSYCHOLOGY COURSES

Amid the changing landscape of higher education with broadened emphasis on online and technology-supported instructional formats, there have been calls for new instructional methods that might enhance learning. The U.S. Commission on Higher Education has urged postsecondary institutions to embrace new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve student learning, and professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association have made recommendations for approaches that might improve the quality of undergraduate education. Authentic pedagogy is a broad term that describes an active learning perspective with a focus on the construction of meaning and intellectual quality in the learning process. Most of the work associated with authentic pedagogy has been done in conjunction with educational reform efforts in elementary and secondary institutions in which the focus has changed from an input model (that measures what is put into the educational setting) to an outcome model (that gives information about what children have actually learned.) There are very few studies, though, that have examined its use in higher education, its impact on measurements of academic performance, its influence on advancing higher order thinking, or its possible introduction in online classroom environments. This presentation will report on a study in which academic performance scores and measurements of higher order thinking on the Reflective Learning Continuum were evaluated after introducing an authentic pedagogical activity into online undergraduate psychology courses. The presentation will discuss issues related to implementation in an online course delivery format and the significant positive outcomes that this approach can produce in undergraduate education.