SIOP’s Teaching Resources: A Report From the Education and Training Committee

Thaddeus Rada-Bayne, Augsburg University, Marissa Shuffler, Clemson University

Hello readers,

The start of 2019 finds the Education and Training (E&T) Committee engaged in a variety of efforts to provide support to teachers in a diverse array of settings. In this update, we would like to highlight some of the resources that the Teaching Tools (TT) subcommittee of E&T oversees. We would also like to solicit feedback on how access to these materials could be improved to reach the widest audience possible.

Over the past decade plus, the TT subcommittee has built up a sizeable library of teaching resources. These resources have been contributed by a wide array of authors, making them an excellent example of SIOP’s commitment to the collaborative advancement of our field. The most recently-added of these resources is a “boilerplate” chapter on I-O psychology that can be included in general psychology textbooks (see Nick Salter’s GIT blog for updates on this effort: http://my.siop.org/GIT-Blog). Due to the general lack of attention that I-O receives in most general psychology textbooks, the goal of this chapter is to give textbook authors an off-the-shelf chapter that will enable them to introduce their readers to I-O psychology, without needing to have a background in our field. The creation of this chapter followed on the heels of a related effort to write one-page summaries of core content areas in I-O, such as individual differences, occupational health and safety, and motivation. Although one goal of these summaries is to assist textbook authors with writing their own I-O focused chapter, they could be used by a variety of audiences. (Links to both the chapter and one-page summaries can be found at the following link: http://0-www-siop-org.library.alliant.edu/Instruct/incorporating_io.aspx.)

In addition to these newer materials, many other resources have been compiled and maintained by the TT group over the past several years. For example, we have a collection of active learning exercises that are designed to facilitate discussion and participation in I-O courses. There are also examples of course assignments related to job analysis, adverse impact, and culture, among others. We have also created resource lists that may be especially helpful for instructors teaching I-O for the first time, such as publication information for frequently-used I-O textbooks, and primary sources in a variety of content areas that have been found to work well in the classroom. Finally, we have resource guides to assist educators with tasks outside the classroom, such as advising and mentoring.

Since 2005, most of the resources that the TT group compiled were housed in an open-access wiki environment. However, traffic at the wiki has dropped in recent years, perhaps indicating a general shift away from this format. In an effort to maintain the visibility of these resources, there has been an effort among the TT members to copy over the resources from the wiki into the “Educators” section of the main SIOP website. However, this migration has led to some duplication of resources across different areas of the SIOP website. There are also challenges associated with updating materials on this platform—while any user could contribute resources to the wiki, requests to add materials to the SIOP website must be placed through the chair of the TT subcommittee, which may discourage users from contributing their own resources and materials.

Given the current popularity of cloud-based file storage options, the TT subcommittee is considering shifting our resources to a platform such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Doing so would divorce the materials from the SIOP website, but would provide a central location and framework for organizing our existing resources that would be easier to manage. This change would also permit users to submit their own teaching materials to share with other users, much as they could through the wiki.

In an effort to understand attitudes toward our teaching resources and their organization, we would like to hear from you, the SIOP membership. We have put together a short survey to assess current usage of the teaching resources, as well as preferences for organizing these resources going forward. You can access the survey at the link below. Whether or not you have utilized SIOP’s teaching resources in the past, we hope you will take a few minutes to provide us with your feedback on these efforts.

https://goo.gl/forms/HLU1dQr5kjEV7Nt92

We will share the results of the survey, and our plans for any changes that are made based on the feedback we receive, in a future issue of TIP. Thank you, in advance, for your assistance improving these resources!