Psychological principles applied in educational research

Psychologist and associate professor Catharine Evers has a big heart for education. In addition to conducting research, she is a passionate teacher. ‘Because of my academic mindset, I quickly began to wonder: how do students learn? How can I best convey the subject matter to them? And what educational principles underlie this?’ This prompted Evers to investigate. How did her knowledge of psychology help her in this?

Catharine Evers works in Social, Health & Organisational Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Utrecht University. This department teaches and conducts research on human behaviour in social contexts. Questions that Evers deals with include: How can you change people's behaviour? How do emotions influence goal-oriented behaviour and motivation? And why are you sometimes hindered in what you want to achieve?

Evers saw a clear link between all these issues and students and their learning behaviour. That is why she wanted to delve deeper into students' study behaviour. How do students prepare for the exam period? And what is the influence of a student's self-regulatory ability on their exam preparation and final grade?

‘Topics from educational science, such as student motivation, distraction and procrastination, can be transferred one-to-one to my psychological research and applied to students' learning behaviour. At a certain point, it dawned on me: we know so much about our own field of research, but we apply so little of it to research into education.’

Back to university herself

This prompted the associate professor to return to university herself to learn how to research her own teaching. She enrolled in the Teaching Scholars Programme, offered by the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning (CAT) in collaboration with UMC Utrecht. This is a course in which lecturers are guided in setting up and carrying out their first research project on teaching. Evers was supervised by educationalists Frans Prins and Theo Wubbels. ‘Our research method at Social, Health & Organisational Psychology has many similarities with how they work at Educational Sciences, in terms of the way they conduct research and apply quantitative statistics. So for me, it was a bit like coming home.’

We know so much about our own field of research, but apply so little of it to research into education.

As part of her course, Evers investigated students' self-regulatory abilities, how this is reflected in their learning behaviour within the Learning Management System (LMS) and whether this subsequently influenced their study results. She was assisted in this research by a research master's student and was given extra hours to conduct her research. ‘That was great, because time is really a bottleneck.’

Encouraging self-regulatory capacity

Students must work very autonomously, and we expect a great deal of independence from them. It is therefore important that they have self-regulatory skills. Self-regulation is an important concept in psychology. It has to do with motivation, setting and pursuing goals, planning and organising, dealing with obstacles and temptations, but also seeking help in time when necessary. Evers suspected that students who score high on these characteristics prepare better for exams and are therefore potentially more successful.

‘We were curious to see whether self-regulatory ability was reflected in the way students prepare for their exams and how they use the online learning environment. Can you tell from this how they study and prepare for an exam? We collected objective tracking data from Blackboard, the predecessor of the current Brightspace system. When were students active on this LMS and did this determine their performance?’

‘Students prepare for exams on this online platform. For example, they open assignments, read them through, work on them and then submit their assignments via this system.’

A nudge in the right direction

Evers also applied a method from psychology to her students: nudging. Nudging involves giving someone a nudge in the right direction without forcing them to do anything. She did this by incorporating practice questions into the course that students could complete in preparation for an exam. Students had to request access to these separately. She then wanted to check whether students requested these practice questions and whether they submitted them.

Evers expected that students who wanted to be well prepared would open the documents at an early stage and therefore also do these practice questions. And she was curious: would that behaviour also correlate with the grade a student achieved?

While the research was ongoing, the coronavirus pandemic broke out. The constantly changing coronavirus measures meant that the course became online one year, then hybrid, and then was modified again. In other words, the research did not go as planned: comparing trace data between courses that are constantly being redesigned is like comparing apples and oranges. ‘It was not possible to consistently link specific characteristics of self-regulatory ability in students to their behaviour in the LMS. It was also impossible to create a coherent dataset and conduct the research as we had planned in advance.’

If students can prepare earlier, this has a positive effect on their results.

Evers' research has been completed, the analysis of the trace data is ready, and she has summarised her findings to date in a report. And despite the fact that she was unable to carry out part of her research, there were still some results. The associate professor concluded that there is a correlation between spending more days active on the LMS and achieving higher exam scores. "So the preparatory behaviour we saw in the LMS was related to the grades they achieved. In a course with a traditional structure – weekly lectures with an exam at the end – the days spent actively using the LMS were even more strongly correlated with the exam grade than questionnaires designed to stimulate self-regulation."

It was also clear to Evers that the way in which you set up the LMS for students is very important. ‘By combining deadlines with active learning and partial exams, students are forced to prepare actively and in a timely manner. This has a positive effect on their study results.’

Permission to use data

“Every lecturer at Utrecht University can monitor their students’ behaviour in the LMS. But if you want to use the same data for research, the situation changes and you have to deal with ethical rules and privacy issues.” For his research, Evers had to seek approval from the faculty’s Ethics Committee, which requires students to give their consent for their activities in the LMS to be monitored and linked to their academic performance. "The committee found it a difficult case. Of course, you don't want to create a research design that could disadvantage students. For example, if you think that a certain intervention, such as a “nudge”, could help students, it feels strange to only give it to half of the group. Yet this is necessary within a research design, because you can only measure the effect of such an intervention by comparing a group with it to a group without it. In a clinical setting, a control group is sometimes temporarily placed on a waiting list, but that obviously doesn't work in an educational setting. From an ethical point of view, you therefore encounter these kinds of considerations. Sometimes the research seems to get in the way of education, while ultimately we want to understand which interventions and forms of education help students the most.

Resources and time for educational research

Evers continues to scrutinise her teaching in order to answer the questions she had at the start of her teaching career. After all, researching your own teaching provides an impetus for innovation. ‘My advice to the university: embrace educational research not only in words, but also make it possible in practice. Teachers currently do this mainly out of love for their profession and their students. That's wonderful, but it's not sustainable in the long term. If we really want teachers to continue researching and innovating, we need to make time and resources available for them to do so.’