Title

National Opinions About Skills Psychology Graduates Should Possess

Document Type

Student Presentation

Presentation Date

April 2017

Faculty Sponsor

Eric Landrum

Abstract

Students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in psychology should be able to transfer general critical thinking skills from the classroom to career and correctly interpret, design, and conduct basic psychological research by graduation. Our goal was to obtain a robust honest indicator from a national sample of psychology professors about the usefulness of the type of problem that we presented, a statistical analysis based on a specific data table, as an assessment item for psychology majors about what they know before and after Research Methods and at graduation. We emailed a link to a survey we created through the web-based program Qualtrics to 1,823 psychology professors nationally (with 210 responding). The participants answered the 10-item questionnaire to the best of their knowledge and had the option to give feedback at the end. Professors rated their graduates on their ability to transfer general critical thinking skills form classroom to career at a 63.1%. A graduates’ ability to correctly interpret basic psychological research one year after graduation averaged only 59.6% by participants. Our findings add additional data to the importance of promoting retention of critical thinking skills and research methods and improving student’s success upon graduation.

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