National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology
The submission portal closed on April 1.
The National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP) is an annual conference for teachers of psychology. NITOP is an independent, nonprofit, educational organization. The NITOP organizing committee invites distinguished
speakers based on nominations from past participants, expertise in topics related to the teaching of psychology, and demonstrated skill in presenting. Presentations include workshops, concurrent sessions, and general sessions on topics of interest
to psychology teachers at all levels, from high school through university. To assist these teachers in improving their effectiveness and enhancing their students' learning, the Institute program offers content updates, new instructional techniques, and engaging activities. Submissions were due by April 1, 2025.
NITOP 2026 is scheduled for January 3-6, 2026, at the Grand Hotel Resort in Point Clear, Alabama, USA. Visit the NITOP website
to learn more. Hotel, registration, and airfare are covered by the Psychonomic Society.
PS-sponsored Talk
The PS-sponsored talk is a 50-minute presentation (followed by Q&A) that should address a topic relevant to any aspect of teaching psychology or improving student success in psychology courses.
At least two kinds of PS-sponsored talks are appropriate for NITOP:
- A discussion of research aimed directly at improving instruction or student achievement (such as effective strategies for improving critical thinking or effective techniques for note taking); or
- A widely-accessible overview of research that focuses on a topic taught in psychology (i.e. attention, perception, memory, language, comprehension) and includes a discussion of ideas on how to effectively teach the topic to college students.
Speaker Requirements
- Present your work during a one-hour session. Based on your presentation, you may be assigned to give either a keynote presentation or two (identical) concurrent sessions. Your room may have up to 400 attendees.
- Be a judge for the poster awards (attend each poster session).
- Be actively engaged with attendees at lunches.
- Promote the Psychonomic Society and its annual meeting to the audience with a slide at the end of your talk.
Questions?
Please use our Contact Us form.
Current PS-sponsored NITOP speaker
48th Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2026 | Point Clear, Alabama, USA
The Get Psyched Curriculum: How to Make Intro Psych Memorable with Engaging Pathways to Learning
Pooja K. Agarwal
Berklee College of Music, USA
Abstract:
Introductory Psychology has been taught the same way for decades. Lecture slides, question banks, and class activities are stale — for us and our students. Learn how to energize and revamp your Intro Psych course with innovative pathways to improve long-term learning: textbook-free Book Clubs, Co-LAB-orative Experiments, Psych Sandbox assignments, and a Science Brief Video Project.
Previous PS-sponsored NITOP speakers
47th Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2025 | Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA
Doc, There's a Gorilla in that Lung: Teaching about Use-Inspired Basic Research in Vision and Attention
Jeremy M. Wolfe
Harvard Medical School, USA
Abstract:
As topics to teach, vision and attention have the advantage of offering many excellent demonstrations. Indeed, I promise to show a few that you have not seen. My purpose is to show that these are more than intellectually stimulating fun and games. Missing
things that are “right in front of your eyes” and seeing things that are not actually present are phenomena with important real-world consequences. We miss visible stimuli all the time. These can be trivial. Did you notice the repeated “the” in the
previous sentence? They can also be highly consequential as when a driver fails to see a pedestrian or a radiologists fails to spot a tumor in an x-ray. In driving, these are known as “look but fail to see” errors, following what the driver says to
the police at the scene of the accident (Officer, I know I Iooked to my left. I just didn’t see that motorcycle.) In radiology, such errors are said to be “retrospectively visible” because you can go back to the image and see that the tumor was there.
The law often sees these errors as evidence of negligence. Are they? On the other hand, the law is often quite convinced by eye-witness accounts of what was seen. How and when is it possible for an honest witness be honestly wrong? Psychological science
has a lot to say about these topics but we need to grow the audience. We don’t need to teach students to simply disbelieve their own eyes (or ears, nose, tongue, etc.), but we can teach them to be discerning consumers of the testimony of the senses:
their own and those others.
46th Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2024 | Bonita Springs, Florida, USA
Curiosity and Learning from Errors
Janet Metcalfe
Columbia
University, USA
Abstract:
Nobody wants to make a mistake on a test that counts. If a person is taking a high stakes test, performing a concert, giving a lecture, or making a critical medical decision, the last thing they want is to make an error. The issue that is addressed in
this talk is not whether making an error in such a situation is desirable. Of course it is not. The question, rather, is whether making errors in preparation for such a test–when the person is learning–is valuable and helps learning or is detrimental
and to be avoided. It might seem intuitive that if one does not want errors on the test that counts, then one should avoid them at all stages of learning. By this view, committing errors should make those errors more salient and entrench them into
both the memory and the operating procedures of the person who makes them. Exercising errors should make the errors themselves stronger, thus increasing their probability of recurrence. In contrast to this view, however, much recent research indicates
that making and correcting errors during study can be highly beneficial. Many tightly controlled experimental investigations have now shown that in comparison with error-free study, the generation of errors, as long as it is followed by corrective
feedback, and as long as the learner understands and is engaged in processing the feedback, results in better memory for the correct response than does error free learning. This literature, and some constraints and boundary conditions on it, will
be described. In addition, a study that we conducted investigating how teachers used such 'learning from errors' to prepare students for a high stakes Regents' test, which the students needed to pass in order to graduate high-school, will be discussed.
Finally, engagement with errors may be useful in educational settings not only because of the enhanced learning that results but also because of the role errors play in stimulating curiosity.
45th Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2023 | St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA
Metacognition and the Impostor Phenomenon: Why Teachers Should Take off Their Genius Masks
Lisa Son
Barnard College,
Columbia University, USA
Abstract:
A growing body of literature suggests that we live among impostors. That is, many of us feel that we do not deserve our successes, and instead will attribute our achievements to external factors, such as luck or extra hard work. To avoid being “found
out” that we are not the “genius” that others believe we are, we might then behave in ways that are harmful for further learning and advancement. For instance, we might fail to use appropriate metacognitive strategies. Metacognition is made up of
two components, monitoring and control. For impostors, I will argue that while the monitor may be intact – we might know what we don’t know, the control function will often break down. In the classroom, for instance, a student impostor might know
that they need help, but resist arguing for a higher grade, resist asking the teacher for extra help, resist requesting feedback on a rough draft, resist joining a study group, or, even simply, resist raising one’s hand in class. In this talk, I will
first present the various features of an impostor, focusing mainly on the symptoms that might lead to a breakdown in metacognitive control. Then, I will go through a study on the hindsight bias, which will highlight not only how the mask gets put
on, but also the deceptively thin nature of the mask. Finally, I will provide thoughts on how students might believe that they need the impostor mask to impress their teachers, who may be more “expert,” or deceptive, impostors. Overall, I hope to
spark a larger discussion on why metacognition is so challenging to apply in the classroom, and what can be done about it.
44th Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2022 | Live streamed | St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA
Designing Online Courses for Flexibility and Fairness
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
University
of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
Abstract:
Among other revelations, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the need for online classes to be designed with built-in flexibility. The pandemic also revealed inequalities that existed prior to but were magnified by COVID-19. For example, low-income
students work more hours at paid jobs and have more family responsibilities than their more affluent peers; students of color are less likely to obtain disability documentation that would otherwise provide the flexibility they need; and students
from cultures under-represented on college campuses are less likely to approach faculty and staff to request flexibility. By attending this presentation, participants will be introduced to the scientific literature documenting these and
other inequalities, as well as the empirical data documenting instructors' attitudes toward granting extensions. Participants will also learn how to design and implement policies that provide flexibility fairly and consistently across a variety of
class experiences (e.g., attendance, deadlines, group work, office hours, and presentations). The goal is to imbue online classes with the flexibility needed for all students to succeed in a fair and consistent way during and beyond the pandemic.
42nd Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2020 | St. Pete Beach, Florida
Improving Student Success - From the Classroom to the Lab to the Classroom to...We Need to Talk!
Donald J. Foss
University of Houston, USA
Recently, Stephen Chew provided a list of nine cognitive challenges related to teaching and student learning, followed by this (2017): “Effective teaching involves solving a nine-way interaction of factors. And these are only the cognitive factors and
does not even address social, emotional, or other kinds of factors.”
The scamp in me tempts me to say—under my breath, of course: Is that all?
That temptation arises because of a strong suspicion that he may be correct,
and at least a dim realization of the difficulty in finding a sweet spot among that swirling set of variables. Yikes!
I think we’re going to have to figure out how to do work that generalizes and gets decent effect sizes while we build
up the practical and theoretical acumen to predict when we will get both commitment to learn and transfer of that learning—supremely important yet elusive goals.
This talk will discuss an approach to putting together what we think we’ve
learned from the lab with the complexities of the college classroom as lived. It employs semester-long studies combined with careful counterbalancing of some variables we can ethically manipulate. I’ll talk about some successes and, from one point
of view at least, some less-than-successful work on learning and transfer, and address students’ metacognition and the effects of feedback on it. Finally, I’ll suggest that we consider other pedagogically in vivo, but still relatively “small ball”
approaches that can (1) examine social, intellectual, and teaching technique variables that may help us find those sweet spots, and (2) permit relatively easy adoption by our colleagues.
41st Annual NITOP Meeting
January 3-6, 2019 | St. Pete Beach, Florida
Why Effective Techniques May not Help Students Achieve: Challenges for Implementing Cognitive Principles in College.
John Dunlosky
Kent State University, USA
About NITOP
NITOP is an independent, non-profit organization whose conference is co-sponsored by the Association for Psychological Science and the University of South Florida. NITOP brings together about 400 psychology faculty members. Sessions update participants on psychological science and provide them with fresh ideas for updating their courses and improving their teaching. You can learn more about NITOP from their website:
www.nitop.org.
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