Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

It’s the first day of PBS Lecturer Öykü Üner’s introductory course on cognitive psychology and the students file in after the winter break. Üner anticipates a familiar uncertainty. Most of the students are psychology majors, but they are not quite sure what they are there to learn.

“With abnormal or social psychology,” says Üner, “they know more or less what they’re getting into. Cognitive psychology? They have no idea.”

So she gives them a short exercise: Count the number of windows in the place where they spent their break. Maybe it was their parents’ house or their own apartment.

After a minute or two has passed, Üner asks them to consider, “What did they need to do to perform this ordinary task?” The answers themselves – which include remembering the space, keeping track of the number, even determining where the category of windows begins and ends, among other acts of recollection, calculation and decision making – provide a glimpse into the new subject matter.

“It is all those processes you use on an everyday basis that you kind of take for granted, things you do all the time, really well, but don’t ever stop to think about,” Üner explains. “By the end of the class I think they are surprised by how much the subject actually relates to their lives.”

Those moments of recognition when students see the subject matter of the course reflected in their everyday lives is one of the things Üner loves most about introducing cognitive psychology to students. Studies of attention for example, have practical implications for everyday life, enabling students to better understand the limitations of this capacity, for example, when using your cell phone while driving or, for that matter, while sitting in class.

 

 

But perhaps it’s her own research interests on learning and memory that hit home the most. As Üner says, “I like to tell them that they’ve always gotten instruction on the content of their classes, but rarely on how best to learn it. That is what my research is about.” It’s also why she shares evidence-based study strategies with them in the first week of the semester.”

“At the end they realize how much the course relates to their everyday life. I like teaching that class because of that: Really getting them to understand what it means and how it connects to their life. That’s huge for me.”

Mentoring Role Models

Üner grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, where it was necessary to decide one’s course of study in advance of attending a university. The child of two engineer parents, Üner wasn’t quite sure what she herself wanted to do. So her parents took her to talk to people at universities in different disciplines. “My parents were really lovely,” she says, “in that they made sure I got a lot of information beforehand.” After meeting with a psychology researcher, Üner knew what she wanted to study.

The university she attended in Istanbul was relatively small and she had excellent mentors, one of whom had gotten her Ph.D. in the U.S. and encouraged her apply to graduate schools there. She attended Washington University in St. Louis, a hub for research in her areas of interest in learning and memory. “The university was great,” she notes, “and my Ph.D. advisor was amazing.” Having had such guidance and support throughout her school career, Üner recognizes how important this is. “I know just how much it has meant to me and I try to provide that for my students,” she says.

Evidence-based teaching

Completing her Ph.D. in 2021, Üner soon joined the PBS faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor before receiving her current Lecturer position. Being at PBS, she again finds herself among people who share her interest in education-related research. It is, she says, “a nice way to still be plugged into the research and collaborate with people,” while remaining mostly focused on teaching. She recently collaborated with PBS Assistant Professor Ben Motz in a study demonstrating the usefulness of a new plug-in tool for experimental research on teaching and learning, Terracotta, developed by Motz and his collaborators. Enlisting students in her own class to participate, the study successfully replicated previous work showing that retrieval practices like weekly multiple-choice quizzes more effectively improve student learning than passively reviewing one’s notes and readings. She is also looking into other collaborations within PBS and at the university level.

If she pursues research more extensively in the future, Üner says she would focus on overcoming the disconnect between research on learning and memory and its actual application to the classroom. The challenge lies in translating research done in laboratory-based experiments into principles for student learning. Students come in with different levels of motivation and preparedness. These variations can change the effectiveness of the study strategies researched in the lab. Moreover, the complexity of what they are learning in the classroom is also at odds with the learning materials often used in laboratory experiments. Overcoming these challenges involves doing more complex tasks in the lab as well as more studies in actual classrooms. “Ideally, doing both is the most important,” says Üner. “You can learn in a controlled lab environment and pinpoint why this worked or didn’t work. In a classroom setting you have more variation.”

In the meantime, Üner continues to make the most difference in the classroom itself - and on the way students learn there.