Are you looking for new ways to introduce original psychological research to your Intro Psych students? In this freely available journal article, authors identified 14 articles from the open access Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, each relevant to one of 14 typical chapters in an Intro Psych textbook (Rouse et al., 2025). For each identified article, the authors provide the reference information for the article, the abstract, key terms, and five questions. The questions are intended to be used by an instructor to prompt students to reflect on each of the sections of a journal article.
For example, for an article on procrastination (Gregory et al., 2023), after students have read the article, the authors suggest asking your students these questions:
Question 1 (Understanding background):
“Academic entitlement beliefs” can be defined as a propensity to possess an expectation of academic success without having to assume personal responsibility to achieve this success. How may social media and a growing consumer mindset have coincided with or contributed to the increase of these beliefs over recent generations?
Question 2 (Understanding purpose):
Although many studies have examined the consequences of procrastination, few have explored predictors or causes of procrastination. Why might this be?
Question 3 (Understanding method):
Social desirability bias can occur when respondents to a survey answer questions in ways they think will be viewed favorably by others. How could the researchers have limited the impact of social desirability bias in this study on procrastination?
Question 4 (Understanding results):
The results of this study indicate that the behavioral variable of daily social media did not significantly predict procrastination, but it did significantly correlate with procrastination. Why would this result be significant? Could there be another direct effect between social media and procrastination?
Question 5 (Implications for life):
Considering that the elements of academic entitlement and conscientiousness may both impact procrastination tendencies, how could students practically apply these results to their study habits? (Rouse et al., 2025, p. 104)
If you’re a fan of the jigsaw classroom, it would work well here. Divide students into groups of five. Give each group one of the questions to discuss. Once they have their answers, assign one student from each group into a new group so that each new group has a representative for each question. Each student, in turn, summarizes their original group’s discussion.
Because the articles aren’t super short—the one on procrastination is 10 pages—students should be encouraged to read the assigned article before coming to class.
