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Teaching Psychological Critical Thinking Using Popular Media

Psychological concepts are ever-present in popular media and students need to learn to think critically about the accuracy of such portrayals. As part of a first-year course, students were taught to critically evaluate the accuracy of psychological concepts portrayed in episodes of the animated TV series South Park. Each week, the students submitted written analyses of one episode describing the accuracy of concepts portrayed. Three of these analyses (semester beginning, midterm, and semester end) were evaluated independently by two raters using three rubrics measuring critical thinking and written communication skills. Large gains were observed across all rubric measures in two sections of this course (final sample = 28 students, &eegr;p2 ranging from 0.68 to 0.78). Improvement in written communication was equivalent between those simultaneously enrolled in the university’s English composition course and those who were not (&eegr;p2 = 0.02). Despite these gains, further research is needed to test the effectiveness of this program in other classrooms and with other popular media.