Abstract:

In our academic context, in the course of Psychometrics, it has been appreciated that the students have difficulties fully comprehending the concepts of “operational and relational” construct definitions. It seems possible that the problems related to these concepts arise because they have an apparently easy-to-understand theoretical definition that, at the same time, implies complex and abstract psychological content. Despite the students manifesting, during the lectures, that these psychometric concepts have been accessible, the results regarding class projects and the difficulty index of the items related to these concepts point to a different conclusion.

The objective of this study is to tackle this situation by breaking with the traditional lectures by fostering that the students translate both abstract definitions using their own concepts and that they work manipulating more significant and concrete contents. Specifically, it is proposed that the students work with highly relevant psychology content (either related to research or psychological intervention), with popularly known constructs (e.g., autism spectrum disorder [ASD]) and academic materials (i.e., research papers) where “operational and relational” definitions of ASD would be easy to identify. The complexity of the activity lies in that the complete definitions of the construct can only be obtained by connecting the small pieces of the definitions, obtained individually in the assigned material, with the rest of the information obtained by the rest of the group participants.

Aronson’s jigsaw classroom may present an opportunity for students to face abstract psychometric concepts together by working within groups and contrasting their results with other groups. For this reason, we implemented this technique in activity groups with a maximum of 30 students, in a course of Psychometrics in the Degree in Psychology, University of Almería, with 196 enrolled undergraduates. We apply several scales such as the Student Satisfaction and Self-Confidence in Learning Scale (SCLS), the Student Engagement Questionnaire (SEQ), a Visual Analogue Scale regarding global motivation, together with students’ marks in the class project and some open-response questions that provide qualitative feedback and enable us to evaluate the impact of the activity.

The results will be discussed regarding both the teaching-learning procedure of the two target psychometric concepts and the improvement of student motivation, satisfaction, and self-confidence. Finally, we will provide recommendations for the application of this technique in the context of methodological subjects in Psychology.

Keywords:

Aronson's jigsaw classroom, innovative teaching methodologies, teaching-learning procedure, Psychometrics, Operational and relational definitions, Psychology.