Thursday and Friday, July 29-30, 2027
Duke University, Penn Pavilion
Durham, North Carolina
Duke University, Penn Pavilion
Durham, North Carolina
REGISTRATION IS OPEN! THE 2027 CONFERENCE WILL BE JULY 29TH AND 30TH
This annual conference is for people who share a passion for the teaching of Introductory Psychology at the high school and college levels. It will feature three outstanding keynote addresses as well as a range of workshops, demonstrations, and interactive roundtable discussions. The primary focus of this conference is to provide attendees with engaging presentations and discussions that focus on tips and techniques to reinvigorate your course!
Whether you are a graduate student teaching Introductory Psychology for the first time or someone who's been teaching the course for a long time, you are welcome to join our community. Attendance is limited to 100 participants to ensure an intimate and highly interactive experience.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
The class is lively, heads are nodding, and students leave class seeming to understand the material. Yet on exam day, students seem baffled by concepts they knew just days earlier. What happened? Through a series of hands-on demonstrations and examples, you will experience firsthand how easily our intuition about memory can miss the mark. We'll uncover what cognitive scientists have learned about how people actually learn and remember. Each surprising result will lead to practical, research-based strategies that you can start using immediately to improve learning and teaching.
Janell Blunt is a cognitive scientist and educator whose research focuses on how people learn and how teaching can be improved through research-based practices. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Purdue University and has published research in reputable journals, including Science, with her work featured in The New York Times. As an Associate Professor of Psychology at Anderson University, she has taught more than 20 sections of Introductory Psychology, with class sizes ranging from 20 to more than 400 students. She also shares learning strategies to help employees upskill as a LinkedIn Learning instructor. When not in the classroom, you can find her applying the science of learning to bike maintenance, slow speed climbing (we all have to start somewhere), and piano.
Why do we laugh? Despite its association with humor, most laughter happens not in response to jokes, but while we’re interacting with other people. In this talk, I will explore the science of laughter: where it comes from, why it’s so rewarding, and what it might be doing in our relationships. Drawing on research from her lab and beyond, I’ll examine the different forms laughter can take, why we laugh with friends and strangers, and what laughter reveals about social connection.
Adrienne Wood is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia, where she studies how people connect—from shared laughter and engaging conversations to the social networks and culturally diverse communities they build. Her lab examines how verbal and nonverbal behaviors help people understand one another and form bonds, how people build and navigate social networks, and what happens when they move between communities. Her research draws on methods ranging from acoustic analysis and mobile sensing to social network analysis and computational modeling, and is supported by an NSF CAREER Award. Outside the lab, she has a toddler, two unruly hounds, and one ruly cat. She unwinds from the chaos with improv, arts and crafts, and piano.
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