SXU Psychology Professor Receives Teacher-Scholar Award
Saint Xavier University (SXU) psychology professor LaTreese Hall, Ph.D., has received the College of Liberal Arts and Education's Teacher-Scholar Award. The Teacher-Scholar Award recognizes faculty whose scholarship directly enhances their teaching through efforts such as developing new courses, adopting innovative teaching strategies, increasing teaching effectiveness, and involving students in meaningful research experiences.
"Receiving this award is so meaningful to me because I really care about using research to create engaging, supportive learning experiences for my students," said Hall.
In her time at SXU, Hall has developed the Psychology in Film course, gamified her developmental classes, uses frequent surveys and studies in her classes to improve her teaching, and has established the GLAD (Gamification, Learning and Development) Lab.
"My teaching informs my research because the classroom constantly generates questions worth studying. And my research informs my teaching because every study changes how I think about engagement, motivation and the learning environment," said Hall.
Hall's ability to create engaging experiences is evident in her classrooms, which have 95-97% attendance averages. Through patterns that raise research questions, her classroom experiences shape her scholarship.
"I noticed that students seemed more motivated to complete assignments (in my class, they are called challenges) when they were framed as earning 50 points on a challenge out of 5,000 total semester points instead of 1 point on a challenge out of 100 total semester points," said Hall.
When she established the GLAD Lab, she designed a collaborative research project inspired by that observation, and over the past few semesters, over 15 student researchers have worked together to investigate multiple questions related to gamification and motivation. They are exploring how point framing influences motivation, how gamified narratives affect memory for assignment details, and how factors like GPA, personality traits, self-efficacy, and gender relate to perceptions of gamified assignments.
"One of my favorite parts of this project is that the students themselves helped shape the research questions based on what interested them. Many of those students have been presenting their work at conferences, which has been incredibly rewarding to watch," said Hall.
Hall has wanted to be a teacher since she was a young child, surrounded by alphabet toys, number activities, books, and educational games. Her first teaching job was at 15 years old in the daycare center of her high school for part of her child development class.
"Long before I had the language of pedagogy, developmental psychology, or scholarship, I was already fascinated by how people learn. That curiosity stayed with me," said Hall. "I started by playing school, and now I have the privilege of spending my career trying to understand what makes school worth playing in the first place."
In the future, Hall hopes to continue exploring innovative approaches such as gamification, field studies, and escape room-style learning experiences to make psychology even more interactive for students. She will soon travel to Barcelona for the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention to engage in conversations about teaching, learning and research.