Award Winners

Dr. Alisha C. Holland is a psychological scientist and educator whose work focuses on integrative approaches to teaching introductory psychology. After initially designing her course around the APA Introductory Psychology Initiative pillar model, Dr. Holland identified a key limitation: although students were exposed to multiple subdisciplines, the course did little to demonstrate how those areas connect as part of a unified field. In response, she redesigned her introductory psychology course around four overarching “Big Questions” that cut across subdisciplines and explicitly link course content to APA-IPI integrative themes.

This thematic course design is supported by Scholarship of Teaching and Learning literature and includes integrative assessments, most notably a semester-long “Big Answers” assignment that requires students to apply psychological concepts from across the course to real-world issues they care about. Dr. Holland has received positive student feedback on this approach, and her department voted to transition all introductory psychology courses to a thematic design by the 2026–2027 academic year. In addition, she has coordinated and supported colleagues in developing their own versions of the Big Questions framework and has engaged in ongoing empirical work examining student outcomes, with preliminary analyses indicating greater student engagement in thematically organized sections.