Psychological misconception endorsement often is due to a failure or inability to think critically about information that may or may not be accurate. This study examined to what extent undergraduate introductory psychology students' personality traits and the supraliminal, semantic priming of their metacognition and critical thinking predict their ability to dispel common psychological misconceptions. Fitting hierarchical regression models, exploratory analyses found that Black/African American persons, Hispanic/Latino/a persons, and persons from other ethnic minority groups exemplified greater psychological misconception endorsement than White persons. Also, assertiveness (an aspect of extroversion on the Big Five), intellect (an aspect of openness/intellect), and orderliness (an aspect of conscientiousness) significantly predicted misconception endorsement. Controlling for demographics and personality, the prime was not a significant predictor of misconception endorsement. Despite this, 46.52% of the variation in misconception endorsement was explained by the complete set of predictors. In terms of the potentially metacognitively advanced response of "don't know" on the misconceptions test, as students' year level of college when they took an introductory psychology course increased, their frequency of endorsement of "don't know" increased, while their endorsement of misconceptions decreased. Also as orderliness decreased, endorsement of "don't know" increased. Again, controlling for demographics and personality, the prime was not a significant predictor. Nevertheless, a majority of undergraduate introductory psychology students still endorsed and believed in many common psychological misconceptions. The implications of these results for teaching are that the use of equitable and inclusive classroom activities geared toward student diversity in misconception endorsement and the collaborative construction of knowledge should be emphasized.

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Objective: This study examines whether there are differences among first-generation and continuing-generation community college students in the importance they place on achieving college-related goals and difficulties they face from college- and other life-related challenges. Methods: Data were drawn from the Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success student survey. Results: Results from MANCOVA show that, after adjusting for age, gender identity, U.S. birth status, and race/ethnicity, first-generation college students (FGCSs) place more importance on achieving college-related goals and face greater difficulties from college- and other life-related challenges than continuing-generation college students (CGCSs). Contributions: These findings indicate that community colleges should offer more support to FGCSs pertaining to students’ goals and challenges so that all community college students may be successful in their academic pursuits. Future research should explore interaction effects among student demographics and their goals and challenges as well as interventions to support community college students. This is because community colleges enroll the largest number of FGCSs compared to other institutions of higher education, and FGCSs and community college students share challenges when it comes to obtaining a college degree.