The learning styles hypothesis--and particularly the meshing hypothesis--state that learners' preferences about their preferred modality of learning (i.e., visual, aural, or kinesthetic) predict learning gains on academic tasks. Despite the fact that this hypothesis is not borne out by the scientific evidence available to us, it still remains in…

"The Cognitive Challenges of Effective Teaching," by Chew and Cerbin (2021) outlines a framework of nine cognitive challenges to student learning. The framework can help economic educators better design and describe new ideas for teaching in economics. In this article, the author highlights and expands upon ideas that are particularly…

The authors describe a research-based conceptual framework of how students learn that can guide the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of teaching practice. The framework consists of nine interacting cognitive challenges that teachers need to address to enhance student learning. These challenges include student mental mindset,…

Generative learning involves actively making sense of to-be-learned information by mentally reorganizing and integrating it with one's prior knowledge, thereby enabling learners to apply what they have learned to new situations. In this article, we present eight learning strategies intended to promote generative learning: summarizing, mapping,…

This article is prepared as part of a "Practice Teaching in Science" course of a teacher education program aiming for developing prospective science teachers' teaching through inquiry-based instruction involving practices of science and active learning strategies. During the semester, student teachers are required to prepare four…

In this article, the contributions of cognitive psychology to research and development of medical education are assessed. The cognitive psychology of learning consists of activation of prior knowledge while processing new information and elaboration on the resulting new knowledge to facilitate storing in long-term memory. This process is limited…

When presented with a problem in mathematics class, students often function as problem performers rather than problem solvers (Rigelman 2007). That is, rather than understanding the problem, students focus on using an operation to complete it. Students' tendencies to act as problem performers can prevent them from suggesting problem-solving…

Recent research on disciplinary literacy has called for a paradigm shift among secondary content teachers from perceiving themselves as disciplinary content transmitters to disciplinary literacy teachers who model and engage students in reading, writing, inquiring, and doing like experts within each discipline. How do content teachers incorporate…

At the intersection of social studies and world language curricula are opportunities to explore students' prior learning with vocabulary-rich content designed to support language acquisition goals. "Funds of knowledge" is defined as socio-cultural, economic, and historical knowledge from home and community settings. The instructional…

The Common Core State Standards and Response to Intervention are significant contemporary educational initiatives that have emerged largely in isolation from one another. We argue that an integration of these initiatives is beneficial. We trace the independent development of these two initiatives and offer suggestions for how they might fruitfully…

Life-long learning is a process. Learning skill ability is common to all as well as individually unique. A learner's beliefs are constantly susceptible to conditioning from external expectations. A discussion reflects on techniques for strengthening distance-learning skills in this technological age.

Public education in the United States is sequenced in such a manner that a skill learned at one level is then transferred to a more complex skill at yet a higher level. In addition, the individual concepts or grade-level-expectations based on state Standards are designed this way. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) stated, "Educators hope…

Students in higher education are being taught pedagogically. Moreover, pedagogy has long persisted as the basis for the entire educational system. Education is, however, discovering that adults learn differently than children learn even though they have been taught as children were taught. Students tend to behave dependently when they are in a…

Instructional design can be more effective if it is as fixedly dedicated to the accommodation of individual differences as it currently is to the accommodation of subject matters. That is the hypothesis. A menu of accommodation options is provided that is applicable at each of three stages of instructional development or administration: before,…

We synthesize ideas from the foregoing articles in this special issue and from the broader literature on transfer to explore several themes. In many ordinary life circumstances, transfer proceeds easily, but formal learning often shows much less transfer than educators would like, making failure to transfer a focus of investigation. Transfer, like…