This essay can save you money and make you a better teacher. Few graduate programs offer extensive training in how to teach, and many offer none at all. When it comes to developing teaching skills, new faculty are often left on their own unless
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This essay can save you money and make you a better teacher. Few graduate programs offer extensive training in how to teach, and many offer none at all. When it comes to developing teaching skills, new faculty are often left on their own unless they are fortunate enough to be on a campus with a good center for teaching and learning. Luckily, the past 25 years have seen an outpouring of resources on teaching in the form of books, blogs, journals, videos, and websites. Some must be purchased, but many are free. The topics and quality vary considerably, as do the authors’ background and the target audience. Some are based on research, others on personal teaching experience. It’s hard to know where to start. Every issue of The Teaching Professor is full of tips, ideas, and perspectives, but they may not apply to the problems you are currently facing in your teaching. The goal of this essay is to give you credible, accessible resources that address the cognitive challenges of teaching you are experiencing.
Bill Cerbin and I published a framework of the cognitive challenges of effective teaching (Chew & Cerbin, 2021; for a general overview, see Cerbin, 2022). These are the challenges that teachers and students must successfully negotiate for students to learn. There are nine challenges, and to help make the framework easier to understand, I have organized them into four categories. Table 1 shows the cognitive challenges associated with what students believe: student mental mindset, metacognition and self-regulation,and student fear and mistrust. The table lists a description and an example of each challenge. Table 2 shows the challenges arising from what students know, including lack of prior knowledge, misconceptions, and transfer of learning. Table 3 shows challenges related to what students can do. This category includes the constraints that the structure of human cognitive architecture imposes on learning—specifically, constraints of selective attention and constraints of mental effort and working memory. Finally, Table 4 shows the challenges associated with how students develop. They include ineffective learning strategies and metacognition and self-regulation.[1]
| Cognitive Challenges | Description and Example |
| Student Mental Mindset |
|
| Metacognition and Self-regulation |
|
| Student Fear and Mistrust |
|
| Cognitive Challenge | Description and Example |
| Insufficient Prior Knowledge |
|
| Misconceptions |
|
| Transfer of Learning |
|
| Cognitive Challenges | Description and Example |
| Constraints of Selective Attention |
|
| Constraints of Mental Effort and Working Memory |
|
| Cognitive Challenges | Description and Example |
| Ineffective Learning Strategies |
|
| Metacognition and Self-regulation |
|
The framework is intended to give teachers the knowledge of how people learn that will make them better teachers. It isn’t so much about the actual practices of teaching, but it does tell you what you are trying to accomplish with those practices. Teachers can use the framework to plan for or diagnose issues they encounter as they teach and determine ways to address them. Below, I list relevant resources to learn more about each challenge.
The resources I share here all come from three open educational resources. There are many more resources available, but I chose these because they are both credible and free to access. The first resource is the website TakingLearningSeriously.com, maintained by Bill Cerbin. He provides an expanded discussion of resources for each cognitive challenge. I’m going to abbreviate this website as TLS. The next two resources are both extraordinary e-books published by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP). They are Applying Science of Learning in Education (Benassi et al., 2014), which I will refer to as ASLE, and In Their Own Words: What Scholars and Teachers Want You to Know about Why and How to Apply the Science of Learning in Your Academic Setting (Overson et al., 2023), which I will refer to as ITOW. The editors of these books gathered leading pedagogical researchers and had them contribute chapter summaries of their work intended to be accessible and useful for teachers. Tables 4–8 list the recommended sources to start exploring each challenge and possible solutions in more depth.
| Cognitive Challenges | Resources |
| Student Mental Mindset |
|
| Metacognition and Self-Regulation |
|
| Student Fear and Mistrust |
|
| Cognitive Challenges | Resources |
| Lack of Prior Knowledge |
|
| Misconceptions |
|
| Transfer of Learning |
|
| Cognitive Challenges | Resources |
| Constraints of Selective Attention | |
| Constraints of Mental Effort and Working Memory |
|
| Cognitive Challenges | Resources |
| Ineffective Learning Strategies |
|
| Metacognition and Self-Regulation |
|
These resources are a good starting point for developing your knowledge of the cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The e-books I draw on here (Benassi et al., 2014; Overson et al., 2023) both contain a lot of other great information relevant to teaching, such as optimal ways to create multimedia presentations, how to design and use examples effectively, and how to give optimal feedback. There are also many other books, articles, blogs, and websites that offer excellent, research-based information. There is a lot of useful information in the resources. We should all continue to learn and improve our teaching.
[1] Metacognition and self-regulation are listed twice, under both “What Student Believe” and “How Students Develop.” The two concepts are linked, with metacognition relating more to what students believe and self-regulation relating more to what students do on the basis of that belief.
Benassi, V. A., Overson, C. E., & Hakala, C. M. (2014). Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php
Cerbin, W. J. (2022, May 20). Cognitive challenges of effective teaching. Psychology Teacher Network. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/challenges-to-teaching
Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education, 52(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266
Overson, C. E., Hakala, C. M., Kordonowy, L. L., & Benassi, V. A. (Eds.). (2023). In their own words: What scholars and teachers want you to know about why and how to apply the science of learning in your academic setting. Society for the Teaching of Psychology. https://teachpsych.org/ebooks/itow
Stephen L. Chew, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Samford University. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, he endeavors to translate cognitive research into forms that are useful for teachers and students. He is the recipient of multiple awards for his teaching and research. Author contact: slchew@samford.edu.
