Commentary on the Special Issue

Abstract

At the outset, I must confess to being very enthusiastic about the line of research being presented. On a larger scale, I am very pleased to see experimental psychology as conducted by applied cognitive scientists focusing on principles of learning, memory, and cognition that have implications for classroom practice. At the same time, these principles, generally speaking, have been available to classroom teachers in one form or another for some time. The question that I keep asking myself is “what didn’t work before, what went wrong?” Why has there been no wide spread adoption of these learning principles by educational professionals? Prior to specific comments about individual contributions, I am going to take the liberty of engaging in some philosophical thoughts. First, I will comment on a couple of metaphors frequently employed by educators when making meaning about educational progress and reform. Second, I will recommend the consideration of “the correspondence principle” as described by Gibson (1994) as a means of facilitating communication among researchers and practitioners. Following comments on individual articles, I suggest the development of a model-based reasoning approach (Mislevy 2009), that should not only enhance the construct validity of the arguments presented, but enhance communication between basic researchers and educational professionals. Models, like metaphors, provide a common referent for communication and are a critical component in the conventionalization process.