Online implementation of portions of “the cognitive challenges of effective teaching”

Abstract

Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a fruitful way of thinking deeply about teaching economics. In this article, the author offers several ideas on how to offload parts of three of the cognitive challenges they identify to an online module that any instructor could assign to their students. Ideally, this module would be described in an economics education publication.

Keywords:

• Metacognition
• self-regulated learning
• working memory

JEL CODES:

• A20
• A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors for thoughtful comments that greatly improved the article.

Disclosure statement

The author states that there are no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

Notes

1 As will be seen, adding economic terms or concepts does not seem possible for some demonstrations.

2 Some economists might have seen this demonstration at the 2019 Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education (CTREE) in Chew’s plenary address.

3 These words come from Hyde and Jenkins (1973).

4 This demonstration does not touch on learning styles, which was one option students were asked about at the start of the demonstration. Cognitive science finds little evidence for this concept (Pashler et al. 2008). This finding is described to students as part of the wrap up to this demonstration.

5 Like the prior demonstration from Chew (2010), it is hard to envision it using economics content.

6 The concept is revealed below—the reader is invited to see if they can determine it, much as students are asked to in the demonstration.

7 Like many classroom activities, the etymology of this demonstration is uncertain. A Google search shows different instructors using variations of it at different times at various institutions. I actually thought I developed a variant, but later read of its earlier use at the University of Michigan (that reference was not saved). The version here, with paired students recording task times and computing their ratio, was part of Stephen Chew’s plenary address at CTREE in 2019 and I have since used it.

8 A ratio larger than one for a large majority of participants is consistent with the literature; see, for example, May and Elder (2018).

9 A complication is that some terms might be easier to remember than others. To address this, terms of roughly the same difficulty should be in each of the groups.

10 A subtle point is that over the span of a day or two, rereading material leads to greater recall than being tested on it. But one should keep in mind that much of college content needs to be recalled over weeks or more.

11 It is an open research question on whether the testing or generation effect leads to better future recall.

12 To the greatest extent possible, this module should contain discipline-specific examples. Thus, economics students would see economics examples, and so on, to help “sell” the module to students and to minimize complaints.

13 “LTI” is short for “Learning Tools Interoperability,” a software standard written by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Major LMS vendors Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and Sakai participate, as do firms like Pearson, McGraw Hill, Cengage, and Turnitin. Many faculty and students likely use LTI tools without knowing the term—they are employed when they use external tools inside the LMS without having to log into them.

14 Stephen Chew used this example at his plenary talk at CTREE in 2019. The etymology is unknown.

15 Clearly the upper limit is dependent upon the technology used to ask the question, but if many students answer that even one time during class there was too much information to process, the instructor should investigate why this occurred.