Stephen L. Chew is a professor of psychology at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, one of his primary research interests is the cognitive basis of effective teaching and learning. Chew works to translate cognitive research for teachers and students. He developed a research-based framework of cognitive challenges that teachers must address to promote student learning. In 2011, he created a series of groundbreaking YouTube videos on how to study effectively that have received millions of views and are in wide use at educational institutions around the world. Chew is the recipient of multiple national awards for his teaching and research, including being named the 2011 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and receiving the award for Distinguished Career Contributions to Education and Training from the American Psychological Association in 2022. Chew serves as the chair of the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP).
The Cognitive Challenges of Effective Teaching
In this presentation, Dr. Stephen L. Chew proposed that the dominant approach to pedagogy, that of “best practices” is wrong, and as a result, teaching is stuck in a mire of fads and buzzwords. To move teaching forward, he proposed a research-based conceptual framework of cognitive challenges that teachers and students must negotiate for students to learn. It consists of nine interacting cognitive challenges that include student mental mindset, metacognition and self-regulation, student fear and mistrust, prior knowledge, misconceptions, ineffective learning strategies, transfer of learning, constraints of selective attention, and the constraints of mental effort and working memory. After describing the challenges, he recommended possible ways of addressing each one. The framework is context-dependent; what is effective for one situation may not be effective in others, and no single teaching method will always be optimal for all teachers, students, topics, and educational contexts. The framework can guide the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of teaching practice.
Pedagogy Matters 