Learning Transfer – Center for Teaching and Learning

The Cognitive Challenges of Effective Teaching

Chew & Cerbin propose a research-based framework of nine interacting cognitive challenges that teachers must address in order to promote “optimal learning” rather than merely acceptable performance. They emphasize that teaching is not just delivering content but creating the conditions in which students learn. Each of the nine challenges represents a characteristic of how students think, learn, or struggle — the idea being that failure to address any one of these can undermine learning. The authors describe each challenge, provide examples, and suggest instructional strategies for mitigation.

Don’t Just Learn It, Apply It.

Why should you care about a 1980 study on analogies? Because it still explains why students don’t always transfer what they’ve learned to new situations—and what we can do about it.

In this classic paper, Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak showed that people often fail to apply a known solution from one context (like a military story) to another (a medical problem) unless they’re cued to see the connection.