Chapter 1, page 18
SUMMARY: THE STRUCTURE OF THIS TEXTBOOK
The core ideas in this textbook are summarized in Figure 1.5. At the heart of effective learning
and teaching is the continuous interplay among instructional goals, instructional methods, and formative
and summative assessments. Teachers develop instruction to achieve desired instructional goals; this
means that the teacher must design learning environments that are effective in helping students learn. The
goals set by the teacher include specific goals related to engagement, understanding, metacognition,
transfer, and collaboration. Teachers make sure that formative and summative assessments are tightly
aligned with their goals. As teachers gather information from their formative assessments, they revise their
instruction; they may even revise their goals to better meet students’ needs. At the end of the unit, teachers
use summative assessment to provide information about how to modify the unit the next time.
The teacher’s decisions about goals, instruction, and assessment are guided and informed by
educational theories—theories of learning, theories of development, and theories of individual and group
differences. These decisions are also guided by the teacher’s knowledge of the student’s prior conceptions
and strategy use. The summative assessment provides information about students’ conceptions and
strategies that will feed forward into the next unit.
This textbook is designed to help you begin to master the various components of effective teaching
that you see in Figure 1.5. Each of the chapters is designed to help you master one or more processes
shown in Figure 1.5. Together, the chapters are intended to help you gain a deep understanding of how all
these components of instruction fit together.
THE FEATURES OF THIS TEXT
This text contains several regular features designed to help you master important ideas and skills.
We have already discussed one of these features—the links to theory that occur in each of the subsequent
theories. In this section, we will discuss four other regular features: multiple examples, revising ideas in
different ways, application problems, the Reflections on Students’ Thinking that appear at the beginning
of each chapter, and the Extensions at the end of each chapter.
Multiple Examples
One of the first things I learned when I began teaching educational psychology was that students
clamored for more and more examples. The more, the better. Students reported that when there were many
examples, it helped them understand the key concepts and principles better. In addition, when the
examples were in varied contexts, they developed an even deeper understanding of the concept, and it
made it easier for them to see how they might apply the idea to new contexts in the future.
There is research evidence supporting my students’ intuitions about the value of many, varied
examples. Psychologist Alan Baddeley (1999) described a study by psychologist K. E. Nitsch that
investigated how undergraduates learned new concepts from examples. Nitsch invented concepts and gave
them names such as CRINCH and MINGE. He developed two different ways of providing definitions and
examples to students. Half of the undergraduates received definitions and a set of examples that were all
from the same context, such as examples all from the context of a diner, shown in Table 1.1. The other
half of the undergraduates examples received definitions and a set of examples from varied contexts, with
each example coming from a different context, as illustrated in the bottom half of