Andrew Watson – Education & Teacher Conferences Skip to main content

Author Archives: Andrew Watson

Andrew Watson About Andrew Watson

Andrew began his classroom life as a high-school English teacher in 1988, and has been working in or near schools ever since. In 2008, Andrew began exploring the practical application of psychology and neuroscience in his classroom. In 2011, he earned his M. Ed. from the “Mind, Brain, Education” program at Harvard University. As President of “Translate the Brain,” Andrew now works with teachers, students, administrators, and parents to make learning easier and teaching more effective. He has presented at schools and workshops across the country; he also serves as an adviser to several organizations, including “The People’s Science.” Andrew is the author of "Learning Begins: The Science of Working Memory and Attention for the Classroom Teacher."

Website

Older posts
Retrieval and Generation: Does the Order Matter?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 06, 2026

Retrieval and Generation: Does the Order Matter?

Read More

For almost three decades now, cognitive scientists — led by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork — have championed desirable difficulties. The simple definition: any study strategy that

  1. Requires students to think harder, and
  2. Ultimately results in success. (For this reason, a difficulty that overloads working memory would certainly be undesirable.)

For obvious reasons, retrieval practice fits comfortably within this category. After all:

  1. Students have to think harder when they retrieve than when they review, and
  2. In an impressive body of research, students remember more after retrieval practice than after rereading notes or textbook pages.

So too, a well-designed generative learning activity could be desirably difficult. When students summarize or draw or re-enact or explain, they have to think harder…and typically end up learning more.

Because both of these desirable difficulties help students learn, we can reasonably ask: does the order matter? Should students retrieve before they generate? Generate before they retrieve? Or, perhaps either approach works equally well? Perhaps the answers to those questions will be different depending on the timing of the retrieval and/or generation?

A recent study looks at this very question.

Intro to Cognitive Psychology

In this study, roughly 200 German university students read a short passage defining four concepts from social psychology and cognitive psychology: “the availability heuristic,” “the mere exposure effect,” and so forth.

One group of students first generated examples of these concepts — they could look at the text if they wanted — and then revised their examples based on feedback. Next they did three cycles of retrieval exercises.

A second group reversed that order: they started with that substantial retrieval exercise, and only then did the multi-step generation task.

(I’m leaving out another group, because that third variable adds more complexity than a blog post warrants.)

Helpfully, researchers had two other groups follow the same steps — except that they did the retrieving and generating two days after the initial reading.

And, fully a week later, the students came back for a final test to see if they could recall the definitions and apply them to new situations.

Given all these steps, researchers can start to answer these questions:

A. Does the order matter? Should retrieval come before generation, or vice versa?

B. Does the timing matter? Is one order better when retrieval/generation happen right away, while the other order is better after two days?

Those are intriguing questions, and we really want to have the answers…

The (Initial) Answers

“No,” and “no.”

That is: no, the order didn’t ultimately matter. Students who retrieved before generating scored as high on the post-tests as those who generated before retrieving.

And: no, the two-day delay didn’t change that result. Whether retrieval preceded generation or generation preceded retrieval, both groups scored roughly the same on the test they took one week later.

By the way: researchers pre-tested the students to see if they already knew about “the availability heuristic” and the other terms. Students all scored very low on this pre-test — so “prior knowledge” probably didn’t drive these results.

Tentative Questions

On the one hand, this study starts to answer an important question. I frequently discuss both retrieval practice and generative learning with teachers, so it’s helpful to have a research-based answer about the appropriate order.

On the other hand, I have two reasons to wonder about this study’s conclusions.

First: as noted above, researchers pre-tested the students to see what they knew about those four terms. (Research methodology indeed encourages such pre-tests.)

However — and this is a big however — we have a growing pool of research suggesting that pretesting itself enhances learning. In other words, the (methodologically appropriate) pretests might themselves have helped students learn all those definitions. The stated results — “the order doesn’t matter” — could be true after pretesting, but not necessarily without pretesting.

Second:

More hypothetically, I wonder about a potential distinction between two kinds of generation:

  • Gen A: “generating by combining one new classroom concept with prior knowledge,” and
  • Gen B: “generating by combining multiple new classroom concepts.”

In this study, researchers focused on “Gen A”: students had to generate examples of “the availability heuristic” with their own lived experience.

They did not have to think of an example where — for example — “availability heuristic” and “mere exposure” might overlap.

Let me offer an example from my own work as a high-school English teacher. I want my students to know the definition of “tragedy,” and the definition of “bildungsroman” (“a novel of character formation”). After I teach those definitions, I use retrieval practice to help students consolidate them.

Once those definitions are well-seated in long-term memory, I ask a Gen B question: “can a bildungsroman ever be a tragedy?” In this case, my students must generate a response about two new classroom ideas.

I suspect — although I don’t have research to support my theory — that in this “Gen B” case — retrieval should precede generation. If I asked my students to generate — to think about tragedy and bildungsroman together — before those concepts were well consolidated by retrieval, I think the result would be working memory overload.

The Balancing Act

I started off by asking: because both retrieval practice and generative learning help students learn, does the order matter?

  • The research-based answer to that question is (currently) “no.”
  • My working-memory based hunch is: “if you want to use generative learning to combine classroom ideas, then retrieval should probably come first.”

With this study — as is so often the case — teachers should balance the insights that scientific inquiry can offer with the daily complexities of the classroom.

Obergassel, N., Renkl, A., Endres, T., Nückles, M., Carpenter, S. K., & Roelle, J. (2026). Generative and Retrieval Tasks: Does the Sequence Matter and Do Sequence Effects Depend on Learning Task Delay?. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 40(2), e70188.

40% Wrong: The fMRI Problem in Educational Neuroscience
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August 30, 2026

40% Wrong: The fMRI Problem in Educational Neuroscience

Read More

When our students learn — or pay attention, or feel motivated — all sorts of amazing things happen in their brains. Neurons connect and neurotransmitters zip. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) coordinates executive functions; the default mode network (DMN) helps consolidate prior learning. It’s all so cool!

A recent study invites us to reconsider: how do we know about all that brain activity in all those brain regions?

One way to study brain activity goes by the cumbersome name “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” aka fMRI. In theory, fMRI tells us what parts of the brain are working and when. So:

  • If students are effectively task switching — that is, enacting executive functions — their PFC “lights up.”
  • If students are letting their thoughts wander freely as they consolidate their learning, the DMN “lights up.”

When you see those colorful brain images, the highlighted areas show what regions have been activated during specific mental processes.

Most fMRI studies reach these conclusions by relying on a clever proxy. Here’s the logical chain:

  1. When neurons activate, they use up oxygen.
  2. The brain resupplies that oxygen – in fact, oversupplies that oxygen – by increasing blood flow to the region.
  3. By tracking changes in blood oxygenation, therefore, we can draw reasonable conclusions about neural activity.

In brief: changes in blood oxygenation reveal mental work in very specific regions of the brain.

That’s what most fMRI does. If blood oxygenation CHANGES in the PFC after students effectively task switch, we conclude that executive functions “happen” in the PFC. If blood oxygenation changes in the DMN when students let thoughts wander freely, we conclude that mind wandering “happens” in the DMN.

Such conclusions just make sense.

Rethinking Core Assumptions

But wait just one minute: what if that proxy is wrong? What if the foundational assumption of fMRI analysis just ain’t so?

Last month, a research team published a simply astonishing study challenging the standard interpretation of most fMRI analysis. Instead of measuring neural activity by the blood-oxygenation proxy, they measured it more directly. (To be precise, they used a much better proxy: oxygen metabolism.)

They found that:

  • In some cases, blood oxygenation changes do correlate with the more precisely measured metabolic activity. So: yes, sometimes the standard fMRI interpretation path is true.
  • But in other cases, blood oxygenation changes in the opposite direction of the more precisely measured metabolic activity. In these cases, the standard interpretation is BACKWARDS.

We should pause to let that finding sink in. If these scholars are correct, then the logic governing fMRI interpretation for DECADES has been — at least at times — pointing us in the wrong direction.

Frying Pan, Fire

In my quick summary above, I wrote that “in some cases” the interpretation is backwards. We should ask: how many cases? If this backwards response happens 1% of the time, that’s an interesting quirk, but perhaps not terribly important.

Well, brace yourself.

  • Across the cortex, this study finds a backwards response roughly 40% of the time.
  • The backwards response is especially common — more than 60% of the time — when brain regions appear to “deactivate.” (This finding matters so much to education research because — according to the traditional interpretation — the DMN “deactivates” during focused mental tasks.)
  • Even when cortical brain regions appear to “activate,” the backwards response still occurs about 30% of the time.

Even worse:

  • In most cases, the backwards response isn’t a stable feature. SOMETIMES a specific brain region shows this backwards response, and sometimes it doesn’t.

To put the matter starkly: in brain regions highly relevant to education (e.g., the DMN), we simply do not know if most of the fMRI studies we’ve been relying on accurately describe which regions are more or less active. If the signal we use to infer brain activity often points in the wrong direction, then we can’t be confident that many published interpretations are correct. They could be 60% wrong … and that’s A LOT of wrong.

Let me summarize this grim news in one sentence:

Because blood-oxygenation doesn’t reliably correlate with neural activity, our default way of interpreting standard fMRI doesn’t reliably hold.

Not So Fast

Before I throw out decades of educational neuroscience, I should acknowledge several important caveats:

First: I am not a neuroscientist. I know more about fMRI than most people, but this study happens at a level of technical analysis WAY outside of my own direct knowledge. I’ve done my best to understand its claims, but I could have misunderstood.

Second: because fMRI is so technical, I’ve had to simplify the argument here substantially. I’ve tried to simplify without oversimplifying. But to keep this post readable, I’ve had to err on the side of brevity and clarity.

For instance, throughout this post, I’ve used the phrase “most fMRI” for a reason. This problem applies to the most common kind of fMRI: “blood oxygen level dependent,” aka BOLD. There are other kinds of fMRI – more complex and expensive — and the fears outlined above don’t apply to them (as far as I know).

This point matters a lot. If those other kinds of fMRI support the conclusions that BOLD fMRI has reached, then we might heave a sigh of relief and go on about our business. Of course, other kinds of brain scans — EEG, FNIRS, PET — might also confirm the now-wobbly BOLD fMRI conclusions.

Third: one study is just one study. Until this study has been replicated, we should remain open to the possibility that this research team just got it all wrong. (BTW: they ran their own mini-replication, and came up with similar results.) 

Hope?

Neuroscience is a kind of biology. It can tell us what IS happening in the brain, but not what teachers OUGHT to do about that neural activity. (If you teach philosophy, you will recognize David Hume’s “is/ought gap” here.)

For instance, neuroscience tells us what IS happening when new long-term memories form: neurons join together into new neural networks.

But that neuro-biological IS doesn’t give teachers an OUGHT; we don’t know what to DO to cause learning to happen.

Instead, psychology gives us that OUGHT. When teachers learn about mental functions – memory, attention, motivation – that knowledge helps us teach better. We ought to promote desirable difficulties; we ought to focus students’ attention; we ought to manage the working-memory demands of the classroom.

The potential revolution in interpreting BOLD fMRI results might change our understanding of what IS happening in the brain. But it doesn’t change our OUGHT. No matter what neurons are doing within the skull, teachers should still promote desirable difficulties and focus attention and manage WM load.

That’s the hope: teachers can focus on what psychology tells us about learning, confident that our work doesn’t depend on getting the neuroscience exactly right. That neuroscience underneath is fascinating—but thankfully, we don’t need to wait for it to be settled before we can teach well.

Epp, S. M., Castrillón, G., Yuan, B., Andrews-Hanna, J., Preibisch, C., & Riedl, V. (2025). BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 1-12.

Speaking, Writing, and Learning: What the “Production Effect” Can—and Can’t—Do [Repost]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August 23, 2026

Speaking, Writing, and Learning: What the “Production Effect” Can—and Can’t—Do [Repost]

Read More

A colleague recently asked me this thoughtful question:

I’ve seen research on the ‘Production Effect.’ It tells us that students remember words better when they say them out loud. Following this logic, will students understand ideas better if they explain them out loud? For instance: will an oral presentation to the class help my students learn more than writing an essay or taking a test?

In this blog post, I will:

  1. Introduce the production effect
  2. Explain the most common misunderstanding of the production effect, and
  3. Offer a more effective strategy to ensure that students understand ideas better

TL;DR: Don’t ask “Should students talk or write more?” Ask “What thinking are they doing before they talk or write?” Turns out: the production effect supports memory, but not understanding.

Introducing the Production Effect

Strong research earns trust by testing ideas from many angles. Consider, for instance, this study by Dr. Colin MacLeod and colleagues. (This is the study my colleague had seen.) In it, MacLeod’s team undertakes — depending on how you’re counting — ELEVEN different studies to explore the potential memory benefits of saying words out loud.

  • They test out the benefits for real words and made-up words.
  • They test the difference between actually saying the words out loud and simply mouthing them silently.
  • They test the effect when one person tries both strategies, and when different groups choose only one strategy or the other.

The simple headline: YES, students remember words better when they say them out loud compared to the words they didn’t say out loud. For the stats-y people reading this post: the effect sizes here are generally impressive.

The surface level teaching implication just might be: students should write less and speak up more.

Pick Those Pens Back Up Again…

That final sentence, however, makes a crucial mistake — a mistake that’s easy to make.

Let’s go back to that “simple headline:”

Students remember words better when they say them out loud compared to the words they didn’t say out loud.

Imagine my student Tarik has a list of 20 words. If he says 10 of them out loud, he’ll remember those words better than the other ten he didn’t say out loud.

Here’s the important distinction: Imagine that Tarik and Laszlo have the same list of 20 words. Tarik says them all out loud; Laszlo does not say any of them out loud. In this case, there isn’t a statistically significant difference between the number of words Tarik and Laszlo remember.

That’s right: “Production” doesn’t matter if one person says everything out loud and the other says nothing out loud. It matters only if one person says some words out loud but doesn’t say other words out loud.

MacLeod’s team researched this question specifically in that study I described.

For this reason, we have no reason to believe that speaking thoughts results in better memory than writing thoughts. (To be precise: students who speak some thoughts out loud will remember those thoughts better than the others that they didn’t say out loud.)

From this perspective, oral presentations don’t seem like a research-based requirement.

Digging Deeper

The discovery of this nuance might prompt us to keep asking questions. The fact that we almost over-estimated the benefits of the production effect suggests we should give the “speaking > writing” idea another review. As it turns out, this decision to double check proves to have been wise. Here’s the catch:

MacLeod’s research shows that effect enhances memory. As teachers, we approve of memory (!), but we probably want comprehension and understanding as well. MacLeod’s research doesn’t test that bigger goal.

More recent research, led by Dr. Brady Roberts, does explore that question.

Team Roberts chose ten reading passages, covering topics like “the Successes of George Washington Carver” and “Introversion and Extroversion.” Students read half of these passages out loud, and the other half silently. They then answered multiple-choice questions about the passages.

Here’s the special sauce:

  • roughly half of those MCQs tested simple recall: students simply had to recognize words from the passage
  • the other half tested comprehension: students had to decide, for example, if the main idea of a paragraph was “similarity” or “contrast.”

Roberts’ team ran this study four different times, increasing the sample size and switching up the reading passages. The result:

  • Good news: the production effect improves memory of words and passages, but
  • Bad news: it does NOT improve comprehension

Let’s pause to summarize these studies so far:

First: if the goal is for individual students to remember some words or passages better than others, they should read those important passages out loud.

Second: if the goal is for students to remember all the words or passages, then reading aloud is just as good as reading silently.

Third: if the goal is for students to understand the concepts, reading aloud provides no extra benefit.

The Final Step

If reading passages out loud doesn’t enhance understanding of underlying concepts, what does?

Although this question invites a very long answer, I’ll offer two short-ish ones.

  1. We should focus less on the mode of presentation. In most cases, whether ideas are spoken out loud or written down (or acted out, or…) has little effect on understanding.
  2. Instead, we should focus on the quality of the thinking before students do their presenting. Are they elaborating? Are they self-explaning? Are they comparing and contrasting? Are they thinking critically? Are they thinking beyond the initial information they took in?

Students who do undertake such mental activity — students who think hard about the material — are much likelier to understand it than others who don’t. They may write down their ultimate thoughts and conclusions. They may explain them out loud to their peers. But that final step will have much less effect on understanding than the thinking that came before.

In a sentence: speaking and writing are both good. Thinking matters more.

MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R., & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671.

Roberts, B. R., Hu, Z. S., Curtis, E., Bodner, G. E., McLean, D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2024). Reading text aloud benefits memory but not comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 52(1), 57-72.

We Should Teach Introverts Differently (Or, Should We?)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August 16, 2026

We Should Teach Introverts Differently (Or, Should We?)

Read More

As we strive to make classrooms helpful for all our students, we often hear advice about adapting instruction for our introverts and extraverts. Odds are good you’ve gotten suggestions like these:

  • “Because introverts need to muster up energy in social situations, we should give them time to think before they participate in class discussion. If possible, allow them to participate by writing, or by working independently.”
  • “Because extraverts thrive with social interaction, they should participate in group discussions, group activities, and verbal exchanges.”

You might even hear suggestions that go beyond the classroom’s social dynamics:

  • “Introverts prefer humanities, research, and programming; they benefit from muted classroom decoration; they think deeply, but have slower processing speed.”
  • “Extraverts prefer business classes, politics, and management; they benefit from highly decorated classrooms; they have higher processing speeds, but think less deeply.”

This kind of advice feels intuitive. We don’t want to make our students needlessly uncomfortable.

Because we hear such guidance regularly — I read a Twitter thread on this topic just last week — we should stop to double check its accuracy. In this post, I want to raise two hesitations about this well-intended practice.

The First Reason to Hesitate

Honestly, I’m struggling to find strong research that supports these teaching conclusions.

Let’s take this study by Flanagan and Addy. These researchers tracked over 250 college Canadian students taking biology classes: “Quantitative Biology” and “The Biology of Fungi.” (Yes, fungi.) These students worked in a “team-based learning model” throughout the entire semester; in fact, most of the class time was devoted to these small-group interactions.

Flanagan and Addy tracked three measurements:

  • final course grades
  • peer evaluations
  • self-reports about peer support, learning, engagement with the material

What did they find? No discernable differences among extraverts, ambiverts, and introverts. The researchers themselves write: “Our group-based, active-learning classrooms did not favor extraverts or disadvantage introverts.” This teaching model — with its substantial focus on conversation and interaction — would seem to contradict much of the advice summarized at the top of this post. But when researchers measured the results, they didn’t find that this approach worked especially badly for introverts or especially well for extraverts.

Flanagan and Addy note that other studies have arrived at similar conclusions. While some researchers find that introverts don’t enjoy group-discussion classes as much as their extraverted peers, they all learn the same amount (on average).

These findings make me skeptical that we should listen closely to strong claims about teaching introverts.

The Second Reason to Hesitate

Personality psychologists do research introversion and extraversion. They do use the words “introvert” and “extravert.” However, experts in this field don’t see these groups as clear and obviously distinct categories. In some circumstances, people might experience introversion; in other circumstances, they might experience extraversion. But neither of those experiences mean that anyone is one kind of person.

In the world of popular psychology, people gloss over this problem by creating the category “ambiverts.” But the ambivert category is very large — practically everyone experiences both sets of feelings.

Yes, scholars do include Introversion/Extraversion in the list of the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, intro/extraversion. But the tests that measure these traits do NOT give people labels or put them in discrete categories. Instead, they measure each of those traits along a continuum.

For instance, I might have a generally sunny disposition. But I certainly have grouchy days. I’m not, psychologically speaking, “Mr. Bucket of Sunshine.” And I’m not in a different category of human being than Oscar the Grouch. (Okay, he’s a muppet, but you get my point.)

Let me try another analogy. We see light along a spectrum of wavelengths: from red, orange, yellow, and green to blue, indigo, and violet. We don’t act as if everything around us is either red or violet; we don’t claim that the middle-wavelength colors — from orange to green to indigo — are just compromises of the two extremes. LIke colors, personality traits exist on a continuum — not as two extremes.

To state this argument most bluntly: we shouldn’t take advice about teaching introverts and extraverts because that advice assumes people exist in these measurably distinct categories. We don’t.

1 + 2 = 3

These two concerns reinforce each other.

I wrote a few paragraphs ago, as my first hesitation, that I’m “struggling to find strong research support for these claims.” My second hesitation — we don’t have specific, discrete categories of intro/extraversion — makes that first one even more complicated. If we can’t categorize individuals as one personality type or another, we can’t reliably determine which group responds well to which kind of teaching — because those “groups” don’t actually exist.

For example, I asked Elicit.com if introverts and extraverts benefit from different teaching styles. It considered the twenty-five studies it judged most relevant, and concluded that — yes — these groups learn better in different environments.

However — and this is a big “however” — almost all of those studies asked students to self identify as introverts or extraverts (or didn’t explain how they labeled participants). The only study that used a validated assessment to put students into groups found…no differences between introverts and extraverts.

Because these studies include technical terms (“introvert/extravert”), follow typical research procedures, and include complex mathematical calculations, they seem to carry the gravitas of science behind them. Alas, this self-report methodology obscures the underlying personality continuum; after all, these studies invite students to place themselves in separate categories that personality psychologists don’t think really exist. Hence my enduring hesitation.

The Takeaway

The headlines sound like this:

  1. Psychologists don’t describe introverts and extraverts as distinct, stable categories.
  2. For that reason, we really struggle to research the best teaching approach for people who tend to either extreme.
  3. The studies that look most persuasive to me don’t offer clear suggestions; they suggest that, by and large, we should teach our students the same way.

If someone gives you advice to teach these students this way and those students another way, don’t hesitate to ask for the research behind their claim.

A final technical detail: the opposite of “introvert” has two correct spellings: “extravert” and “extrovert.” In the post above, I’ve consistently written “extravert” — but the Flanagan and Addy study uses “extrovert.” I changed their spelling when I quoted them above so that the variation wouldn’t distract readers along the way.

Flanagan, K. M., & Addy, H. (2019). Introverts are not disadvantaged in group-based active learning classrooms. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 45(1), 33-41.

The Problem with “Students Teaching Students” [Repost]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August 09, 2026

The Problem with “Students Teaching Students” [Repost]

Read More

Should our students teach their peers? The obvious answer to this question is: “yes, of course.”

Experience shows that teaching leads to greater understanding for the person who did the teaching. After all, when I figure out how to explain “tragedy” to my sophomores, I end up knowing more about tragedy than I did before. No doubt my students would benefit from such experiences.

In this blog post, I’m going to make a surprising pair of arguments:

  • We should ask students to explain ideas and topics, but
  • We shouldn’t ask students to teach those ideas and topics.

Here’s why.

Theory and Practice

Educators regularly hear that we should ask our students to teach one another.

One often-discussed version of this approach: the “jigsaw method.” In this pedagogical strategy, the teacher divides a topic into several jigsaw pieces. For instance, if I’m teaching the digestive system, I can divide it into several sub-topics: the stomach, the pancreas, the small intestine, and so forth.

Next, I assign these jigsaw pieces to pairs of students. Once each pair has mastered their topic, they all circulate and teach the other pairs. In this way, all my students reassemble the jigsaw by teaching each other.

Over the years, teachers have offered me other examples.

  • When parents asked “how can I help my child study when I don’t understand the math they’re doing,” one teacher suggested: “have your child teach the concept to you. She will understand the concept better because she did.”
  • A middle-school biology teacher explained: “I often begin class with a warm-up exercise: one student teaches a shoulder partner the concepts we studied yesterday.”
  • A kindergarten teacher offered a fun example: “for one unit, my students each chose a community helper — a postal worker, a crossing guard, a firefighter — someone like that. They then taught the whole class about that community helper.”

No doubt you can think of many (many) other examples of students teaching students.

Definitions Matter…

As I’ve written before, our work often benefits when we stop and focus on precise definitions. Let me offer the most basic possible definition of the verb to teach:

“To teach is to cause someone else to learn.”

In the examples above, we’re inviting students to explain a topic to a second person: a parent, a shoulder partner, the whole class.

We are not – by the definition above – inviting students to teach a topic to a second person. In practice, we’re not measuring their success by someone else’s learning.

  • If the parent doesn’t ultimately understand the math concept, that’s okay. The goal was to help the child learn, not the parent.
  • If a kindergartener’s classmates don’t learn about postal workers or firefighters, no worries. The goal was to help each child learn about a specific community helper, not for everyone in the class to learn about all the community helpers. (I know because I asked.)

We have lots of research showing that explaining a topic to another person helps people learn. In fact, I recently read a study (Nestojko 2014) showing that students who thought they were going to explain a topic to another person learned it better – even though they never did the explaining. Simply planning to explain produced modest learning benefits.

If you’ve heard about generative learning, you know that this strategy fits neatly into that category. When students select, organize, and combine ideas, they learn those ideas better. Students might select, organize, and combine by

  • Drawing a picture
  • Creating a mind map
  • Acting out a scene, or
  • Presenting an idea to their classmates

When they do any of this generative mental work, students learn more.

But – to be precise – the goal of that last option is that the student who is presenting learn more about the topic. If their classmates haven’t learned, the presentation still counts as generative learning because the presenter learned.

… and Learning Matters

From one perspective, this distinction might seem merely fussy. If students are explaining ideas to one another, what’s the problem with calling that teaching? Explaining is close enough to teaching, isn’t it?

I myself don’t think so. Simply put, explaining – by itself – isn’t teaching. Simply hearing an explanation does not reliably lead to learning – and “causing someone else to learn” is the definition of teaching.

Let’s consider the jigsaw example above. At the end of that class, all the students will have heard explanations about the digestive system’s components: stomach, liver, large intestine. Those segmented explanations, however, will rarely add up to an understanding of digestion as a system.

Understanding that system requires not simply an organ-by-organ review of facts: “hydrochloric acid in the stomach breaks down proteins and kills off bacteria.” Instead, students need to see the connections among all those organs. Unless this lesson “causes students to learn” how those organs and functions add up to accomplish the goal of digestion, they have not been taught. They have heard explanations, but those explanations weren’t enough.

To be clear: I can help students learn by asking them to explain. That generative work — selecting, organizing, and expressing ideas — has real cognitive benefits.

But explaining isn’t the same as teaching.

  • The goal of explanation is that the speaker learns.
  • The goal of teaching is that someone else learns — and accomplishing that goal requires more than explanation alone.

When I ask students to explain, I’m giving them a powerful way to strengthen their own understanding. When I want their classmates to learn, however, that responsibility ultimately sits with me.

Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & cognition, 42(7), 1038-1048.

From Defensiveness to Curiosity
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 26, 2026

From Defensiveness to Curiosity

Read More

Two studies have stirred up lots of controversy in recent weeks. Although these studies focus on different topics, they follow a roughly similar pattern:

  1. Our society has identified a serious problem
  2. Thoughtful people have come up with well-intentioned solutions
  3. According to recent research, the solutions — despite those good intentions — might not be helping
  4. Social media responds with big feelings

I will start by summarizing the studies, then shift focus to the right way to respond to them. My ultimate argument: “when you start to feel defensive, get curious.”

Do Cell Phone Bans Work?

Widespread social concerns about the effects of cell phones have led to a school policy solution: cell phone bans. This impressively large study looks at the results of those bans. Specifically, they looked at data from more than 5000 (!) schools that used Yondr pouches to restrict cell phone access. They compared data from these schools to the same data sets from other schools that did not adopt cell phone restrictions. What did they find over the course of three years?

First: the bans reduced cell phone usage substantially.

Second: the bans had essentially no effect on standardized test scores. (High school scores went up very slightly, especially in math; middle school scores went down very slightly overall.)

Third: after some difficulties with adjustment — for instance, an increase in discipline problems — both MS and HS students reported small increases in well-being. After the first year, students reported a 0.20 SD lower well-being than students in comparison schools. After the second year, they reported a 0.16 SD higher well-being than those in comparison schools. Those numbers aren’t large, but they’re not nothing.

The study didn’t find evidence for changes in attendance, or attention, or bullying.

The answer to the question “do cell phone bans work?” depends on your definition of “work.” Cell phone use went way down. Grades didn’t change much. Reports of subjective well-being increased slightly over two years.

Does Mental Health Awareness Training Help?

A much smaller study looked at the potential benefits of Mental Health Awareness. Specifically, 215 college students attended workshops.

  • One highlighted the symptoms of ADHD. It was designed to resemble social media-like explanations of ADHD — complete with prevalance statistics and “hidden signs.”
  • Another talked about the benefits of sleep. It too was designed to have a popular media feel, with an emphasis on sleep hygiene and health benefits.

One week later, students who attended the ADHD workshop were likelier to diagnose themselves as having ADHD, although they didn’t report any difference in ADHD symptoms. The increase in self-diagnosis was striking: half of a standard deviation.

This study included a third crucial group.

  • Group 3 students participated in an alternative ADHD workshop. This one included the same information about prevalance and symptoms. It added important cautions: learning about symptoms can lead people to misinterpret ordinary experiences, which can be caused by lack of sleep, distraction, or stress.

One week later, students in this “nocebo” group were NOT likelier to diagnose themselves with ADHD. (Technically: they could not statistically be distinguished from the control group.)

What to Do with Bad News?

Predictably, social media made a big meal of these studies. The responses I’ve seen most often:

  • The cell phone ban study is OBVIOUSLY wrong, because…
  • Aha! All those mental health awareness initiatives have been a waste of time and money. I knew it all along!

Let’s imagine for a moment that I’m a champion of cell phone bans, or a long-time advocate of mental health awareness initiatives. These studies clearly contradict my passionately held views. How should I respond?

Step 1: Look at the study itself.

This point might sound too obvious to make. However, I’ve been alarmed by the apparent failures to do so.

  • For example: the ADHD study doesn’t claim that “all mental health awareness initiatives” are a waste of money. It says that social-media-flavored ADHD awareness efforts lead to increased self-diagnosis unless paired with a nocebo message. (This substantial review highlights the complex interplay of potential benefits and unintended consequences of mental health awareness initiatives.)
  • Even more disturbing: one prominent critic of the cell phone ban study has listed its many flaws — after a preamble saying that he hadn’t read it. (I do not think I am making this up.)

So, yes: if a study contradicts my deeply held beliefs, I should read it before forming a strong opinion.

Step 2: evaluate its validity. (I’ve written a whole book on this process: I won’t rehash it here.)

Step 3: if the study survives thoughtful scrutiny in step 2, ask this hypothetical question: “what if this study is correct?”

No, really. What if this thoughtful research was right?

The Curiosity Stance

Let’s imagine that my advocacy for a cell phone ban started with fervent beliefs. I just KNEW deep in my bones that — if only the cell phones went away — students would learn more, feel better, and pay more attention. Those conclusions were, in my mind, just inescapable. According to this study, they’re all incorrect.

My very human temptation will be to reject the study entirely. (“I haven’t read it, but I know it’s wrong for all these reasons…”)

If, by a great force of effort, I can bring myself to be curious about the study, I would have lots to learn.

To start: what evidence do I have at my own school that the YONDR pouches are helping? Do our grade data, or standardized test scores, support my initial hypothesis? If I ask these curious questions, I might discover that we’re an exception to the overall pattern — or that I’ve been misleading myself all along. Both of those discoveries would be useful and important.

  • I’m deceiving myself: let’s say it’s true — cell phone bans haven’t changed those variables. Would my community want to continue the ban anyway? Are we seeing other benefits, not captured by this research, that give us reasons to continue? When I take off my rose-colored glasses, has the ban truly improved my school?
  • We’re an exception: let’s say it’s NOT true. At my school, all our data show clear improvement: bullying cases are down, grades are up, counseling office reports show less despair and more camaraderie. This discovery leads to an important question: “what’s our special sauce?” Why did the cell phone ban work here when it didn’t work in other places? What can my school add to the cultural conversation?

If I refuse to take the research seriously, I’ll miss out on important conversations that might otherwise benefit my school and my students.

The ADHD study provides an even starker example. Imagine that I were a mental health awareness advocate, and I read several gloating press headlines: “ADHD awareness causes false self-diagnosis!”

Instead of rejecting this study outright — “I’m just sure it’s wrong” — I could adopt a curious approach. When I read the study itself, I find that the “nocebo” addition might enhance the work I do. By moving past defensiveness to curiosity, I’ve potentially made my mental health advocacy even more effective.

TL;DR

Research that contradicts our beliefs is unpleasant to read. It can also be immensely helpful. Whenever possible, we should adopt a “curiosity stance.”

Sandra, D. A., Segal, Z., Majoo, S., Sistanis, A., Burke, M. J., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Inform and do no harm: Nocebo education reduces false self-diagnosis caused by mental health awareness. Psychological Medicine, 55, e330.

Foulkes, L., Winterburn, I., Sandra, D., Inzlicht, M., Andrews, J. L., & Guzman Holst, C. (2026). The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1-12.

The Hidden Tradeoffs of Self-Explanation
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 19, 2026

The Hidden Tradeoffs of Self-Explanation

Read More

If you’ve got a headache, you might find yourself reaching for some ibuprofen. If you just sprained your ankle, or your arthritis is acting up, ibuprofen can make your day much better. But: these truths do NOT mean that ibuprofen fixes pain. After all, nerve pain — such as sciatica, neuropathy, or neuralgia — doesn’t relent much after an Advil or two. Those little red pills help with some pain, but not all types of pain.

In research world, we call such limitations “boundary conditions” — as in, “this study technique helps under these conditions, but not those conditions.” Good research-based teaching advice makes boundary conditions explicit. After all, no one teaching strategy helps all students learn everything all the time.

Today, I want to focus on “self-explanation”: a teaching technique that does indeed have lots of good research behind it. Because we’ve got so many reasons to use “self-explanation,” we should be aware of the relevant boundary conditions as well. Happily, I’ve found a review article that highlights those essential boundaries…

Core Benefits

Education researchers define self-explanation as “generating explanations for oneself in an attempt to make sense of new information.” One formulation emphasizes that self-explanations are generated “by the learner and for the learner.” That is: “teaching” isn’t “self-explanation” because the person who generates the explanation (the teacher) does so for someone else (the student).

The review article’s authors highlight two kinds of benefit from self-explanation.

  • First: self-explanation helps students integrate knowledge. By putting all the pieces together in their own words, students reinforce connections among them.
  • Second: self-explanation tends to direct students’ attention to conceptual structures over surface features and details. For this reason, students succeed at transfer tasks more readily after self-explanation.

As you can see, those are powerful reasons for teachers to incorporate self-explanation activities in our classes. Anything that promotes integration of knowledge and transfer of knowledge … well, that sounds like a winner!

Boundaries Beyond Benefits

If all research-based teaching advice has boundaries, we should ask: what are the limits for self-explanation? In their review article, Rittle-Johnson and Loehr highlight a few boundaries that we should keep in mind.

As is so often the case, a strength of self-explanation is also a weakness. As noted above, self-explanation highlights conceptual structures over details. For that reason, it serves well in cases where the teacher wants students to grasp a broad concept instead of a specific example.

In my math class: when I ask my students to express 127 in base 8, I want them to understand the broader principles and processes of thinking in different bases. I don’t really want them to remember the fact that 127 (base 10) is 177 (base 8).

However, sometimes we teach a topic where we DO want students to recall the granular specifics.

  • If I’m teaching Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” I want my students to focus on and remember the increasingly weighty details — lost door keys, a lost watch, a lost continent — that build up to the poem’s wrenching conclusion. I don’t want them simply to recognize Bishop’s poetic structure (a “vilanelle”) and move on.
  • If I’m teaching about Botswana’s independence, specific events and people matter. Students should know the first President Seretse Khama; his focus on constitutional norms and education; the timely discovery of diamonds; the pursuit of moderate economic policies, and so forth. Students should be able to abstract from those details to see broader patterns … but they need to recall those examples as well.

When deciding if I should ask my students to self-explain, I should first decide if I want students to consolidate the deep rules and patterns, or if I want them to remember the piece-by-piece details as well. In the latter case, some other teaching move might be more effective than self-explanation.

Explaining What? In Response to What?

A second boundary that Rittle-Johnson and Loehr emphasize: the content that students are self-explaining.

Unsurprisingly, in most studies that Rittle-Johnson and Loehr review, students benefit most from self-explanations of correct information. If students self-explain beliefs based on prior misconceptions, their self-explanation may consolidate meaningful inaccuracies, and thereby make it harder for students to learn the correct answer, approach, or concept. In this case, the self-explanation technique could very well backfire.

For this reason, teachers should evaluate the timing and content of self-explanation questions. If today’s classroom topic invites common misconceptions, I should explain correct answers first before I invite my students to self-explain. If I start with self-explanations, my lesson may reinforce prior misconceptions rather than correct them.

Third: Rittle-Johnson and Loehr emphasize that self-explanation prompts focus students’ attention on different parts of the cognitive work that they’re doing. In brief:

  • a “why” prompt helps students focus on conceptual understanding
  • a “how” prompt consolidates procedural fluency
  • a “why is this wrong” prompt helps repair misconceptions

Teachers should ask not only “should I have students self-explain right now?” but also “what’s the best question to focus my students’ cognitive work precisely?”

TL;DR

Like all teaching techniques, research-informed strategies work in some cases…but not all cases.

Self-explanation can help students consolidate and transfer knowledge. To use this approach most effectively, teachers should

  • use self-explanation to help students consolidate conceptual structures more than granular details,
  • correct prior misconceptions before asking self-explanation questions, and
  • prompt self-explanation with targeted questions.

When teachers stay within these boundary conditions, our students reap the greatest benefits.

Rittle-Johnson, B., & Loehr, A. M. (2017). Eliciting explanations: Constraints on when self-explanation aids learning. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 24(5), 1501-1510.

The Complex Relationship between Knowledge and Reading
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 12, 2026

The Complex Relationship between Knowledge and Reading

Read More

Given the time constraints that all teachers face, what are the most effective strategies to help our students with reading comprehension? Should we focus on particular reading strategies: say — finding the main idea of a passage, predicting what will come next, visualizing the scene? Or do we serve students better by building overall historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge: say — the development of the silk road, an understanding of erosion, the innovations of Martha Graham?

Like so many debates in education, this one prompts heated — often exasperated — debates.

A recent study considers such questions.

Faith Bandler, and Beyond

A group of Australian researchers worked with 8-year-olds at a relatively affluent school. Over the span of eight weeks, students learned about several topics: artifacts, fossil fuels, a famous Australian voting-rights activist named Faith Bandler, Nelson Mandela, and so forth. Typically, the sequence went like this:

  • Teachers taught a multi-class unit on one topic. At the end of the unit, students took a short-answer quiz on that topic.
  • Soon after, students read a passage related to the topic. Once again, students took a test.
    • Some of the questions simply tested knowledge from the reading passage.
    • Others required drawing inferences based on the reading passage.
    • Still others required drawing inferences from the preceding unit taught by the classroom teacher.

By following all these steps, researchers could consider important questions:

  • How much did prior knowledge from the unit help students understand the reading passage?
  • And: did the individual student’s skill at reading matter?

I should also describe one important variation from this typical sequence. In most cases, the reading passage and test came soon after the classroom unit on a topic. With two topics, the teacher waited four weeks after the classroom unit for students to read the related passage and take a test on it. For this reason, researchers could answer another important question:

  • Do the benefits of prior knowledge fade within four weeks?

Given all these steps and calculations, what did the researchers conclude?

Certainty, and Uncertainty

Because this study measured so many different variables in so many circumstances, I’m not going to report numerical results. (You can find all the data here if you’re curious.) Instead, I want to focus on plausible conclusions.

More broadly, I want to push back on strong claims I’ve been hearing about this study. When I first came across it, the quick headlines read — in effect — that this study shows conclusively the importance of prior knowledge for reading comprehension. By implication, this study has been offered as a way to support a “knowledge-rich” curriculum. I’m not persuaded by that reading of these data; let me try to explain why.

Conclusion #1: As you recall, on two occasions students waited four weeks after the unit before they read the related passage and took the follow-up test. How did those students do on the reading test compared to their peers who read the passage right away?

Sure enough, after a four week gap, the benefits of that prior knowledge had begun to fade. Students in the waiting-four-weeks group scored lower than the read-right-away group.

On the one hand, this finding makes great sense. I’m not surprised — and I doubt that you are — that students who have background knowledge fresh in mind will understand a reading passage better than students who haven’t thought about the topic in the last month.

On the other hand, this conclusion cuts two ways.

  • Yes: it highlights the importance of prior knowledge.
  • However — and this is a big “however” — it doesn’t necessarily support the broad claims of a knowledge-rich curriculum. These students didn’t benefit from having gotten relevant background knowledge at some point in the past. They benefited from getting that knowledge immediately before reading.

In their strongest version, claims supporting a knowledge-rich curriculum emphasize that getting knowledge will benefit reading comprehension at some point in the future. This study does not support that claim — at least if that “point in the future” is a month or more after initial instruction.

At a minimum, this finding suggests that a knowledge-rich curriculum should include frequent review in order to benefit future reading comprehension.

More Uncertainty

If I put several parts of this study together, I can also summarize one theme this way:

Conclusion #2: Strong readers did better at almost everything.

  • They knew more topic content at the end of the classroom lessons than the weaker readers did.
  • They scored higher on the factual knowledge part of the reading tests.
  • They were more successful at drawing inferences on the reading tests.
  • Whereas the four week delay reduced scores for weaker readers, that delay did NOT (statistically significantly) reduce scores for stronger readers.

Let’s go back to the first of those bullet points: “stronger readers knew more topic content at the end of the classroom lessons than the weaker readers did.” This result strikes me as very puzzling.

I understand why weaker readers learn less from reading, but why might they have learned less from teaching? Did the strong readers already know more about these topics before the lessons began? (There was no pretest, so we don’t know.) Did the classroom lessons rely heavily on reading? Is direct instruction less beneficial to weak readers for some obscure reason? I just don’t see an obvious reason that those two cognitive capacities — “ability to read” and “ability to learn from classroom lessons” — should be related.

To make this point a different way: this study’s title is “The Importance of Knowledge for Reading Comprehension.” I think it makes that case, although in a limited way. Based on the conclusions I’ve just listed, I wonder if a better title might be: “The Importance of Skilled Reading for Academic Success.” Or an even more accurate title: “Skilled Reading is a Good Proxy for General Academic Success (but We Don’t Really Know Exactly Why).”

To be clear, I think this study shows that active prior knowledge enhances reading comprehension. (Those benefits dissipate with time, as that prior knowledge becomes less “active.”) But it also points to a bigger question: how does skilled reading connect to — or cause, or result from — other categories of academic life: motivation, vocabulary development, self-efficacy, working memory capacity, attention, and so forth?

Both this blog post and the study that inspired it started by focusing on background knowledge as an important variable in reading skill. I’ve ended up more curious about the relationship between reading and academic success more broadly. I’m sure that background knowledge matters — and this study has left me equally sure that there’s much more to the story…

Smith, R. J., Snow, P. C., Serry, T. A., & Hammond, L. S. (2026). The Importance of Knowledge for Reading Comprehension: A Quasi-Experimental Investigation. Reading Psychology, 1-27.

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 05, 2026

Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking

Read More

Almost any teacher will say: “in our school, we want students to become critical thinkers.” Once we embrace that praiseworthy goal, we’ve got some questions to ask.

How, exactly, do we help students think critically?

Or, here’s a bigger question:

Can we do that? Is critical thinking a skill that can be taught?

This debate frequently rages in educational circles.

  • Team A says: “our society needs critical thinkers! Schools should teach this skill…here’s how.”
  • Team Z says: “critical thinking isn’t a generic skill! People need knowledge with which to think critically…schools should teach that knowledge.”

I myself am sympathetic to Team Z’s claims. For instance, I’ve written a book about critically evaluating “research-based” claims in education. In that book, I repeatedly warn that I’m offering steps to think critically about this one topic; I’m not the right guy to think critically about the history of medieval Russia, or innovations in jet engine design, or a new rugby formation. I just don’t know enough about those topics to guide critical thinking about them.

I recently came across a study looking at this question. This study, helpfully, offers both reasons to be optimistic and reasons to be cautious. Here’s the story.

“Correlation Isn’t …”

A research team looked at 400 students taking college-level philosophy courses. About 115 of them took a course called “Critical Thinking”; the rest took other intro-level courses: “Introduction to Philosophy” and “Moral Problems.”

The critical thinking class focused on common biases or errors in judgment:

  • mistaking correlation for causation
  • honoring sunk costs
  • ignoring regression to the mean
  • forgetting about opportunity costs, and
  • the gambler’s fallacy (“if a fair coin comes up heads 8 times, the next toss is REALLY likely to come up tails”)

The instructor began the course by offering obvious examples that intuitively resonated with students. Over the course of the term, students practiced applying the rules in many different contexts: athletics, romantic relationships, business, war, friendship, and so forth. The class interleaved these examples, and worked to ensure that students looked for the “deep structure” behind them. That is: rather than thinking “this is a claim about capital punishment,” the students learned to think “this is a claim about causation…I should be sure it’s not relying on correlational data.”

At the end of the course, students in the Critical Thinking class made ENORMOUS strides compared to the students in the other philosophy classes. The effect sizes ranged from 0.91 — well into the “large” range — to 2.01 — comfortably in the “I’ve never seen anything like it” range.

Let’s look at some raw data. For one of the fallacies — sunk costs — the control group and the critical thinking group both bought into a “sunk costs” logic at the beginning of the term. On a scale of 1 (“that’s not a good reason at all”) to 7 (“that’s a really good reason”), they gave a sunk-costs argument an average rating of 5.5. That is: they substantially agreed that “past investments should influence future decisions.” (“I’ve read half of this book, so I’ve got to finish it … even though I’m not enjoying it.)

At the end of the term, the control group continued to support this fallacy: they rated sunk costs reasoning at 5.5. The critical thinking students now dropped their average ratings to 1.4: very close to the “that’s not a good reason at all” end of the scale.

Even more impressive, those gains lasted. 25% of the enrolled students returned for a post-test sixteen months later. The effect sizes remained roughly 1.00 — a remarkably high number.

Technically speaking, this was quite a class.

Practicing What We Preach

Having seen the highlights of this critical-thinking study, let’s think critically about its methods and conclusions. A few points stand out.

First: students were not randomly placed in these courses; they opted in. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that students who signed up for a course called “Critical Thinking” improved at critical thinking. In other words: these students might differ in meaningful ways from students in the other courses.

A related point: these are college students taking philosophy courses. That’s a very select group within a very select group. As I’ve often argued, we should be cautious about applying college-student data to K-12 education.

Second: this was one course with one teacher. Maybe this study has identified an unusually effective professor.

Third: I gotta say, those effect sizes give me pause. A wise stats-y friend of mine says: “in education research, an effect size of greater than 1.00 is almost always suspect.”

Fourth: the post-test problems weren’t identical to the class examples…but they were structurally highly similar. We could plausibly call the results “near transfer,” but not “far transfer.”

Remembering Opportunity Costs

When I DO teach this novel, I’m NOT teaching that novel. That absence is the “opportunity cost,” and we should always be on the lookout for them.

In this case, I think we can say:

College students who opted into a critical thinking class got better at spotting four specific reasoning errors. (They didn’t get better at spotting the fifth — the gambler’s fallacy.) Their ability to spot those fallacies lasted an impressively long time: at least 16 months.

We don’t know if other professors are as effective as this one. We don’t know if such a course would work with younger, or with less interested, students. And — crucially — we don’t know if students got better at spotting those errors in their actual lives: when reading advertisements for timeshares, or evaluating claims by political parties, or making decisions about medical treatment.

For the reasons listed in the second paragraph, I worry about summarizing this study by saying “look, critical thinking CAN be taught”; instead, I think it arrives at a much more modest set of claims.

And: I worry about opportunity costs. I’m quite sure that students can’t think critically without substantial amounts of factual knowledge. I’m still unsure if students — even when they do well in a course like the one described above — actually think critically in real life. For that reason, I’m all in favor of talking with students about critical thinking; I certainly offer up examples of doing so in the classroom (and, I hope, on this blog). I’m still not persuaded that the time taken to teach a full course on the topic — especially to younger students — will accomplish our praiseworthy goal.

Bishop, M., Feltz, A., & Conway, P. (2026). Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: Results from a field experiment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Beyond “Checking for Understanding”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 21, 2026

Beyond “Checking for Understanding”

Read More

Blog posts here typically start with research and then consider classroom application. Today’s post — more speculative than most — begins with a concept and then moves to thinking aloud. In brief: I want to explore the concept of “checking for understanding,” and propose a new category of classroom moves that should precede such checks.

Completing the Subject

As an English teacher, I get paid money to explain the grammatical concept of “subject complement” to my students. Let’s consider these sentences:

Joyce is President. She is decisive.

In these sentences, we know that “is” is a linking verb. When we look at the words “President” and “decisive” we see that they offer more information about Joyce. “President” is another word for “Joyce.” “Decisive” describes Joyce.

So, a subject complement completes the subject. Specifically:

A subject complement follows a linking verb, and renames or describes the subject.

“President” and “decisive” are subject complements because they follow the linking verb “is,” and offer more information about the subject Joyce.

In this explanation, I’ve given my students lots to think about. I should stop and check to see how all this information is landing. Specifically, I’m worried about working memory overload. My students have taken onboard new information, and they have to combine that new information with ideas already in long-term memory. Both of those demands — processing and combining new info — can strain working memory to the breaking point.

I can easily brainstorm several questions I might ask at this point to assess working memory function. Here — in a deliberately jumbled order — are four of my potential questions. Please take a minute to sort these questions by their difficulty: that is, which one places the least demand on students’ WM, and which one the most?

  1. Write a sentence with a subject complement.
  2. In the paragraph below, convert subject complements into appositives.
  3. What is the definition of “subject complement”?
  4. In the sentence below, which word is the subject complement?
[I’m strategically pausing here to give you a chance to think.]

I suspect you came up with this order:

  1. What is the definition of “subject complement”?
  2. In the sentence below, which word is the subject complement?
  3. Write a sentence with a subject complement.
  4. In the paragraph below, convert subject complements into appositives.

The first question simply asks students to repeat the definition I just gave them. The next three questions ask for application, each one with a greater degree of difficulty than the previous. That is: whereas question 3 is a bit more difficult than question 2, question 4 is MUCH more difficult than question 3.

Checking for Something

Let’s go back to look at those questions. Which of them, in your opinion, measures understanding? That is: you would comfortably say: “If my students can answer question X correctly, they understand the idea of subject complement?”

I myself would say: a correct answer to question 4 starts to demonstrate “understanding.” (Reasonable people might argue that #3 also measures “understanding.” I think “understanding” requires more than “simple application,” but the argument I’m about to make will hold wherever you draw the line on that list of questions.)

Of course, the other three questions give me important data:

  • Have my students heard what I said?
  • Have they done some basic processing of the idea?
  • Has my lesson plan prompted initial encoding?
  • Can they apply this new idea in basic ways?

So, I really must ask those first three questions — and others like them — even though they’re not actually helping me know if my students understand.

In my experience, those first three questions would typically fall under the heading “checking for understanding.” However — and here’s the point of my blog post — such questions don’t by themselves verify understanding. For that reason, the phrase “checking for understanding” is misleading. It provides false comfort. Once I’ve asked those questions, I’ve checked for something, but I haven’t yet learned if my students understand.

We need a better label. I have a modest proposal: “checking for uptake.”

Walking before Running

In suggesting this new category, I’m deliberately focusing on very basic parts of teaching. My students can’t capital-l Learn about a topic, can’t capital-u Understand a topic, if they haven’t started basic encoding and processing. “Checking for uptake” doesn’t sound especially glamorous, but the lack of glamour is the point.

Because I’m always focused on working memory, I think checking for uptake questions provide two working-memory benefits.

First: if my students haven’t successfully taken up foundational ideas, they won’t be able to do more advanced cognitive work. I can prevent future WM overload by ensuring that basic ideas are onboard. Checking for uptake helps me solve WM problems before they arise.

In other words: until my students succeed at increasingly challenging checking-for-uptake questions, I shouldn’t even ask checking-for-understanding questions.

In my own teaching, I think one of my greatest failings has been to ask “understanding” questions before my students had fully taken in the ideas I was presenting.

Second: if my students can’t answer checking for uptake questions, I might discover that even my initial explanation overwhelmed working memory. Perhaps my students don’t understand “linking verb” as well as I thought. Perhaps they’re not even clear on the idea of a grammatical subject.

In other words: checking for uptake can both prevent working memory overload in the future and reveal WM overload that might already have happened.

Double Checking

To ensure that we don’t overload students’ WM during direct instruction, we should check for two Us:

Checking for Uptake: did my students hear what I said? Can they say it back to me, or paraphrase it? Can they take baby steps with the concept?

Checking for Understanding: once students have taken up a lesson, can they do something new with it? If yes, can they do something even more challenging? Can they override prior misconceptions? Can they create and analyze?

Good teaching will include both kinds of checking — but Checking for Understanding should follow Checking for Uptake.

Older posts