Implications of Developmental Psychology for the Design of Effective Instruction

As anyone who has been a classroom teacher can attest, not all concepts or skills that children are asked to learn are of equal cognitive complexity. In any given curriculum, there are normally one or two tasks that stand out as being harder than the rest. Even when students are highly motivated, they master such tasks with great difficulty. In certain cases (for example, the addition of fractions), they may not master the tasks at all unless they are academically talented or unless they are given massive practice. The present paper addresses the question of how the teaching of such cognitively complex classroom tasks can be improved. It contends that a significant improvement can be achieved by basing the design of instruction on principles that derive from the study of cognitive development.