
Stephen ChewSamford University · Department of Psychology
Stephen Chew
Doctor of Philosophy
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (70)
Like millions of people, I play Wordle each day in The New York Times. If you are unfamiliar, Wordle is a logic game in which you get six guesses to figure out a five-letter word. After you submit a guess, you get feedback about each letter in the word you chose. Either the letter is not in the correct word at all, the letter is in the correct word...
Students often underestimate how much study time is required to master course concepts for an exam (Chew, 2014). Weaker students in particular tend to be grossly overconfident about how quickly they can learn. As a result, many students wait too long to begin studying for an exam and run out of time, cramming the day or two before an exam and hopin...
Do people learn in the same way or different ways?1 According to cognitive science, the answer is the former. There are general principles of learning that apply to everyone, such as the importance of attention and the value of good learning strategies like spacing and retrieval practice (e.g., Weinstein et al., 2018). At the same time, some educat...
It is challenging to design an assessment, formative or summative, that reveals individual student understanding, especially within the time constraints of a class period.
A childhood friend of mine passed away a few years ago. We worked on the high school yearbook together, but what was for me an extracurricular became for him a lifelong passion for journalism. He majored in it in college and became a sports reporter. After writing for newspapers for a few years, he grew tired of a life working nights and weekends,...
Students come to our classes with misconceptions about the concepts and about the course. These misconceptions make learning accurate information more difficult, and the research shows that misconceptions can be remarkably difficult to correct.
Students learn better if they are curious about the topic. Curiosity is both a trait and a state. This essay describes what we know about curiosity and how to create it.
What truly makes teaching a challenging task? We don't know the exact conditions in which learning occurs. We do, however, know a lot about the conditions which help or hinder it.
Establishing productive social norms for class is beneficial for supporting student learning. The norms need to be established and reinforced from the first day of class.
When thinking about designing assignments or using technology, it is useful to think about in terms of affordances and constraints. Affordances are what the assignment supports students in doing. Constraints are what it prevents students from doing.
Not only do we need to teach our subject, we need to teach students how to study and learn our subjects. This article describes how to teach students to study effectively.
Educators all want teaching to progress, but right now there are two contrary definitions of progress. I call one form of progress transactional teaching and the other transformative teaching, and they are pulling teaching in opposing directions. Let me explain what I mean.
This article explores how to carry out formative assessment, use examples, and give feedback; three practices that are common to all teaching methods.
This article lists freely available, high quality resources for each cognitive challenge of effective teaching.
Seven behaviors to that can undermine student trust and motivation.
This article critiques the current emphasis in teaching on "best practices" as both wrong and unproductive. An alternative method is described that emphasizes what teachers know over what teachers do.
In this essay I argue that research on trigger warnings has missed an important point about them. They are as much, if not more, about developing trust between student and teacher as they are about preventing trauma. I also point out that most research on trigger warnings lack a pedagogical reason why subjects should view potentially disturbing mat...
Examines the three key types of knowledge teachers must possess for effective teaching.
Author's note: I started this essay when my son graduated from high school. He is now a college senior. (Procrastination is a problem I need to deal with one of these days.) I publish it now so that readers may share it with the college students in their own lives. Students get a lot of advice of varying quality. This is advice from a father (who k...
Student trust in the teacher is a critical but often overlooked variable in student engagement, perseverance, and learning. In this essay, I define it and discuss possible ways teachers build student trust or inadvertently undermine it. .
Students and teachers often don't understand the relationship between learning, effort, and difficulty. This essay tries to explain that relationship.
Here is my advice to new teachers about how to approach the task of preparing to teach.
At the beginning of a course, and of each class, the teacher should help students see the need and value of what they will be learning.
One of the strongest predictors of how easily and well a person will learn a topic is their prior knowledge about it. The more one already knows, the easier it is to learn more. Because of this fact, students often struggle more with introductory courses, where they know little about a field, than with advanced ones, where they are adding to what t...
What should count as evidence of effective teaching for assessment, tenure, and promotion? In this article, I outline some ways of gathering relevant evidence.
Psychologists and educators have studied learning for well over 100 years, and we still don't know the specific conditions that result in learning. If we did, then teaching would be easy. A teacher would simply recreate the specific conditions, and students would always learn. We may not know exactly how people learn, but we do know a lot about the...
Like many college faculty, my first teaching experience was in graduate school. I was woefully unprepared to teach but blissfully ignorant of that fact. I had sat through three informal meetings on how to teach given by fellow graduate students who had taught a few times. I figured my 180 minutes of training had prepared me pretty well to teach my...
Les enseignants et les élèves ont tout à gagner d’une compréhension précise de la façon dont les gens apprennent. Pourtant, les recherches montrent que les deux groupes ont souvent des croyances erronées qui nuisent à l’apprentissage des élèves. Cet article décrit un organisateur avancé qui peut être utilisé pour aider les enseignants à comprendre...
The authors describe a research-based conceptual framework of how students learn that can guide the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of teaching practice. The framework consists of nine interacting cognitive challenges that teachers need to address to enhance student learning. These challenges include student mental mindset, metacognitio...
The challenge of teaching communication skills outlined in Goal 4 of the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major is that it occurs in many contexts and the communicator must adapt the form to match both context and purpose. We created a taxonomy of dimensions and kinds of communication that represents the various contexts in communica...
In traditional research areas within psychology, effective researchers stay up-to-date with the latest advances and new methodologies within a specialty area. Failure to do so limits one’s effectiveness and potential impact on advancing that field of study. In our view, teachers of psychology possess the same responsibilities to stay current and in...
In this essay, I argue that the traditional view of teaching, that the teacher's responsibility is to present information that students are solely responsible for learning, has been rendered untenable by cognitive science research in learning. The teacher can have a powerful effect on student learning by teaching not only content, but how to study...
Scholarly research focusing on teaching and learning has experienced extraordinary growth in the last 20 years. Although this is generally good news for the profession of teaching, a troubling form of tribalism has emerged that inhibits the advancement of teaching practice. In this essay, we trace the development of scholarly inquiry into teaching...
Using the principles of the scholarship of teaching and learning, we evaluated 2 learning strategies to determine if they could improve student exam performance in general psychology. After the second of 3 exams, we gave students the option of participating in a specific learning activity and assessed its impact using the third exam. In Study 1, pa...
Ten American English vowels were sung in a /b/-vowel-/d/ consonantal context by a professional countertenor in full voice (at F0 = 130, 165, 220, 260, and 330 Hz) and in head voice (at F0 = 220, 260, 330, 440, and 520 Hz). Four identification tests were prepared using the entire syllable or the center 200-ms portion of either the full-voice tokens...
Music presents information both sequentially, in the form of musical phrases, and simultaneously, in the form of chord structure.
The ability to abstract musical structure presented sequentially and simultaneously was investigated using modified versions
of the Bransford and Franks’ (1971) paradigm. Listeners heard subsets of musical ideas. The abs...
Sung vowels provide an excellent opportunity to study the information present in the vowel steady state. Ten American English vowels /i,I,e,ɛ,æ,ɑ,ʌ,o,U,u/ in /b/-vowel-/d/ syllables were sung by; a professional male singer at seven different pitches: C3, E3, A3, C4, E4, A4, and C4. Syllable length ranged from about 500 to 900 ms. An algorithm was u...
Quantitative literacy (QL), a relatively new literacy, has the potential to bridge the gap between the literary and scientific cultures. The chasm of the two cultures refers to the gulf and increased polarization between scientists (science) and literary intellectuals or literati (arts). Snow (1959) drew attention to the divide of The Two Cultures...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1986. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-212). Microfiche. s