How teachers understand these issues will influence how they bring students into contact with information, what they encourage students to do with this information, and how they assess the success of what students have accomplished. We believe teachers make many important decisions and this book will offer even more ideas and proposals to consider. Unless the approaches we offer make sense to teachers, we doubt they will invest the time and energy needed to implement the ideas. This textbook emphasizes a cognitive perspective. This is one of several possible theories teachers encounter in an effort to help them understand learning and problem-solving behavior.
Students encounter theories in many of their college courses.
We take a somewhat different perspective and suggest that we all have developed explanatory models we use to guide our decision-making behavior.