Recommendations From Cognitive Psychology for Enhancing the Teaching of Natural-Science Categories

Because of their complex structures, many natural-science categories are difficult to learn. Yet achieving accuracy in classification is crucial to scientific inference and reasoning. Thus, an emerging theme in cognitive-psychology and cognitive-science research has been to investigate better ways to instruct about categories. This article briefly reviews major findings that will help inform policies for teaching categories in the science classroom. Many of the examples come from our specific project that examines teaching rock classifications in the geologic sciences. This project uses formal models of human category learning—developed in cognitive psychology—to search for optimal teaching procedures. The model-suggested category-teaching procedures often lead to better learning outcomes than do alternative procedures motivated by teachers’ and students’ intuitive judgments. In addition to reviewing these enhanced procedures for teaching natural-science categories, the article points to recent broader efforts for fostering collaborations between cognitive-science researchers and education researchers.