Collaborative Teaching and Making Sense of Symbols: Comment on Lampert's "Knowing,Doing, and Teaching Multiplication"

Despite the progress research in cognitive science has made in the last few decades, it remains a challenge to demonstrate important practical benefits of this research. Too often it seems that the practical implications researchers can draw from their theories are either obvious to experienced practitioners or have small or tenuous effects in the real world. The article by Chandler and Sweller (1991) contrasts dramatically to this customary state of affairs: They apparently have found a simple characteristic of instructional materials that has dramatic effects on performance in real-world tasks. However, their article raises a number of deeper questions regarding the relation between research and application that will be the focus of this commentary. I argue that the best way to generate important practical results is to develop and test theories of mental processing that are concerned with variables and tasks that are important in the real world. Chandler and Sweller have not taken this approach, and this may limit the implications that can be drawn from their results.