The articles in this special issue take an important step in beginning to test the PET framework. Together, these articles illustrate the importance of considering individual differences in attitudes and prior knowledge as well as differences in task demands when investigating the role of emotions in shaping cognitive processing while reading…

An exponential increase in the availability of information over the last two decades has asked for novel theoretical frameworks to examine how students optimally learn under these new learning conditions, given the limitations of human processing ability. In this special issue and in the current editorial introduction, we argue that such a novel…

The lack of citations of previous research is the result of serious problems all readers of scholarly publications have: (1) articles are unnecessarily long; (2) they are written in unnecessarily complex prose; and (3) journal subscriptions and books are very expensive. The solution: Short, clearly written scholarly papers, published in…

This manuscript presents an interview with John Sweller, Fred Paas, and Jeroen van Merrienboer about cognitive load theory. It presents the views of these main founders of the theory on the progress from the first major publication on the theory in 1998 (Sweller, Van Merrienboer, & Paas, "Educational Psychology Review," 10(3),…

Over a century of research on postsecondary learning has documented that students often struggle with the academic literacy demands of college. Academic literacy tasks are the subset of all academic tasks that involve reading and writing and are rooted within larger cultural practices. These demands are challenging, complex, and varied, so…

Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a fruitful way of thinking deeply about teaching economics. In this article, the author offers several ideas on how to offload parts of three of the cognitive challenges they identify to an online module that any instructor could assign to their students. Ideally, this module would be described in an economics…

In this commentary, I reflect from a neurocognitive perspective on the four chapters on natural number development included in this section. These chapters show that the development of seemingly basic number processing is much more complex than is often portrayed in neurocognitive research. The chapters collectively illustrate that children's…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…

Oral reading fluency probes are essential for reading assessment, intervention, and progress monitoring. Due to the limited options for choosing oral reading fluency probes, it is important to utilize all available resources such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT to create oral reading fluency probes. The purpose of this…

Although there is a lack of accurate data on the exact number of international students in school psychology graduate programs, international student enrollment seems to be increasing, especially from Asia. Graduate school is challenging for everyone; however, it can be exponentially more difficult for those who are navigating both their identity…

How does the teaching of climate change and sustainability fit into the teaching of the traditional content and skills of the core science strands? In this article, Rosemary Hipkins responds to this question that was asked by a teacher who is concerned that complex context that dominates the narrative of teaching can cause confusion for students…

Macalister and Webb (2019) claim that "children's literature" written for native English speakers is too difficult for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) students, those who have acquired the first 3,000 to 4,000 most commonly used words in English. The authors analyzed a corpus of short stories written for a classroom…

Recent upgrades to cognitive load theory suggest that evolutionary processes have shaped the way that working memory processes cultural and social information. According to evolutionarily educational psychologists, some forms of information are processed with lower working memory loads than other forms. The former are evolutionarily salient and…

This article reflects on the epistemological steamrolling that the 2021 Ofsted Curriculum Research Review (OCRR) accomplishes: in part, by the positioning of the problem and solution through highly selective cherry-picking (omitting key causal factors); in part, through the discursive move of acknowledging complexity before offering simple and…

In this short article I try to present a taxonomy of sources of difficulty, in particular complexity. I emphasize how these factors interact with each other and with individual differences and treatments, before illustrating some of these interactions and the methodological issues involved in studying them with examples from the empirical studies…