Rationale: Cognitive psychology
To create developmentally appropriate, successful learning opportunities, teachers need to understand how children learn and how their students' development affects their learning. All teacher candidates should understand key ideas, such as 1) people understand new things in the context of the information they already know, 2) proficiency in new mental tasks requires practice, 3) children are more alike than different in how they learn, and 4) children differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed by hard work. Instruction should not endorse topics that constitute pseudoscience (e.g., learning styles). As a team of psychologists wrote in a review of relevant research on learning styles, "[T] he contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing."1
