The Dynamic Young Adult Mind: Practical Implications for Teaching
Guiding Principles for Promoting Students’ Cognitive Development
1) Repeatedly expose students to Open-Ended problems.
 Involves raising questions (and giving assignments) with no single right answer.
 Examples: Conflicting Accounts assignments; exposure to conflicting evidence (e.g.,
Battle for Hue in Vietnam; exposure to conflicting interpretations of a given set of data).
2) Scaffold students to higher levels of thinking.
 Avoid the extremes of oversimplification and excess challenge.
 Goal  scaffolding 1 level/step at a time. In other words – the goal should be to assign
coursework that focuses on the next level of skills beyond where the student currently is.
3) Balance challenge and support.
 Provide open-ended problems but clear and structured instructions. Design assignments
for which students have to address specific questions (e.g., “why don’t we know with
certainty whether this interpretation is correct?” “What are the pros and cons of this
particular solution to the problem?”) versus “Please write 1-2 pages on _______.”
 Provide examples of responses to similar assignments (sample papers/assignments or
class discussions to illustrate desired responses; maybe used to illustrate common
errors/mistakes as well)
 Engage, model, provide guided practice, encourage, and offer feedback.
“When their responses are dogmatic, I foster all their doubts; when they seem mired in skepticism or
paralyzed by complexity, I push them to make judgments; when their tactics are not fully reflective, I
encourage their best efforts to use critical, interrogative, or evaluative thinking” (Kroll, 1992, p. 13).
4) Empathize with students.
 Increasing cognitive complexity is difficult (requires “shifts” from comfortable certainty
to scary uncertainty).
 Helpful to validate students’ discomfort and struggles.
5) Avoid pigeonholing students
 Use the developmental framework as a guide, but avoid perceiving students simply in
terms of a fixed label or developmental stage.
6) Strive to be patient.
 With students (development does occur, but it is a slow process; may take up to 2 years to
develop strong Step 2 skills; average progression during college years: Stage 3.5 to 4)
 With ourselves (instructing is difficult, especially when trying to foster critical thinking –
frustrating process, especially given the typical phenomena of regression, difficulty
generalizing skills, the limited ability to perform a given skill independently, etc.).