GLN Consulting specializes in helping teachers use explanatory modeling activities to deal with what many educators consider to be the most common problem confronting students of psychology: achieving the depth of understanding that is necessary to think critically about its subject matter.  Although this is a common problem, it is often largely ignored by people involved in teaching psychology at the undergraduate level. As a result, students often fail to appreciate the need to develop the cognitive skills necessary to reason effectively about psychological phenomena, and this failure may partly account for the low standard of work that students frequently submit in essays, reports, and examinations. Moreover, teachers' assessments of students' work and their critical comments are often ineffective in helping students overcome these inadequacies. When students receive these assessments and comments, they may become aware that their general approach is inadequate, but in most instances they do not know how to rectify their inadequacies or redirect their efforts.

GLN Consulting focuses on providing teachers with individualized advice and guidance on how to use explanatory modeling activities to help students organize and systematize their knowledge of psychology in a manner that helps them achieve a deeper understanding of its subject matter. Students can learn to organize and systematize their relevant background knowledge in this way by constructing, evaluating, and revising generic models that explain psychological phenomena.  Psychological explanations enhance understanding of behavior and mental processes by situating those phenomena within a larger body of scientific knowledge.  The depth of understanding provided by a given explanation depends on the number of inferential connections it establishes between the phenomena it explains and other elements of the target domain. 

By achieving a deeper understanding of psychology, students can improve their proficiency in analyzing and evaluating basic and applied research in psychology and in making, analyzing, and evaluating sophisticated psychological arguments (see theoretical framework).  In addition, engagement in explanatory modeling activities can help students enhance their understanding of psychological terms, learn to identify and correct their misconceptions about psychological phenomena, and coordinate psychological explanations with relevant empirical evidence.  All these potential benefits of engaging students in explanatory modeling activities can enhance the quality of work they submit on examinations, essays, and reports.

GLN Consulting has developed strategies for students to use to perform explanatory modeling tasks.  The proper use of these strategies can complement the requirements of explanatory modeling tasks in helping students develop the kinds of cognitive skills that are essential to understanding and reasoning about psychological phenomena. These cognitive skills include those that involve (1) abstraction through generic modeling (2) stimulative model-based reasoning, and (3) coordinating explanations of phenomena with relevant empirical evidence.

Explanatory modeling can also include metacognitive reflection and discussion activities that can help students learn to evaluate their skill in thinking critically about psychological phenomena.  Once students have engaged in explanatory modeling activities, those activities can serve as objects of discussion and reflection. For example, students might be asked to explain and justify their choice of model components.  Engagement in these metacognitive and discussion activities can enhance the benefits of modeling activities by enhancing students' proficiency in employing, monitoring, and evaluating their use of explanatory modeling strategies.  In addition, they can help students achieve a better understanding of the strategies that scientific psychologists use to model phenomena and the purposes that each set of components serve.  GLN Consulting can provide advice and guidance on developing effective methods of (1) engaging students in these kinds of metacognitive and discussion activities and (2) using the results of those activities in conjunction with students' performance on exams, essays, and reports, to refine the focus of future instructional methods to better accommodate students' current understanding.