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 kind of scientific 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 more coherent understanding its subject matter. To achieve this kind of understanding, students must learn to organize and systematize their relevant background knowledge in a manner that reflects the two defining characteristic of psychology: (1) its use of scientific methods to study behavior and (2) the scientific application of its knowledge.  By learning to organize the their knowledge of psychology in this way, 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 and correct many of their inadequacies.  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 kinds of activities can often help students identify their deficiencies and learn to rectify those deficiencies and redirect their efforts.  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.