GLN Consulting

Create explanatory modeling activities that resemble innovative scientific practices. By engaging in these activities, students can achieve a deeper, more complete understanding of the scientific study of psychologicla phenomena.

GLN Consulting

Provide students with recommended strategies for performong these tasks, instructions for excuting these strategies, and reasons for each cycle of activities involved.

GLN Consulting

Provide students with scaffolding (core concepts) for learning to use these strategies.

GLN Consulting

Integrate student engagement in these activities with teaching methods and instructional resources in ways that achieve course and departmental objectives

GLN Consulting



“GLN Consulting: The Key to Enhancing Psychology Students’ Depth of Scientific Understanding”

Engaging Students in Explanatory Modeling Activities to Enhance their Understanding of the Scientific Study of Psychological Phenomena

GLN Consulting offers a variety of services organized around the use of student engagement in explanatory modeling tasks and activities (EMAs) to promote their use of higher-order thinking skills to learn and achieve a deeper and more complete understanding of the scientific study of psychological phenomena. The EMAs we develop are designed to resemble innovative scientific reasoning strategies. These strategies serve as higher-order thinking tools for thinking critically about scientific psychology. Proficiency in using these kinds of reasoning strategies is essential for conducting basic and applied research and for presenting, analyzing, and evaluating scientific arguments.

Explanatory Modeling is a form of model-based reasoning that scientists typically use to construct, evaluate, and revise explanatory hypotheses about phenomena. Model-based reasoning can be used to predict, control, and/or explain phenomena, but explanations provide greater depth of scientific understanding because they place more constraints on the causal variables that contribute to phenomena and how they do so.

Why Use Explanatory Modeling tasks and Activities?

Critical thinking about the subject matter of scientific psychology requires a deep and complete understanding of both the reasoning strategies that scientists use to formulate hypotheses and the use of systematic empirical methods to evaluate and revise these hypotheses. These are two important aspects of scientific practice and they are interrelated in important ways that are often not well understood by students. Engagement in explanatory modeling tasks and activities can help students to learn and achieve a better understanding of these interrelations.

The Founder of GLN Consulting

GLN Consulting was founded in 2003 by Dr. George L. Newsome, III to provide psychology teachers with a convenient and inexpensive source of advise and guidance on how to use student engagement in scientific reasoning activities to promote a better understanding of scientific psychology. Dr. Newsome has spent countless hours since his retirement from teaching on researching and developing activities for fostering deeper and more complete scientific understanding in psychology students.