“How Obvious”: Personal reflections on the database of educational psychology and effective teaching research

From a personal perspective, the author reflects upon the notion that many research findings appear falsely to possess the quality of being “obvious”. Specific attention is given to the topic of teacher effectiveness. The feeling that findings are obvious can be related to the following: the false consensus effect, self-serving cognition, hindsight bias, base-rate neglect, illusory correlations, and the fundamental computational bias. The author suggests ways in which teacher effectiveness findings can be used, and notes how one “obvious” notion, that discovery learning produces more meaningful learning than direct instruction, is a fundamental misconception.