For decades, instructional communication scholars have relied predominantly on cross-sectional survey methods to generate empirical associations between effective teaching and student learning. These studies typically correlate students' perceptions of their instructor's teaching behaviors with subjective self-report assessments of their own cognitive learning. The author feels that these self-report perceptual studies are limited by design, providing little insight into how various teaching behaviors foster authentic student learning (Lane,2017). The author maintains that learning is always the result of some process at work in the mind of the student learner; there is no direct absorption or transfer of knowledge taught by a teacher. Instead, there are mechanisms through which effective teaching helps students learn, and these indirect mechanisms are mediators between teaching and learning. Since learning is a process, the author feels it should be researched as such and argues that one of the greatest reforms for instructional communication research over the next five years would be to encourage researchers to design teaching-learning experiments and adopt recent advances in linear modeling (see Darlington & Hayes, 2017; Hayes, 2013) to test hypotheses featuring mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis to better understand the mechanisms through which learning occurs and the boundary conditions under which learning opportunities are optimized. By doing so, scholars will study authentic learning as the causal process that it is and identify with greater precision how and when teaching does (or does not) foster authentic student learning.