Helping Children with Learning Difficulties to Employ Mnemonic Strategies: A Role for Educational Psychologists

Constructive Instruction and Learning Difficulties

“…• Classroom interactions in which teachers are very directive, and where the pupils ask few questions, and are relatively passive, make few contributions, may pretend to understand, need frequent reassurance, and show low levels of engagement (Good and Brophy, 1991;Wang, 1991;Bennett, 1991;Wood, 1991) • Tasks which are unengaging, and make low intellectual demands, indicating that expectations of pupils are low (Bennett, 1991;Watson, 1996) • Highly organised and tightly planned curricula which lack coherence and intrinsic interest, or, at the other extreme, complex ones which may be overwhelming (Vaughn and Schumm, 1996;Goddard, 1997;Zigmond, 1996) • Solitary learning, a relative lack of the social and intellectual stimulation of learning with peers (Dyson, Millward and Skidmore, 1994;Riding and Read, 1996;Hart, 1992) • Insufficient attention to metacognition, learning strategies, and generalisation of learning (Wang and Reynolds, 1995;Riding and Read, 1996;Male, 1995) • Practice that leads to negative motivation, low self-esteem, feelings of incompetence and lack of control (Ames and Ames, 1991;Galloway, Rogers, Armstrong and Leo, 1998;Norwich, 1997) These observations may be the legacy of behavioural approaches which emphasised repetition, simplification and clarification within structured learning programmes made up of small steps. What pupils are missing has become more obvious and there have often been disappointing results in terms of pupils' confidence, competence and general knowledge.…”

Metamemorial functioning of children with moderate learning difficulties

“…In the light of these findings, traditional strategy training -based as it is on the premise that LD children do not spontaneously employ strategies to aid recallis seen to be inappropriate as a means of intervention. Instead, an instructional model has been proposed (Male, 1995) which aims to utilise and genera'ise the strategies already at the disposal of the LD memoriser.…”