How Can Good Strategy Use Be Taught to Children? Evaluation of Six Alternative Approaches

A primer of research on cognitive strategy instruction: The important issues and how to address them

“…Others have followed an expansion and cognitive elaboration of neobehavioral recommendations for good teaching (e.g., Carnine and Silbert, 1979;Rosenshine, 1979Rosenshine, , 1983, with Roehler and Duffy's (1984) "direct explanation" method for teaching reading strategies as one of the best developed examples of this approach. Despite different conceptual foundations, Vygotskian and cognitive-behavioral descriptions of effective teaching are similar (Herrmann, 1988;Meichenbaum, 1977;Pressley, 1979;Pressley et al, 1987e).…”

“…Moreover, whether strategy instruction usually is scaffolded is hard to say from the observations made to date. Since scaffolding demands much of teachers because it requires constant diagnosis of student difficulties and a great deal of reexplanation (Pressley et al, 1987e), it may be rare, especially when strategies are taught to entire classrooms of students. In short, previous work on naturalistic methods for teaching strategies is neither as extensive nor as analytical as it could be.…”

Regulative processes in individual, 3D and computer supported cooperative learning contexts

“…The fact that the teachers informed the students of the goals of the task and what to do appears to inhibit the undertaking of orienting activities. By varying the amount of information provided externally, thus, the motivation, need, and ability of students to orient themselves towards a task can be modified as should be done according to good strategy user models (Pressley 1986, Pressley, Snyder, & Cariglia-Bull, 1987. Alternatively, one may opt to let students do what most people do and simply get on with things without reading the relevant instructions or manual.…”

Learning stoichiometry: a comparison of text and multimedia formats

“…Practice with hitting stationary balls at a driving range may effectively improve your golf score, but it does not transfer to returning a slice serve on the tennis court. Likewise, trying to teach students to use general, context-independent cognitive strategies has no clear benefits outside of the specific domains in which those strategies are taught (Pressley, Snyder, & Cariglia-Bull, 1987 (Rissland, 1991). For newly learned concepts and procedures to be flexible-that is, able to be applied to multiple situations within the domain of study--students need experience with multiple and variable examples in different contexts from which they can extract the critical underlying principle(s) (Perkins & Salomon, 1989;Quilici & Mayer, 1996).…”