NICHCY: Evidence for Education -- the Power of Strategy Instruction

As a youth, the well-known mathematician George Pólya found that he much preferred the challenge of solving new problems over the simple memorization of solutions to old ones. It is little wonder, then, while studying for a career in law, he grew so tired of having to memorize boring legal terms that he dropped out of law school. Only later did he earn a degree in mathematics.

Early in his professional career Pólya tutored students who were struggling in math and developed an approach that equipped these students with the general skills needed to identify and solve problems across a range of circumstances. Pólya would later become professor of mathematics at Stanford University where he dedicated a significant portion of his career to the study of problem solving. In 1945 he published the best-seller, "How to Solve It," where he laid out his problem-solving model in four easy steps: Identify, Plan, Monitor, and Check.

Strategy instruction has its earliest roots in this and similar work exploring the approach of the "good learner"--that is, what good learners do when they read, write, listen, do math, study, or prepare an oral presentation for class (Belmont, Butterfield, & Ferretti, 1982; Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966; Garner, 1982; Hayes & Flower, 1980; Logan, Olson, & Lindsey, 1993; Pressley, Heisel, McCormick, & Nakamura, 1982; Pressley, 1989; Rubin, 1975). The underlying premise of these investigations was, if we discovered what good learners do, we could teach poor or struggling learners to do these things and thereby improve their performance.

This early research showed that, indeed, good learners take very specific and systematic actions that less effective learners typically do not. Effective writers, for example, use three recursive stages in preparing written work: planning, writing, and revising. Within those general areas, more strategies are deployed. Strategies also play a key role in the effectiveness of good readers. In fact, strategies play a key role in all learning tasks. As important, this research also demonstrated that students can be taught to use strategies that they have not developed themselves.

Researchers then focused on naming and categorizing the strategies that good learners use and found that certain strategies tend to be very task-specific, meaning that they are useful when learning or performing certain tasks. Researchers call these concrete, action-based activities cognitive strategies. Examples include taking notes, asking questions, or filling out a chart. However, researchers also found that an essential element arched across how good learners approach tasks--metacognitive awareness (Campione, Brown, & Connell, 1988). Metacognitive awareness, simply, is the learner's awareness of the learning process and what it takes to achieve good results in a specific learning task.

Various strategies exist under the umbrella of metacognitive awareness, but a particularly illustrative one is self-evaluation, or the ability to stand back from one's work--say, a paper on the causes of the Civil War for history class--and evaluate it objectively, making corrections or revisions based upon that analysis. Similarly, a good reader will monitor comprehension while reading and take action when something does not make sense--for example, look back in the text for clarification or consciously hold the question in mind while continuing to read.

Because of the executive nature of metacognitive strategies--similar to a foreman overseeing all parts of a project and directing the action, including any problem solving that needs to occur--they are often referred to as self-regulatory strategies. It's easy to see why self-regulated learners tend to achieve academically. They set goals for learning, talk to themselves in positive ways about learning, use self-instruction to guide themselves through a learning problem, keep track of (or monitor) their comprehension or progress, and reward themselves for success.

The next wave of strategy research, not surprisingly, focused upon translating these findings into instructional approaches to teach less effective learners how to approach academic tasks in the systematic manner of the good learner (Ellis, Deshler, Lenz, Schumaker, & Clark, 1991; Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1991; Scruggs & Wong, 1990; Thompson & Rubin, 1996; Weinstein & Mayer, 1986). After more than 20 years of such research, the field has definitive knowledge about what works in strategy instruction and why. We know now, for example, that the most effective strategy interventions combine the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. A plethora of approaches abound (we will spotlight a sampling of the most well-documented below and in future editions of Evidence for Education).

Teacher-ready materials are steadily emerging to translate this research into classroom practice. As publishers respond to federal mandates that instruction be based on scientific evidence of effectiveness, the latest student textbooks frequently incorporate strategy instruction as an explicit part of their materials. This is visible in textbooks that begin chapters by asking students to think about what they already know about the topic to be addressed, in literature series that ask students to predict what will happen next, and in student materials that require students to create concept maps or graphic organizers for the information presented. All of these activities relate to strategies of the good learner; all are derived from decades of research into effective teaching and learning.

The remainder of this Evidence for Education is devoted to spotlighting several of the most notable and well-documented strategy interventions. These summaries are provided, not as recommendations to exclude other intervention approaches, but to illustrate how powerfully research can inform educational practice and how appropriate application of research can lead to well-packaged and well-specified educational interventions that can make a positive difference in student learning and student outcomes.