Chapter 7, page 122
9 Harmful germs are not trying to be
bad when they settle down in your
body. They just want to live quietly,
eat, and make more germs.That means they don’t really want to hurt you, but
they just want to live quietly and eat the food you
digest and all the things that could go in your
stomach and they just want to get more bacteria. 337%10 Harmful germs can get into your body
in three ways, through your nose, your
mouth, and by cuts and scratches in
your skin.They get in through your moth and nose, and um...
cut.. .what I am thinking is, how can they get in
because the cut is so little... but maybe it really got
in through your skin... so it might not be getting
exactly right in. 449%11 In the beginning dinosaurs were fairly
small and weighed about 20
kilograms, about as much as a 6-year-
old child.A long time ago, people started to have a lot of hair
like monkeys, but now people don’t have as much
hair as before. So I think dinosaurs are probably the
same because they started to get bigger and bigger. 451%12 Harmful germs are not trying to be
bad when they settle down in your
body. They just want to live quietly,
eat, and make more germs.I wonder if germs are intelligent. I guess not...
maybe there’s a whole new world... .like there’s
fighting going on between the good and the bad
germs.... It’s kind of neat when you think about it,
‘cause to think of a whole new world inside the
body.” 561%(^1) The data are adapted from Chan et al. (1992, pp. 104-105, 115).
Table 7.1 presents examples from twelve of the students in the study. Each row of the table shows an
example of a think-aloud response by a different student. Column 2 presents one of the sentences that the
student read, and Column 3 presents the student’s think aloud response to that sentence. Column 4 shows
the percentage of ideas in the passages that each student recalled. The table is sorted by recall score, so that
the students with low recall scores are presented first.
Classify the think-aloud responses in Table 7.1 in a way that can explain why some students recall
more than others. Present a graphical analysis of your results.
The Reflection you just read is about the relationship between students’ learning and the cognitive
strategies they use. Researchers have found that effective students use more sophisticated strategies for
reading, writing, reasoning, and solving problems than ineffective students do. In Chapter 2 (Learning
Theories), you learned about some powerful strategies for promoting better memory. In Chapter 4 (Social
Development), you learned about some effective strategies for social interaction. In this chapter, you will
learn about cognitive strategies that you can teach your future students to dramatically improve their
comprehension, problem solving, writing, and reasoning.
Because the cognitive strategies students use are a very important determinant of how well they do in
school as well as in the real world, it is important that you, as a teacher, learn to evaluate your students’
strategy use. Effective teachers evaluate their students’ strategies so that they can best work out which
strategies they should teach their students and they can check whether their instruction has been effective.
In this chapter, you will learn a powerful set of tools that will enable you to evaluate the quality of your
students’ strategy use.
Figure 7.1 lists the specific strategies that you will learn about in this chapter. This list presents only
a fraction of the many useful cognitive strategies that psychologists and educators have studied over the
past several decades. We are starting with the strategies on this list because they offer great potential for
improving your students’ learning, problem solving, and reasoning skills. Moreover, most of you reading