Chapter 7, page 129
Successful students offered many more explanations of why each step in the worked-out problems was
taken. Successful students also were much more likely to monitor their learning, by accurately detecting
points that they did not understand. In contrast, unsuccessful students seldom explained steps in the
worked-out problems, and they seldom commented on anything that they did not understand—even though
their poor performance on the test showed that there were in fact many points that they did not understand.
Table 7.2 summarizes the differences between successful and unsuccessful students.
Table 7.2:
Differences between successful and unsuccessful students in the Chi et al. (1989) study
Successful Students Unsuccessful Students
- Provided many explanations (15.3 per student).
Examples:
y Ummm, this would make sense, because since
they’re connected by a string that doesn’t stretch.
y If the string’s going to be stretched, the earth’s
going to be moved, and the surface of the incline
is going to be depressed.
y Okay, so it’s basically a way of adding them
together and seeing if there is anything left over.
And if there is anything left over, it equals the
force: mass times acceleration.- Provided few explanations (2.8 per student). They
were more likely to paraphrase statements from the
worked examples without adding any new ideas to
try to explain why certain steps were taken.
- Provided few explanations (2.8 per student). They
- Noticed failures to comprehend (9.3 per student).
Examples:
y I was having trouble with F-mgsin ș = 0.
y I’m wondering whether there would be
acceleration due to gravity?
y Why the force has to change?
2. Seldom noticed their own failures to comprehend
(1.1/student).
from Chi et al. (1989, pp. 161, 165, 171).
This study is one of a large body of studies that support the idea that effective and ineffective
students often differ because effective students use different (and more effective) strategies. Together, these
studies strongly suggest that teaching ineffective students to use more effective cognitive strategies would
help them become more effective. The training studies that we discuss in the next section confirm this idea.
Strategy Training Studies
Strategy training studies are studies that investigate the effects of teaching students a strategy or a
set of strategies. In typical training studies, one group of students is taught one or several strategies. This
group is then compared with a control group of students who are not taught the strategy or strategies to see
whether students who have been taught the strategies perform better. Many strategy training studies have
documented that teaching students to use effective cognitive strategies improves performance (e.g., Friend,
2001; Graham et al., 2005; Taconis, Ferguson-Hessler, & Broekkamp, 2001).
As an example, consider the following experiment by educational researchers Victoria Page-Voth and
Steve Graham (1999), who explored ways of helping learning-disabled (LD) seventh and eighth graders
learn to write opinion essays. Their study was grounded in research that showed that learning-disabled
middle-school students typically support their opinions with just one or two arguments and seldom consider