Chapter 7, page 132
Large-scale instructional experiments
Another type of study that supports the importance of making cognitive strategies a central focus in
the classroom is the long-term classroom experiment or quasi-experiment. (These are two of the research
designs we discussed in Chapter 1). These studies often span most of a school year or longer, and they
contrast the effects of a curriculum that instructs students on many different cognitive strategies with the
effects of a traditional curriculum that is less focused on strategy instruction. A number of these
experiments have been carried out and have shown that students benefit from curricula that focus on
cognitive strategy instruction (e.g., R. Brown et al., 1996; Guthrie et al., 2004).
As an example, educational psychologists Rachel Brown, Michael Pressley, Peggy Van Meter, and
Ted Schuder (1996) reported the results of a yearlong study that evaluated the effects of a program that
integrated reading comprehension strategies into the second grade curriculum. The program, called SAIL
(Students Achieving Independent Learning), required teachers to provide extensive instruction and guided
practice using a variety of strategies that promote reading comprehension. These strategies include making
predictions, visualizing information, relating the text to prior knowledge or personal experiences
(elaboration), summarizing, monitoring comprehension, setting goals, and looking back in the text for
important information. Teachers regularly modeled multiple strategies and encouraged students to apply
multiple strategies when reading.
In this study, there were two sets of reading groups. Reading groups taught by five teachers using
SAIL were contrasted with the reading groups taught by five teachers who their principals and supervisors
identified as being strong reading teachers. This was a quasi-experiment because teachers were not
randomly assigned to condition. To form the groups, students were matched according to scores on a
reading comprehension test that had been administered before the study began. Once the groups were
established, some lessons were videotaped and analyzed. These analyses revealed that lessons taught by
SAIL teachers incorporated the use of an average of 9.20 comprehension strategies per lesson, whereas the
other teachers’ lessons incorporated an average of only 2.00 comprehension strategies per lesson. In
interviews in the spring, after a year of participating in SAIL, SAIL students were much more fluent than
comparison students at talking about the strategies they had learned. The SAIL students also outperformed
the comparison students on a standardized test of reading comprehension administered in the spring. The
gains in comprehension test scores registered by SAIL students from fall to spring were double the gains of
the students in comparison groups. Interestingly, SAIL students also outperformed comparison students on
a standardized test of word skills (e.g., how to attack difficult-to-decode words), even though this was not a
focus of the SAIL program. Studies such as this provide powerful evidence of the value of infusing strategy
instruction into the school curriculum.
In addition to large-scale instructional experiments, researchers have compared high-performing
schools with lower-performing schools to see how they differ. Strategy instruction is one difference that has
emerged from a number of these studies. We discuss studies of this type in the next section.
Comparisons of instructional practices in effective and ineffective schools
There is evidence that highly successful schools place great emphasis on helping students learn
effective strategies (Gaskins et al., 1993; Langer, 2001; Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995)(cf. Pressley,
Raphael, Gallagher, & DiBella, 2004). Several studies have compared instructional practices in effective
and ineffective schools and have found more and better strategy instruction in effective schools (Langer,
2001; Pressley et al., 1998; B. Taylor et al., 1999; Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, & Hampston, 1998). A
study by literacy researcher Judith Langer (2001) provides a good illustration. Focusing on literacy
instruction, Langer studied a diverse range of 25 schools in Florida, New York, California, and Texas.
Among these schools, some were classified as schools that were “beating the odds.” In these schools,
students were performing higher on standardized literacy tests than were other schools serving populations
that were demographically similar. Other schools were classified as “typically performing” schools; in these
schools, students’ literacy scores on standardized tests were typical of schools with the same demographic