EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 7, page 138

When my daughter, who is bilingual in English and Japanese, was in elementary school, she spent a
portion of two summers in a Japanese school. Several months later, when she was back in her regular
school, she showed me her algebra notebook when she was doing her homework. She had circled in red ink
the problems that she had gotten wrong on homework assignments. She explained, “Dad, in Japan the
teachers tell us to circle the problems that we got wrong, and then later we can study our errors so that we
won’t make them again. But here, everyone erases their wrong answers and writes the correct answers over
them. I don’t think that’s a very good idea, because then they can’t learn from their mistakes.” My daughter
had been taught in Japan to use the repair strategy of circling errors and then studying them. This seems to
me to be a very useful strategy, and one that could easily be taught to students (and there are undoubtedly
many American teachers who do). By not teaching such strategies to students, teachers miss opportunities
to help their students become more effective learners.

Problem 7.3

Understanding students’ thinking: Monitoring and Repairing Understanding

As a teacher, you will regularly observe students’ oral and written work to determine which

strategies they are using, and if they are using these strategies effectively. Here is an example

related to monitoring and repairing understanding. Evaluate the strategy use you see in these

examples.

1. Teacher (talking to a student about her study strategies): Do you ever find things you don’t
   understand when you are reading?
   Student: Yeah, a lot.
   Teacher: So what do you do then?
   Student: Usually I just keep on reading and hope I’ll understand later.
   How would you evaluate this student’s approach to monitoring and repairing understanding?
   How should the teacher follow up this conversation.


2. Here Is the response of a middle-school student when her English teacher asks her how she has
   prepared a short speech for class.
   Student: Well, I really wanted to get at least a B+ on this, so I spent all night, like from 7 to 9,
   on this.
   Teacher: How did you decide when you were satisfied with your speech?
   Student: Well, I just wanted it to sound good. [pause]
   Teacher: How did you decide when it sounded good?
   Student: Just kind of when it sounded the way I wanted it to sound.

Response: It appears that the student does have a capacity to monitor understanding at a broad

level, because she notices that she often doesn’t understand things. However, it may be that she

does not understand specifically what it is that she does not understand. The teacher should

follow up with her questions to find out more about this, and perhaps have the student think

aloud about a text used in class to see whether she can be specific about what she doesn’t

understand. The last sentence indicates that she clearly does not use effective repair strategies for

repairing understanding when she doesn’t understand a passage. Later text may sometimes

clarify material not yet understood, but to be sure one understands, one needs to go back and

reread and think more about the material that was not understood. Note that the student does

seem to have metawareness of the repair strategy she is using; it’s just that her strategies are not

particularly effective.