EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 7, page 164

interpret students’ answers without knowing exactly how much they studied. Did Jarrod study 30

minutes in the evening and 40 minutes during study hall and think that this is a lot of studying?

How much is a lot? The two questions about reviewing the textbook and the notes do a poor job of

getting at exactly what strategies the students are using. “Reviewing” could include simply

rereading the text or studying it much more actively using elaboration or explanations. The fourth

question is better, in that it is clearer about a specific strategy (asking questions about the text)

that the students might use. Asking oneself questions is a way to stimulate one’s own elaboration

or explanations of the text.

Although the ambiguity of the first four questions makes definitive interpretation of Jarrod’s

responses impossible, his responses suggest that he may not have studied using active

comprehension strategies. He said that he did not use the one active strategy listed—asking

himself questions about the text. His reviewing may have been limited to rereading the text and his

notes.

The open-ended question at the end is one that allows students to show the extent to which they

have metaawareness of the effective or ineffective strategies that they are using. Jarrod uses very

general verbs (“studied” and “reviewed”). Either he lacks the motivation to tell more about the

specific strategies he is using, or he lacks the metacognitive awareness needed to say more

precisely the strategies he is using.

In this section we have examined six reasoning strategies that can help students become more
effective reasoners: generating arguments and counterarguments, fair-mindedness in evaluating evidence,
considering sample size, considering comparison groups, sourcing, and corroboration. All of these
strategies can help students learn to think critically and fairly about evidence and to use evidence effectively
to reach well-founded conclusions. These reasoning strategies can be emphasized across subjects and ages.
We will explore instructional strategies more thoroughly in later chapters.

HOW TO EVALUATE STUDENTS’ STRATEGY USE

In this chapter, you have now learned many strategies that you can productively teach your students.
You have seen that it is possible to help students become much more effective learners and thinkers if you
teach them more effective cognitive strategies. In the Understanding Students’ Thinking problems you
have encountered so far, you have also begun to gain experience in evaluating students’ strategy use based
on their talk in individual think alouds and their talk in group work. As a teacher, you will need to be
skilled at diagnosing what strategies students are (and are not) using.
There are two basic methods you can use to identify the cognitive strategies your students are using
to evaluate how well they are using them: (1) Administer self-report assessments to find out what kinds of
strategies your students say that they use. (2) Pay attention to what students say when they talk (in
individual think alouds, in group work, and in class discussions) and to what they write in their written
work.

Administering Self-Report Assessments

A self-report assessment is an assessment that asks students questions about their own personal
characteristics, such as the strategies that they use when they study. One way to find out what strategies
your students use is simply to ask them. You could, for example, ask a student after school how he studies
for a test. By asking follow up questions, you could prompt him to be specific about the strategies that he
uses. Or at the beginning of class near the beginning of the term, you could also ask all of your students to
write down for you the typical strategies they use on a particular task (such as studying vocabulary words).