EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 7, page 166

By giving a questionnaire such as this one, you can learn a great deal about your students’ strategy use.
There are currently websites that allow students to take different versions of the MSLQ online. Other
questionnaires, such as the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) (Weinstein, Zimmermann, &
Palmer, 1988), can be purchased and administered to students. Research with questionnaires such as the
MSLQ and the LASSI has usually found small but statistically significant correlations between reported
strategy use and measures of achievement such as course grades or GPA (e.g., Karabenick & Sharma,
1994; Pokay & Blumenfeld, 1990). If you cannot use a professionally developed questionnaire, or if you
want to assess use of a strategy not covered by existing questionnaire, you could construct your own
questionnaire with items like the ones above to gain insights into your students’ thinking.

Problem 7.13. Understanding students’ thinking: Elaborations

Now try your hand at evaluating students’ elaborations. Here are two middle

school students whose teacher has asked them to use the strategy of

elaboration in response to the text below. Does each response display

elaboration?

Text: Jackson was the first president to use the veto extensively. Earlier

presidents had used the veto very rarely, and only when they believed that a

bill that Congress had passed was unconstitutional. Jackson used the veto as

a weapon of policy.

Nate. “Earlier presidents didn’t use the veto much, but Jackson used it a lot.

Earlier presidents didn’t veto a bill unless they believed it was

unconstitutional. But Jackson was different.”

Julien. “Most presidents today use vetoes a lot, so it looks like Jackson

started something that has continued for almost 200 years.”

Response: Nate does not elaborate. This is a paraphrase, a lengthy one, but

still a paraphrase. There are no substantial ideas mentioned that were not

already in the original text. Julien does elaborate. He connects what he is

reading to his knowledge of contemporary presidencies.

One obvious problem with self-report measures of strategy use is that students may not truthfully tell
you what strategies they actually use, or they may not interpret the items in the way that you intend. For
instance, when a student reports that she usually “carefully studies each step in the example problems,” she
may think that this means that she reads every word in the example problems, not that she actually tries to
explain each step. Self-report measures also require students to have metacognitive knowledge about the
strategies they use; many students, however, may use effective or ineffective strategies but be unable to tell
you what they are.

Listening to students’ talk and reflecting on their written work. You have already had practice
evaluating students’ strategy use in the application problems. As these problems indicate, there are several
different ways to find out about your students’ strategy use. One excellent way is to really listen to them
and reflect on their strategy use when they are talking in groups or in class discussions. (I’ll discuss this
more in later chapters on discussions and collaborative learning.) You can also examine students’ written