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strategy is, students understand what they are learning—what the goal of instruction is. When teachers
explain and demonstrate how to use the strategy, students get a head start on learning how to actually use
them. When teachers explain when and why strategies are useful, students gain an awareness of when they
can productively use the strategies.
Here is an example of a teacher explaining a new strategy to her fifth grade class. The strategy is
inferring the meaning of new words from context (Duffy et al., 1986).
Ɣ Explaining what the strategy is. The teacher says, “Today we’re going to learn about the strategy
called, “infer the meanings of new words.” When we use this strategy, we try to figure out what a word
means by looking at all the words around it. We call the words around it the context. We’re going to use
the context to work out what new words mean, without having to look up the word in the dictionary.”
When students hear this explanation, they will understand clearly what they will be learning about, and
they will have learned a label for the strategy they are learning (inferring the meaning of new words).
Ɣ Explaining how to use the strategy. The teacher explains, “When you use this strategy, you look at the
sentences around the new word that you don’t know. These sentences give you clues to what the word
might mean. You can use these clues to make a good guess about what the word means.” This
explanation gives students an initial idea about how to use the strategy. They will need more instruction
than just this explanation to learn how to use the strategy fluently, but this gets the students off to a
good start.
Ɣ Explaining why the strategy is useful. The teacher explains, “Sometimes when you see a new word, you
don’t have a dictionary, so you can’t look up the word. Then it would be good if you can infer the
meaning of the word without using the dictionary. And sometimes you can figure out what the word
means just from the context. Then you don’t need to use a dictionary! You can learn the meanings of
lots of words this way.” When students hear this explanation, they gain metacognitive understanding of
why it can be helpful to use the strategy. They may also be persuaded that the strategy really is a useful
tool to improve their vocabulary.
Ɣ Explaining when to use the strategy. The teacher completes her explanation by saying, “You can infer
the meanings of words in lots of different places—not only at school. Of course, you can use this
strategy when you are reading books for school. But you can infer the meanings of new words when you
read a magazine, or an email from your grandmother, or when you read your favorite website. You can
use it when you read a billboard. You can use it when you are listening to things, too. If you hear a
word on a TV show that you don’t know, you can use this skill to try to figure out what that word
means.” This explanation helps students understand the broad range of situations to which they can
transfer the strategy of inferring the meanings of new words. They now have metacognitive awareness of
when they can use the strategy. The teacher’s explanation may also help encourage students to actually
use the strategy outside of school.
Teachers can help students understand what strategies are by giving examples (Gagné,
Weidemann, Bell, & Anders, 1984; McNeill & Krajcik, 2008). Examples can help students see what good
strategy use looks like. A fourth-grade teacher explaining what elaboration is could say, “Let’s look at an
example of elaboration. Suppose Crystal reads in her textbook, ‘Columbus discovered America in 1492.’
Crystal wants to elaborate this information, so she says to herself, ‘Columbus came from Europe, so he
most likely sailed west to America because the shortest way to get to Europe from Portugal is to go west.’
This is a good elaboration because Crystal connected the information in the text to her own knowledge
about geography.”
The teacher can contrast this example of good elaboration with an example of poor elaboration.
“Now suppose that Samantha reads the same sentence, ‘Columbus discovered America in 1492.’ Samantha
says to herself, “OK, so Columbus discovered American in 1492.” This is not elaboration because
Samantha is not bringing in any new ideas. She is just repeating the text.” The teacher can go on to write
other examples on the board and have the students evaluate them.
Effective teachers explain strategies when they are first introduced, but teachers should keep
discussing with students why they are important and when they can be used. Even after students have been
working on summarization for several months, teachers can still remind them that the strategy is useful