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main idea is that ladies’ journalism began to flourish.” How should the teacher response to Aimee’s
summary?
Response: Aimee has certainly picked out a sentence that more than any other presents the main idea
of this paragraph. But a good summary could include more information. It could mention the time
period (the latter half of the 1800s). It could also note that women who wrote sensationalist fiction for
popular magazines were better known than women (and men) who wrote more serious literature. But
regardless of whether this is an ideal summary or not, the teacher needs to know more about why
Aimee decided to pick out the second sentence as sufficient summary. An ideal first follow-up question
would be something like “Why do you think that is a good summary of this paragraph” or “Tell us how
you decided on that as your summary” or “How did you come up with that answer?” When Aimee
gives her answer, then the teacher will have a better understanding of what she was thinking, and then
she can decide better on the kind of feedback to give her.
Goal Setting and Evaluation
Another effective technique of strategy instruction is to ask students to set goals for strategy use
and then to have them evaluate whether or not they have met their goals (Chinn, 2008b; Page-Voth &
Graham, 1999; White & Frederiksen, 1998). As we learned in Chapter 7, the hallmark of self-regulated
cognition is that students are able to set their own goals and then evaluate how well they have achieved
these goals. To encourage students to self-regulate their strategy use, teachers can explicitly direct them to
set goals for strategy use and then to evaluate how well they have achieved these goals.
As an illustration, let’s look at how goal setting and evaluation can be used to promote better
writing. When students are learning to write persuasive essays, they often fail to use two reasoning
strategies that we learned about in Chapter 7: They fail to develop more than one or two arguments for
their position, and they also do not typically consider or discuss counterarguments to their own position.
Students can be encouraged to use more arguments and to consider more counterarguments through goal
setting and evaluation. Teachers might ask students to fill out a simple form such as the one in Figure 14.1.
Students write down their goals for how many arguments they will include and how many
counterarguments they will discuss. Later, they evaluate how well they did on their final persuasive essay.
Once students have achieved these goals, teachers can next ask students to set more challenging goals—
such as writing four arguments that that are based on sound factual evidence. By setting achievable goals,
students understand what they need to do, and (as we discussed in Chapter 10) they become motivated to
achieve the goals they have set. Students also learn to regulate their strategy use by setting their own goals
and evaluating whether they have achieved them. Special educators and educational psychologists Victoria
Page-Voth and Steve Graham (1999) used an instructional method similar to this to improve the persuasive
writing of seventh and eighth graders with learning disabilities.