Chapter 14 page 321
Responses:
A. Derrek has given a lot of information in this hint. After five weeks of practicing with a
procedure to generate and organize, Tina and Madison should be able to use it without this much help.
Derrek should probably try giving less help initially. He might start by asking, “What strategy have we
been learning to help us think of new ideas?” Then he could see if the students could come up with the
idea of starting their own idea-generation chart. If the students don’t see what to do after this hint, he
might further ask, “What have we been writing on pieces of paper to help think of new ideas?” If this
doesn’t work, then Derrek could show them how to get started.
B. The teacher was fairly direct in telling students that there is important information that Ben
didn’t include. One might argue that she was too direct. Perhaps she should have first asked Ben why
he decided that his sentence was the most important sentence. Then she could have seen what Ben was
thinking.
On the positive side, once Angie generated the idea that the paragraph was about artificial
evaporation, the teacher did ask the students to justify Angie’s idea that the paragraph is about
artificial evaporation, and David explained why one could say that the whole paragraph is about
artificial evaporation.
Cognitive prompts. Cognitive prompts are questions or cues that remind students to use particular
strategies. For example, students who are studying for a test could simply be directed to summarize the
main point of each section of the chapter as they are studying. This is a very straightforward prompt to
“summarize” what they are reading as they are studying. Cognitive prompts are often provided when
students are working in groups. As the students work together, the questions remind them of what they
should be thinking and talking about. Cognitive prompts are effective at promoting better strategy use
(Quintana et al., 2004; Quintana et al., 2005; Suthers & Hundhausen, 2003; Toth, Suthers, & Lesgold,
2002)
Table 14.1 shows two examples of cognitive prompts that have been found to be effective by
educational researchers. The first column in Table 14.1 shows a set of cognitive prompts for use in science
lessons with sixth graders (White & Frederiksen, 1998). These prompts focus on strategies to design, carry
out, and interpret experiments. The researchers specifically prompted students to focus on experimentation
processes that they knew to be difficult for students.