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Published by the National institute for Staff and Organizational Development
‘With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Ricnardson Foundation

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_ Lam happy to report that educational psychologists, demonstrating their infinite wisdom, have once again
found students. This may appear to be a curious statement to those of you who never knew we lost them. —
However, for many years, the focus of research and theorizing about teaching focused almost exclusively on’ the
| teacher, teaching processes, teaching materials, and teaching outcomes. Student variables were merely the —
| dependent measures in these studies. We examined the effects of all-sorts of teaching variables both |
individually and in combination on student achievement. _ Perigo, ere
_ However, along with the cognitive revolution in psychology came a change in our view of human learning. yea
More recent theories sevlicanéeniual Gamewarks $a edvcanerel payctolesy tid to focus on understanding how |
incoming information is selected, processed, structured in memory, and recalled for later use. This focus on |
thought, or cognition, has changed our general conception of the teaching/learning process in several ways. ,
_| Instead of viewing learners as passively recording the stimuli that the teacher presents, learning is viewed as an |
| active process that occurs within the learner and which can be influenced by the learner. Instead of viewing the |
_ outcome of learning as depending mainly on what the teacher presents, the outcome of learning is supposed to |
| depend jointly on what information is presented and on how the learner processes that information, =

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) One outcome of this change in focus is that a number of learner variables have been receiving increasing :
“=| attention by researchers and practitioners because of their importance to current conceptions of the learner's |

; | active role in the teaching/learning act. In particular, these conceptual fr meworks suggest that the effects of |

 

  
 

| instruction depend partly on what a learner knows, such as the learner’s prior knowledge about a topic or related
| information, what a learner thinks about before, during, and after a learning activity, such as the cognitive |
_ | processes and strategic planning operations used, and what type of personal context the learner generates for aj
| learning activity, such as the learner's motivational level or affective state. Many of these variables are

| investigated under the label learning strategies. Learning strategies can be defined as behaviors and thoughts that
a learner engages in during learning and that are intended to influence t

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e learner's knowledge acquisition
processes. Thus, the goal of any particular learning strategy may be to affect the learner's motivational or
affective state, or the way in which the learner selects, acquires, organizes, or integrates new knowledge. For |

example, in preparing for a test a student may use positive self-talk to reduce feelings of anxiety; in learning |
from a text, a learner may generate summaries for each section; in learning about a scientific concept, a learner |

_may take notes about the material. Each of these activities—coaching, summarizing, and notetaking—are , —

_examples of learning strategies. ; ey

There are eight major categories of learning strategies a learner can use to improve his/her efficiency:

 

 

rehearsal strategies for basic learning tasks, such as repeating names of items in an ordered list. An example of | —
an academic task that could be facilitated by this strategy would be remembering the order in which Shakespeare |
introduces the characters in the play Hamlet. as foo) ately Jolie edt 30 tn ema
rchearsal strategies for complex learning tasks, such as copying, underlining, or shadowing the material presented |
in class. An example of an academic task using this strategy would be underlining the main ideas in a text or |
recopying portions of a set of lecture notes. . > i BP pak hae aie
te elaboration strategies for basic learning tasks, such as forming a mental image or sentence relating the items in |
. | each pair for a paired-associate list of words. An example of an academic task using this strategy would be |
gm forming a mental image of a scene described by a poem in order to remember the sequence of the poem.
@ elaboration strategies for complex tasks, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, or describing how new information |
az relates to existing knowledge. An example of an academic task using this strategy would be relating the —
| information presented about the structure of complex molecules to the information presented earlier about the —
structure of simple molecules. : Atl ' ish : 4

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(OF Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712