Strategic Processing in Education

Daniel L. Dinsmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315505718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Psicología educativa

While there are certainly numerous influences on individuals' learning and performance, cognitive strategies are the processes most directly related to making meaningful progress on a learning task or problem. Written by a leading expert on strategic processing, this book situates the topic within the broader context of educational psychology research and theory and brings it to a wider audience. With chapters on the fundamentals of domain-general and domain-specific strategies, connections to other constructs, and advice for instructing students, this concise volume is designed for any education course that includes learning or study strategies in the curriculum. It will be indispensable for student researchers and both pre- and in-service teachers.

Part I
The Nature of Strategic Processing

One
What Is Strategic Processing?

Jo, a first grader, looks carefully at a mathematics word problem in front of her. The problem is as follows: “If Cindy takes 5 apples from Joan, who had 10, and Richard takes 3 apples from Jeff, who had 7, how many total apples do Richard and Joan have left?” Jo decides that she first needs to use subtraction to figure out how many apples Joan and Jeff have separately. She does not remember what 10 minus 5 is, so she starts at 10 and counts backwards by five using her fingers to track how many times she needs to count back, “10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5.” She repeats this counting-back procedure for the next problem, 7 minus 3 and comes up with 4. Finally, she confirms this solution by trying to remember 7 minus 3. Without even thinking she says that Joan and Jeff have 9 apples left total.

In the preceding vignette, Jo engages numerous processes to help her solve the mathematics word problem. While some of these activities are indeed strategic—the focus of this book—not all of her actions would fall under what all researchers consider as strategic. In the research literature, many authors have argued for making a clear distinction between skillful behavior and strategic behavior.1,2

Strategies

Specifically, strategies are a special form of procedural knowledge (i.e., knowledge that helps someone know how to do something)1 that are purposeful, intentional, effortful, used to acquire new knowledge, transfer knowledge to other problems, or transform the current problem. Going back to the vignette with Jo, she engaged in a number of different actions that conform to this definition of strategic. First, Jo engaged in a count-back strategy, using her fingers and counting back in order to subtract. What makes this process strategic in the view of many researchers in this case is that it was purposeful and effortful. In other words, she had to consciously invoke this strategy; it did not just happen without thinking about it—there was some planning or control of strategy use. Second, she consciously used a retrieval strategy for the second subtraction problem to check if the first strategy was successful. Given these two strategies, one could say that Jo was engaging in strategic processing during this problem. However, not all of her actions were strategic.

Skills

Some of Jo’s actions were skillful. Skills are a special form of procedural knowledge that are automatic, habitual, effortless, and used to make progress on a given problem or learning task—such as memorizing a list of spelling words or writing an email, but not used to apply new knowledge or transform the problem in any way.1 An example of skillful behavior in the vignette was Jo’s use of retrieval for the final addition portion of the word problem. She did not have to consciously employ this retrieval process via a planning or control process, rather it was automatic. While she certainly could have employed a more effortful strategy to add those two numbers, being skillful allowed her to more efficiently solve the problem with less cognitive resources. The relation between skills and strategies can be quite complex, a topic that needs to be further explicated.

The Use of Skills and Strategies During Problem Solving and Domain Learning

While care has been taken to differentiate the two constructs of skills and strategies, it is important to note that there are also some similarities between them. Both skills and strategies must be learned, are acquired and develop over time, and are necessary for successful problem solving and for further learning in an academic domain or making progress on solving a problem.

First, both skills and strategies must be learned. We do not come pre-programmed with a set of skills and strategies from birth—another way to say this is that skills and strategies are not innate. Rather, skills and strategies must be carefully fostered by teachers, parents, or a more knowledgeable other during learning. Think about a young child trying to tie their shoes. At first, a parent or teacher may instruct the child to use a specific strategy, such as the bunny method by crossing their laces into an “X” and pulling one lace through to make the bunny’s head. The bunny ears are made by making one loop, letting it lay (the first bunny ear), making the second loop and letting it lay (the second bunny ear), then crossing the ears and pulling them together to finally tie the shoe laces together. For anyone that has spent time in a first- or second-grade classroom—or with their own children—this does not just happen without any facilitation. Eventually, the child no longer has to think about making a bunny to tie their shoes. In other words, as adults, tying shoes happens skillfully, whereas for children it is strategic. Specific teaching strategies for fostering strategic processing in learners is discussed in depth in Chapter 12.

Second, both skills and strategies are acquired and develop over time. Individuals do not learn a set of skills or strategies all at once; rather, they learn them bit by bit. For example, a child learning to swing a bat to hit a baseball typically does not start by having a 90-mile-per-hour fastball thrown toward them. Rather, the ball is typically placed on top of a stationary tee so the child can develop the skills and strategies necessary to properly swing the bat before having to anticipate the ball’s arrival from the pitcher and determine the location of the ball (e.g., inside the plate, outside the plate, or right over the plate). At first, actions such as making sure the bat is parallel with the ground as it approaches the ball are effortful and purposeful. However, a major league baseball player does not need to consciously think about keeping the bat parallel; this is now skillful behavior. Rather, as an experienced hitter, a major league baseball player is being effortful and intentional in trying to predict the pitcher’s next pitch. They are still being strategic, however, the strategies are aimed at more complex and advanced tasks from that of the child simply trying to swing the bat in a parallel plane. One could imagine this same scenario with a young reader who is working hard trying to decode new words that eventually become habitual for an older reader. As skills in reading increase—decoding and interpreting as two examples—readers can turn to more complex processes strategically, such as arguing with a persuasive text. The development of strategies is discussed in depth in Chapter 3.

Third, both skills and strategies are required for students to continue to acquire more knowledge and better problem solving in an academic domain. Take a moment to consider a problem-solving or learning situation that involved only skillful or strategic behavior but not both. The following problem can be used to exemplify the use of both skillful and strategic behaviors:

In the right triangle shown in Figure 1.1, what is the measurement of the third side, labeled “x”?

Figure 1.1 Sample geometry problem

The steps of this particular problem could encompass skillful behavior, strategic behavior, or a combination of both. Someone well versed in Pythagoras’s theorem (c² = a² + b², where c stands for the side opposite the right angle and a and b stand for the remaining two sides) might immediately recognize this as a 3:4:5 right triangle and not need to employ any strategies at all—thus it is entirely skillful. Both the recognition of the problem and retrieval of the answer are automatic. A learner less well versed in Pythagoras’s theorem may likely have to employ some strategies. Perhaps they consciously invoke the formula and substitute the known values in the equation for sides c and a. Following this, they solve for the remaining side, b, by squaring 3 and 5 and subtracting 9 from 25. Efficiency in solving this problem are greatly increased the more these processes are automatized—thus, both strategic and skillful behaviors are present in their processing. This allows the learner to focus on the new processes (i.e., invoking Pythagoras’s theorem), rather than employing effort to do basic arithmetic. While it would be possible to do all of these processes consciously and effortfully, this would be rather tedious, particularly with a higher quantity of problems to solve or more complex problems than the one presented here.

On the other hand, imagine someone who only employed automatized skills and never used strategies. While they could certainly solve problems quickly, it would be unlikely they would be able to solve new problems, learn new concepts, or transfer concepts to other types of problems. For instance, if asked to calculate the angle of a ladder leaning against a wall (which would form a right triangle), given the distance between the wall and the ladder, skillfully applying Pythagoras’s theorem would not be particularly helpful (and certainly not efficient). Rather, a learner could apply a new strategy that uses the sine function to calculate that angle. This would enable the learner to understand not only about the relations of sides in a right triangle but expand their understanding to the special relations among angles in a right triangle as well.

For the remainder of this book, the focus will specifically be on strategic behavior, however, one should keep in mind the importance of automatizing these processes—making them skillful—as an individual becomes a better problem solver or learner in a given academic domain.

Additional Readings

Alexander, P. A., Graham, S., & Harris, K. (1998). A perspective on strategy research: Progress and prospects. Educational Psychology Review, 10, 129–154. This article addresses—among other things—the difference between skills and strategies and how these two constructed have, or typically have not, been conceptualized and operationalized in the extant research literature. The article also summarizes the state of the art toward the end of the last century of research on strategy use and strategy training.

Novick, L. R., & Bassok, M. (2005). Problem solving. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G. Morrison (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 321–350). New York: Cambridge University Press. This handbook chapter is a good primer on problem solving, taking the reader through problem representation, generating problem solutions, problem search, problem-solvers’ knowledge, among other topics. Most of the chapter is a domain-general treatment of problem solving, however, there is some attention specifically paid toward problem solving in mathematics.

Two
Types of Strategies

Lee is sitting at his lab bench in chemistry class with an unknown acidic solution (analyte) in a flask. His instructions are to figure out what the concentration of that acidic solution is, given the amount of impure acid dissolved in the water in the flask as well as the concentration of a base solution (titrant) that has also been provided. He first underlines the important values in the written text of the problem that was left on the lab bench. Before beginning, Lee decides to add a pH indicator—bromthymol blue in this case. He then proceeds to use a pipette (an instrument to transfer liquid from one container to another) to slowly add the titrant to the analyte, until the analyte changes color. He then repeats this process three more times in order to be more precise in the amount of titrant needed to create a permanent color change in the analyte.

Now that strategies have been explicitly defined in Chapter 1, a discussion of the different types of strategies described in the literature is in order. At the broadest level, researchers have described three main types of strategies—cognitive, metacognitive, and epistemic strategies.3

Cognitive strategies are those strategies that are invoked to actually solve a problem or learn more about a topic1—in other words, these strategies are the ones that actually accomplish specific tasks and goals the learner has. These are the strategies that were exemplified in Chapter 1 and will be the focus for the rest of this book. Lee engaged in numerous cognitive strategies while trying to solve the acid concentration problem in the vignette, including underlining and titrating. Metacognitive strategies are those that are aimed at monitoring or controlling the cognitive strategies that have been employed.4 For instance, one might decide that the cognitive strategy employed was ineffective, such as deciding to reread a passage and still not understanding it. Additionally, one then might decide on a new strategy, such as looking up words they do not know in the dictionary. Finally, epistemic strategies are those that are aimed at reflecting on the limits, certainty, and criteria of knowing,3 which may influence both an individual’s cognitive and metacognitive strategies. For instance, when deciding whether or not to believe that climate change is caused by human factors—factors such as emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels—a person may ask themselves what criteria (e.g., evidence) would be necessary to support such a belief. More detailed descriptions of metacognitive and epistemic strategies are discussed in two other books in the Innovation Series and are listed at the conclusion of this chapter in the Additional Readings section.

Domain-General and Domain-Specific Strategies

Cognitive strategies have been divided further into either domain-general or domain-specific strategies. Before the distinction between domain general and domain specific is discussed, it is important to be explicit about what is meant by the term domain—specifically academic domains. Academic domains refer to particular fields of study, such as physics or history. Domain-general strategies, then, are those strategies that can be employed effecti...