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Levin 1986
Levin 1986
Educational Psychologist
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To cite this article: Joel R. Levin (1986) Four Cognitive Principles of Learning-Strategy Instruction, Educational Psychologist,
21:1-2, 3-17, DOI: 10.1080/00461520.1986.9653021
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EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST 21(1& 2), 3-17
Copyright @ 1986, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
count the match between the particular learning strategy and the learner's spe-
cific knowledge and skills, and (d) perform controlled empirical validations of
learning-strategy effectiveness. A preliminary model that distinguishes among
the processes of understanding, remembering, and applying is presented to am-
plify the first cognitive principle.
facts, the definitions of unfamiliar words, the main idea of a prose passage,
the steps required to perform a mathematical operation, and so on. This
leads to the first, and most important, cognitive principle of learning-
strategy instruction.
COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE 1:
DIFFERENT LEARNING STRATEGIES
SERVE DIFFERENT COGNITIVE PURPOSES
(see, e.g., Anderson & Armbruster, 1982; Brooks, Simutis, & O'Neil, 1985;
Pressley & Levin, 1983a, 1983b; Snowman & McCown, 1984; Tuma & Reif,
1980; Weinstein & Mayer, 1985). In almost every domain, researchers appear
to be continuing their quest for the single "best" strategy. Yet, as Levin and
Pressley (1985) have recently argued in reference to a variety of competing
vocabulary-learningstrategies, the question of which strategy is best needs to
be rephrased as a series of subquestions, such as: Which strategy is best for
remembering definitions? Which stratgy is best for inferring the meanings of
words in context? Which strategy is best for improving vocabulary usage,
grammar, spelling, and so on? (see also Morris, Bransford, &Franks's, 1977,
notion of "transfer-appropriate processing"). This multiple-objectives prin-
ciple must be at the forefront of researchers' learning-strategyconsiderations
in other domains as well.
In the context of reading comprehension, for example, popular strategies
include activating students' prior knowledge through the use of advance or-
ganizers or analogies, skimming, asking questions, mapping and net-
working, paraphrasing, imaging, note taking, reviewing, and summarizing.
But apart from prescribing that students use all of these strategies, what can
be said about the comparative effectiveness of each strategy? Distressingly,
little. Few studies have been conducted- and replicated -in which optimally
designed versions of the just-mentioned strategies have been pitted against
one another. Yet, even if such a contest were to be held, it is a foregone con-
clusion that no single strategy would emerge as the "winner." Strategy-
effectiveness comparisons would have to be made with reference to both dif-
ferent types of text (i.e., texts differing in content, structure, and format) as
well as different kinds of learning outcomes within each text type. The rank
orderings of strategy effectiveness are likely to change dramatically from one
prose-learning context to the next.
LEARNING-STRATEGY INSTRUCTION 5
For example, I (Levin, 1982) have argued that prose-learning strategies di-
rected primarily at a passage's structure or top-level organization (what
Kintsch 62 Van Dijk, 1978, call ''macropropositions") would inot be expected
to be optimally suited to retrieving specific passage facts and details (the
"micropropositions'~)(for supporting empirical data, see Eylon & Reif, 1984;
Holley, Dansereau, McDonald, Garland, & Collins, 1979; Levin, Morrison,
McGivero, Mastropieri, & Scruggs, in press). Similarly, I have argued that
certain prose-learning strategies are better suited to enhancing students' com-
prehension of what they are reading (referred to here as understanding),
whereas other strategies are better suited to enhancing students' memory for
what they previously read (i.e., remembering). In the following discussion, I
extend the prose-learning distinction between understanding and remem-
bering to encompass creative problem solving, or students' ability to transfer
previously learned prose concepts to novel situations (applying) (see, e.g.,
Mayer, 1982)~
Pressley, Rorkowski, and Schneider (in press) have recently analyzed the
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components of students' efficient strategy selection and use within what they
call the "good strategy user" model (see also Michael Pressley's article in this
issue). My present emphasis on Understanding, Remembering, and Applying
as exemplars of different learning strategies for different purposes is encom-
passed by that model in what I refer to as "You're A (URA) Good Strategy
User." Within this simplified URA framework, understanding is regarded as
an information-processing component, being manifest when one is studying
a body of information. In contrast, remembering and applying are both re-
garded as infarmation-retrieval components, being manifest when one is re-
calling aspects of that information. Remembering, as used here, focuses pri-
marily on memory for specific content, whereas applying focuses on memory
for concepts in the service of problem solving and transfer.
A schematic representation of the URA components is depicted as a series
of potential strategy outcomes in Figures 1-5. For each of the figures, I illu-
strate how different learning strategies can be expected to operate differently
on the URA components. Starting at the top with a particular strategy, I trace
the presumed impact of that strategy on students' understanding, remem-
bering, and applying both specific content and general concepts. In these fig-
ures, solid arrows represent a strategy's direct impact upon a cognitive com-
ponent, whereas dashed arrows represent an unknown, or at best indirect,
strategy impalct.
Understanding Strategies
" Figure 1 represents a strategy that is effectively designed for enhancing stu-
dents' processing (understanding) of what they are studying. Yet, there is no
assurance that such increased understanding will result in either increased
memory (remembering) or transfer (applying) of the information previously
T
Strategy 1
/' '\
//
Figure 1 Representation of a
Remembering
Remembering Strategies
Understanding
Figure 2 Representation of a
strategy that facilitates remem-
Remembering Applying
bering.
Remembering-Through-UnderstandingStrategies
The preceding examples aside, strategies for understanding (on the one
hand) and strategies for remembering and applying (on the other) are not
necessarilly mutually exclusive. Indeed, many empirical and practical in-
stances of comprehension-enhancing strategiesleading to enhanced memory
can be documented (see, e.g., Bransford et al., 1982). Figure 3 represents a
strategy that facilitates remembering through its direct impact on under-
standing. In a prose-learning context, one would include semantic strategies
that serve to capitalize on students' prior knowledge of content and schemata
relevant to what is being learned (e.g, Brown, Smiley, Day, Townsend, &
Lawton, 1977; Pearson, Hansen, & Gordon, 1979; Peeck, van den Bosch, &
Kreupeling, 1982). The rationale underlying the use sf such strategies is sim-
ply that the more easily new information can be meaningfully integrated with
already established concepts, the more thoroughly it will be processed and re-
trieved. The literature suggests that prior-knowledge strategies do indeed fa-
-\
\
Figure 3 Representation of a
Remembering
/I strategy that facilitates remem-
bering through understanding.
cilitate students' memory for prose content. However, whether or not poor-
knowledge strategies lead to enhanced problem solving and transfer of newly
learned concepts has not been adequately established, in my view (see also
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Applying-Through-Understanding Strategies
1
Strategy 4
Understanding
/
-
Figure 4 Representation of a
strategy that facilitates applying
through understanding.
Understanding-and-Remembering-and-Applying
Strategies
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Fiigure 5 Representation of a
' /I Understanding
\C
v
strategy that facilitates understand-
Remembering
ing, remembering, and applying.
10 LEVIN
COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE 2:
EFFECTIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES
SHOULD HAVE IDENTIFIABLE COMPONENTS
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This principle is directly related to the first. In order to select the best strat-
egy for a particular learning outcome, one must compare the various
strengths and weaknesses of different strategies. Thus, whereas the first prin-
ciple is concerned with the whats and whiches of strategies, this principle re-
quires analyzing the whys and hows. That is, why is the strategy effective?
How does it operate? How can one describe its underlying components? The
antithesis of the "kitchen-sink" approach, where some amorphous strategy
can be described only as a collection of undifferentiated parts, the compo-
nent analysis approach involves a careful specification of the cognitive pro-
cess(es) that each identifiable strategy component is assumed to affect (see
also Pressley, Forrest-Pressley, & Elliott-Faust, in press).
There are essentiallytwo aspects of this component analysis principle. The
first is that if everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into a particular strat-
egy and if the strategy is successful, one will not be able to say much about
what makes it successful (see Pressley, Forrest-Pressley, & Elliott-Faust, in
press, for some notable examples). Even worse, if the strategy is ineffective,
one might end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. Perhaps certain
components of the multiple-component strategy were effective, but they
were lost in the shuffle of other ineffective components. For example, in a
study recently reported by Larson, Dansereau, Hythecker, OYDonnell,
Young, Lambiotte, and Rocklin (1985)-which likely establishes a new
Guinness record for having the most combined authors and strategy subcom-
ponent~!-a strategy was devised for improving students' learning of tech-
nical text. The strategy, as conceptualized by the authors, had four major
components, which from their description encompassed at least the follow-
ing subcomponents: skimming, imaging, drawing, elaborating, para-
phrasing ("re-representing"), mnemonics, summarizing, prior knowledge,
analogies, and reviewing. In this case, a global strategyho-strategy compari-
LEARNING-STRATEGY INSTRUCTION 11
son does not readily permit one to determine why the strategy did not work as
well as had been anticipated or what might be done to improve it. In contrast,
t h e s , v ~ ~ ~ v L a t i a n a n d ~ d a f ~ ~ a o ~ a r s u b ~ -
ponents within the context of either a factorial design or smaller scale "titra-
tion" studies (Pressley, Forrest-Pressley, & Elliott-Faust, in press) might
have provided some relevant clues.
The second aspect of the component analysis principle is that effective
learning strategies do not work magically, nor do they work because of the la-
bels attaiched to them (e.g., students "constructed taxonomies," "para-
phrased," or "used imagery"). Rather, every learning-strategyactivity needs
to be accounted for in terms of processing-relevant variables and operations
(e.g., prior knowledge, meaningfulness, organization, repetition, feedback,
concreteness, elaboration, retrieval cues). That is, in addition to attempting
to localize strategy effects with respect to facilitated comprehension, mem-
ory, or transfer (as in the previous section), component analyses require in-
formed judgments about the causes of such facilitation. Examples of in-
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COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE 3:
LEARNING STRATEGIES MUST BE CONSIDERED
IN RELATION TO STUDENTS' KNOWLEDGE AND
SKILLS
The third calgnitive principle of learning-strategy instruction is that there
must be a "match" between strategy and learner characteristics (see also
Bransforti, 1979). Strategies must be devised with the specific skills and
competencies of the learner in mind. If not, the best that one can hope for is
that the strategy will be effective for only some students; at worst, it will be
effective for none. In the learning-strategy research that I have conducted
over the years, a fundamental assumption has been that the student's
12 LEVIN
COGNITIVE PRINCIPLE 4:
THOUGHT-TO-BE-EFFECTIVE LEARNING
STRATEGIES REQUIRE EMPIRICAL VALIDATION
Just like Burns's "best laid plans of mice and men," it is one thing to design
something beautiful on paper, yet quite another to make it "work." So too
have thought-to-be-effective learning strategies not always fulfilled their
LEARNING-STRATEGY INSTRUCTION 13
promise. Once again, there appear to be two different aspects of this princi-
ple. First, people often prescribe strategies on the basis of their own personal
experiences, intuitions, and common folkways, rather than from a more de-
tached scientific perspective. Second, people rarely take into consideration
the complexities and intricacies that arise from the application of a strategy
in practice, in contrast to the smooth-flowing nature of it in their imagina-
tions.
Regarding the first point, in a series of investigationsthat I collaborated on
with Michael Pressley and Elizabeth Ghatala, we were surprised to discover
that both moire and less sophisticated student learners believe that an inef-
fective lei~rnimgstrategy is effective just because it is commonly used or pre-
scribed (IdcGivern, Levin, Ghatala, & Pressley, in press; Pressley, Levin, &
Ghatala, 1984; Pressley, Ross, Levin, & Ghatala, 1984). Moreover, such mis-
beliefs ar~edifficult to eradicate even in the face of sharply contradictory evi-
dence. For example, despite considerable research evidence to the contrary,
otherwise well-informed researchers and educators still cling to the mistaken
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CONCLUDING COMMENTS
As was noted at the outset, the four cognitive principles proposed here ad-
dress only one of the two critical cogs of learning-strategy instruction. A par-
allel set of metacognitive principles of learning-strategyinstruction is a mat-
ter for future consideration, although a sound basis for such a set can be
gleaned from the contributions to this issue by Elizabeth Ghatala, Barbara
Moely, Michael Pressley, and John Thomas and William Rohwer (see also,
Pressley, Borkowski, & Schneider, in press). It can be reasonably argued that
once the two sets of principles have been separately specified, the task con-
fronting the designer of effective learning-strategy instruction is simply -or
maybe not so simply! -one of interfacing the two through appropriately
coordinated connections. Happily, in the last few years, learning-strategy re-
searchers have begun to realize that such connections need to be made.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Center
for Education Research through the National Institute of Education and by a
Romnes Faculty Fellowship through the Graduate School of the University
of Wisconsin, Madison.
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16 LEVIN