CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Strategies
and Styles of Learning
RONALD RAY SCHMECK

It seems appropriate to begin a book entitled Learning Strategies and

Learning Styles with definitions of the terms style, strategy, and most
basically, learning. Clarification of the meanings of these and other terms
and important distinctions drawn between them will prepare the way
for the remainder of the text Learning can be described from various
perspectives. | discuss three: the experiential, the behavioral, and the
neurological,

WHAT I5 LEARNING?

From the experiential (or phenomenological) perspective, learning

is defined by individuals engaged in learning The learners (students)
describe their experience of events involved in learning. Learning, de-
scribed in this fashion, can be categorized in several different ways, that
is, everyone's experience of learning is not the same. At the extremes,
one learner might describe learning as the literal retention of knowledge
often achieved through repetition and recitation, while another might
describe it as an interpretative process aimed at understanding reality.
The authors of the present text use the label conceptions of learning to
describe variation in students’ interpretations of their experiences of
learning.

RONALD RAY SCHMECK * Department of Poycheslogy, Souiheenn Hines University, Car-

bondale, Minoks 62001.
 4 ROMALD RAY SCHMECK

In the present volume, Marton (Chapter 3) and Entwistle (Chapter

2) provide excellent descriptions of learning viewed from the phe-
nomenological perspective, as do Ramsden (Chapter 7) and Biggs
(Chapter 8). Marton suggests that educators can improve learning by
students and teachers to define it more broadly, for exam-
ple, to include personal development
of self-actualization as a legitimate
part of the process. He also suggests helping students enrich their inter-
nal characterizations of reality, helping them to “see” that reality from
more than one perspective. Biggs describes important connections be-
tween the ways in which students view learning (or studying) and the
ways in which they approach the task of writing essays; Kirby (Chapter
9) suggests similar connections with the task of reading.
The second perspective one can take when studying learning is
behavioral. From this perspective, learning is an observable change in a
person's reaction to an equally observable stimulus situation. The
change in reaction (i.e., in behavior) is traditionally
said to be relatively
permanent once it has been learned In any educational setting, we
expect students’ reactions
to test events (e.g., examinations, essays,
recitations) to change as a result of educational experiences. Thus, all
educators view learning from a behavioral perspective at one time or
another. I am including the cognitive view of learning in this behavioral
category, since cognitive psychologists
treat cognitive behavior similar
to the ways other behavioral scientists treat other behaviors. Weinstein
(Chapter 11) presents an excellent program for giving students training
in the behavioral skills needed to improve their performance on test
events, Similarly, Biggs provides suggestions for improving writing,
and Das (Chapter
5) and Kirby (Chapter
9) suggest ways in which read-
ing may be improved,
Finally, from the neurological perspective learning is the process
the nervous system is transformed by its own activity. It 1s the
“tracks” left behind by thoughts, that is, neural activity changes the
neurons that are active, and that change is the structural basis of learn-
ing. The change occurs as a direct result of the neural activity itself, that
is, a8.a direct result of processing information. Das and Kirby take this
perspective, as do McCarthy and Schmeck (Chapter 6) and Torrance and
Rockenstein (Chapter 10). All derive important educational implications
from such a neurological perspective, a perspective which may seem at
first glance to be far removed from education.
McCarthy and Schmeck argue that educators should consider de-
velopment
of the whole person (including
the person's nervous system) as
one of the legitimate purposes of education. They argue, as does Entwis-
tle, that even facts can be stored and referenced more effectively by
embedding them in the overall conceptual framework of the student
rather than simply repeating them until they are memorized. All of the
AN INTRODUCTION 5

authors of this text would agree that teachers should consider ways of
stimulating greater varieties of neural activity (e.g., thinking and prob-
lem solving) in the classroom—perhaps focusing less on literal repeti-
tion and recitation. Sim ple repetition is deceptively rewarding since
something observable is accomplished, but what is might,
in reality, contribute very little to the overall development of the indi-
vidual, In this latter regard, all of the authors argue in one way or
another for a definiton of learrung that includes integration of mental
contents and functions to promote versatility and formation of indi-
viduality
and personal identity.

STRATEGIES, TACTICS, SKILLS, AND PROCESSES

The term strategy

was originallya military
term that referred to
procedures for implementing the plan of a large-scale military operation.
The more specific
steps in implementation
of the plan were called tactics.
More generally, the term strategy has come to refer to the implementa-
ton of a set of procedures (tactics) for accomplishing something. Thus,a
learning strategy is 2 sequence of procedures for accomplishing learning,
and the specihc procedures within this sequence are called learning fac-
ies (Snowman,
in press).
[ have argued (Schmeck,
1983, 1988) that my own research with self-
report queshonnaires reveals strategies through factor analysis of stu-
dents’ responses
to the survey questions Schmeck, Ribich, and
Ramanaiah (1977) wrote questionnaire items, each of which asked the
students about a learning tactic (e.g., using imagery to remember the
definition
of a word), Factor analysis of students’ answers to these ques-
tions revealed clusters of tactics, that is, clusters of questions,
which
could be combined to form inventory scales, These clusters of learning
tactics served as operational definitions of learning strategies (Schmeck,
in press). Furthermore, when the instructions to the questionnaire were
worded so as to ask students to answer the scales as they learn “in
general rather than a particular
course,” then | argued that the scores
could serve as measures of what I called learning styles at that tome but
sheild oueter to call aries erionbacions fee ere ones oF the srentan te
The distinction between the terms style and orientation is clarified below.
Karby (Chapter 9) includes an excellent discussion of the subtle but
important distinctions between strategies and tactics plus the closely
related “skills.” Siills are capacities, or abilities, which can be expressed
in behavior at any time because they have been honed, or developed,
through practice. Skills are the “tools” we have available in our cog-
nitive “tool kits."
Kirby notes that a skill can be employed in either of two ways:
 6 RONALD RAY SCHMECK

intentionally, through conscious decision; or automatically, without

conscious decision. Strategies and tactics are conscious and intenhonal.
Thus, if a conscious deasion was made to implement a skill, tactics and
Strategies were involved. Skills are things we can do; strategies and
tactics involve the conscious decisions to implement those skills. Also
strategies and tactics involve plans (see Das, Chapter 5); a skill involved
in a tactical or strategic maneuver is integrated into a plan of some sort.
One way of conceptualizing students’ plans is in terms of their motives,
and Entwistle (Chapter 2) provides an excellent description of the types
of motives observed in students seeking a university degree He also
suggests that motives are one of the chief determiners of the approach
that a student takes to studying, and since motives tend to be stable,
they help the researcher account for cross-situational (style-like) con-
sistency
in
With regard to conscious decisions to employ skills, the experiential
(or phenomenological)
view of learning emphasizes that learmng
can be
improved if skills are used more intentionally and responsibly and Jess
automatically. Biggs, Entwistle, Marton, and Ramsden all agree with
this phenomenological
point of view. McCarthy
and Schmeck argue that
schools should help students learn about themselves, encouraging self-
awareness a5 a way of promoting cognitive development Both practi-
boners (e.g., Carl Jung, see Campbell, 1971) and researchers (e.;.,
Biggs, 1986) agree thal such awareness is a key bo developing responsi-
ble individuality. Pask (Chapter 4) describes a program for encouraging
cognitive development by helping students become more aware of their
present cognitive styles.
When analyzing educatonal problems, the terms sill and strategy
are often confused. We have to remember that failure to carry out an
activity doesn’t necessarily imply lack of shill. Such a failure
may mean
that an individual knows how to carry out the activity but doesn’t want
to carry it out. In such cases, rather than providing training in a skill, we
have to convince individuals to incorporate the skill into their motives
and plans. This requires that they admit they are capable of the activity
(i.e., that they accept responsibijity for the skill), see the benefits. of
including it in future plans, and actually make the strategic decision to
use the skill when those plans are applicable. Entwistle, Biggs, and
McCarthy and Schmeck all suggest that the concept of “locus of control”
1s applicable, with the responsible, planful student believing that life's
rewards are “internally” (mot “externally"’) controlled.
Several years ago there was an influx of training programs designed
to teach individuals to be assertive, that is, to diplomatically achieve
ther nghts. The lack of assertiveness was most often treated as a skill
deficit. Thus, in a particular training program, students might practice
saying to a person in front of them ina theater, “Sir, will you please
be
AN INTRODUCTION i

quiet;
I cannot hear the performers.” It is often the case that the student
already knows how to say “Sir, will you please,” etc. The real problem
is, because of dependence and fear of rejection, he or she doesn’t really
want to make that statement. This then is a higher-level tachcal and
strategic problem rather than a skill problem, and traming programs
alten failed to recognize the distinction. When individuals are already
capable of employing a skill, they don’t need training, they need educa-
tion concerned with plans, strategies, and responsibility. Kirby points
out that sometimes the problem is indeed one of insufficient practice
with a skill, and then training
is in fact called for In this regard, Wein-
stein (Chapter 11) provides an excellent description of a proven behav-
ioral training program for developing learning skills.
Before turning to the labels style, approack, and orientation, we need
to consider the berm process, as used by Das and Kirby. A process occurs
at the most specific, neurological level of analysis and is even more
specific, or less molar, than a behavior Styles, strategies, tactics, and
skills are all, theoretically, composed of processes. The question is, what
level of analysis does one prefer? At the most differentiated and ana-
lyzed level we have processes, and at less differentiated and more gen-
eral levels we have strategies and styles.
Both Das and Kirby dishnguish between coding and Planning pro-
cesses, with coding involving the more literal recording of experience
and planning involving integration of codes. Das and Kirby als
also dis-
tinguish between simultaneous and successive coding processes, with
simultaneous
coding processes being more gestaltic
or global and suc-
cessiie processes being more sequential
or serial. Also, both Das and
Kirby suggest that individuals may be more proficient in the more-
analytic successive processes or the more-global simultaneous processes
and that this can contribute to the style-hke quality of them behavior.
There is yet another term more general than strategy. That term is
style, and | turn now to its definihon and then to an important distinc-
tion between style and approach.

COGNITIVE STYLES

Escalona and Heider (1959) state with regard to their extensive de-
velopmental
study of behavior:
As one notes behavioral alterations from infancy to—in the case of our
study—later preschool ages, one knows that not a single behavior has re-
mained
the same, yet one ia strock
with the inherent continuity of behavioral
style and of the child's pattern of adeptation (p 9 italies added)
lf ever we observe that an individual has an inclination to use the same
 CHAPTER 4

Learning Strategies,
Teaching Strategies, and
Conceptual or Learning Style
GORDON PASK

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

From the mid- to late 1960s, Bran Lewis, Bernard Scott, and | conjec-
tured that learning strategies, teaching strategies, and even plans of
action have characteristic types which can be differentiated (Lewis &
Pask, 1964, 1965; Pask, 1961, 1970, 1972; Pask & Lewis, 1968, Pask d&
Scott, 1971, 1972, 1973) Individual difference psychologies have main-
tained a similar stance and with greater precision regarding the nature of
strategies. An overview of the approach taken by my own group in the
1960s is described in the remainder of this section. Learning
and teach-
ing strategies can, under appropriate circumstances, be substantially
exteriorized
or externalized for observation. Protocols
can serve this
purpose, but we used maplike representations of what may be known or
learned. These representations were open to continuous evolution as
further topics and relations between them were added by learners,
Later, these representations were seen to be marupulable systemat-
ically and without the imposition of rules that insult freedom of thought
or creativity (about mid-1970s). The maps and representations of topics
(communicable, shared, or public concepts, rather than personal con-

GORDON PASK « OOC Program, Faculty of Education, University of Amsterdam, Grote

Bickerstraat 72. Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1013 KS.
83
b4 GORDON PASK

cepts) were called “entailment structures.” Later still, Kallikourdis,

Scott, and I discerned that entailment structures are special and re-
strictive cases of “entailment meshes,” in which shared, public concept
relations constitute expressions in a “protologic” (Lp) (Pask, 1975a, b;
1976 a, b, c; Pask & Soott, 1973; Pask, Kallikourdis, & Scott, 1975),
An entailment structure consists of topics and connections among
topics which show how they may be derived or understood from other
topics. The enfailment mesh recognizes that the entailment of one topic
from others is a momentary situation that occurs during action or expla-
nation; in fact, the relationships between bopics are fof static and hier-
archical. “Lp” refers to a protologic developed out of Conversation Theo-
ry which is a model of what underlies cognitive activity It is nota model
of logic or language itself but rathera “substrate” for them, hence the
qualifier, “proto,” meaning “underlying.” Its rules involve the pro-
cesses by which, for example, the normally heterarchical relationship
between topics unfolds into hierarchies. [ts details encompass conflict
deteciion and resolution, analogy, generalization, and models of inno-
vation and memory.
Conversation Theory is a summarization of our assumptions and
rationale from this early period. Conversations are behaviors, but spe-
dal kinds of behaviors with hard-valued observables in the form of
concept sharings, detected as “understandings.” Conversations are, we
believe, the first basic data of psychological, social, or educational theo-
ry We see later that people can even have conversations with them-
selves. Conversations which may lead to concept sharing need not be
verbal. Often they are gestural, pictorial, or mediated througha comput-
er interface.
Understanding, like many of the terms of Conversation Theory, has
an everyday use that is evocative of its rigorous and almost technical
meaning within Conversation
Theory An understanding involves not
only the topics that are related and their relationship, but the ability to
transfer and apply the relationship to new situations. An “agreement
over an understanding” is a hard-valued event that can be detected in
an experiment. It involves individuals, each of whom exteriorizes his or
her understandings and confirms that the other's entailments reproduce
his or her own, previously internal, concepts,
The entailment mesh constitutes a network
or map of topics which
have no hierarchy or direction. Paths on this map are a learrung strategy
or a teaching strategy A learning strategy or a teaching strategy consists
of paths on the map marked to indicate specific conceptual events like
examining, trying to learn about, learning about a topic (shared con-
cept), or understandinga topic in the related context of others from
which it may be constructed, reconstructed, or recalled. Such paths may
STRATEGIES AND COMCEPTUAL STYLE 85

consist
of simple trees, a hierarchical
branching and looping, and they
may or may not employ analogies as structures They often involve the
creation of analogies, and they may employ or create generalizations.
A styleis a disposition bo adopt one class of learning strategy or one
class of teaching strategy in the conversation of a butorial. In an art
school, this 5 usually by demonstration. Ina high school, it 15 usually by
verbal communication or laboratory experience. The question remains,
to whom does this stylistic disposition belong? Individual difference
psychologists seem to take it for granted that the unitary, partly autono-
mous unit “owning” a disposition and opting for one or the other class
of strategy
is a person. Of course, this may be so, but a broader perspec-
tive is needed if we are to make sense of the facts. Conversation Theory
offers one such broader perspective. In this theory, we speofy an indi-
vidual (a psychological individual, or P-Individual) as partly autono-
mous. The P-Individual is ‘only partly autonomous because he or she is
open to the information transfer of a concept-sharing conversation be-
tween persons
or between mental organizations in one person (both, in
our sense, P-Individuals),
“P-Individual” may appear chimsy, but the idea is essential because
it allows one of the symmetries of Conversation Theory to exist. There
can be many P-Indrviduals within one person (when | take different and
possibly conflicting viewpoints) as well asa P-Individual that 1s made up
of many persons, such as a school of thought or a religion.
The techmcal cntena of “organizational closure’ and “informa-
tional openness,” underlying this distinction, are hardly in the province
of this paper. Likewise, there are very thorough technical criteria that
underlie the theory's usage of the term wndersianding, already noted as a
specific indicator of concept sharing. The interested reader will find a
review in Pask (1983), which also gives reference to expositions in cyber-
netic, mathemabcal and logical terms. The basic ideas are, however,
quite familiar in ordinary language. A P-Individual is a personna; an
understanding is the ability of two or more P-Individuals to exchange
“what,” “how,” and “why by that method” questions and to provide
mutually satisfactory replies. Such a transaction, which embodies the
shghtly refined common meaning of understanding, is a concept-shar-
ing act Of course, the agreement over an understanding need not be
and often is not complete; for example, your concept of “tortoise” or
“knitting” may be quite different from mine, Hence, agreement must be
taken to include agreement to disagree, with some knowledge of why
and how we disagree. [f there is some agreement and some concept
sharing, then your personal concept of “tortoise” and my personal con-
cept of “tortoise” are mutually ennched by whatever is shared in di-
alogue. Further, a shared or public concept of “tortoise,” some of it