Transactional instruction

DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 375 391 CS 011 866

AUTHOR Pressley, Michael; And OthersTITLE Transactional Instruction or Reading Comprehension

Strategies. Perspectives in Reading Research No.5

INSTITUTION National Reading Research Center, Athens, GA.;National Reading Research Center, College Park,MD.

SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),Washington, DC.

PUB DATE 94

CONTRACT 117A20007NOTE 41p.

AVAILABLE FROM National Reading Research Center, 318 Aderhold,University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-7125.

PUB TfPE Information Analyses (070)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Elementary Education; *Instructional Effectiveness;

Qualitative Research; *Reading Comprehension;*Reading Research; *Reading Strategies; TeacherAttitudes

IDENTIFIERS Research Suggestions; Transactional StrategiesInstruction

ABSTRACTFocusing on the teaching of comprehension strategies,

this paper describes studies designed to identify settings in whicheffective strategies instruction was being carried out and detailsthe conclusions that can be drawn from the studies. The paper beginswith a description of comprehension strategies instruction in the1970s and 1980s. The paper then discusses a series of qualitativestudies undertaken of two successful comprehension strategiesinstructional programs--the Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvaniawhich serves high-ability elementary students who experiencedifficulties in learning to read, and the Montgomery County,Maryland, public schools program, Students Achieving IndependentLearning (SAIL), created for Chapter 1 students. The paper thenanalyzes the instruction in terms of its transactional qualities, itsplace among constructivist theories of learning, and with regard totheories of intelligent assistance. The paper also includes teachers'ideas about how comprehension strategies instruction might be mademore effective. It concludes with a discussion of three directionsfor future research: better instruction at the primary level, teacherdevelopment, and strategies across the curricula and school day.Contains 97 references. (RS)

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Transactional Instructionof Reading Comprehension Strategies

Michael PressleyUniversity at AlbanySale University of New York

in long-term collaboration withPamela El -DinaryGeorgetown UniversityRachel BrownUniversity at BuffaloState University of New York

Ted L. SchuderMaryland Department of EducationBaltimore, MarylandMaryrose PioliMinnetonka, MinnesotaKathy GreenRosctree-Media School DistrictMedia. PennsylvaniaSAIL Faculty and AdministrationMontgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Maryland

Irene GaskinsBenchmark School FacultyBenchmark School. Media. Pennsylvania

Li S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONa

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATIONCENTER (ERIC)

T/his document has Peen relorodirceoreceicee from the person or mongolianoriginating it

0 Minor changes have been made toimprove reproduction quality

Pones or New or opinions waled rn airsdocument do nol necessarily representofficial OERI position or pnlicy

NRRCNationalReading ResearchCenter

PERSPECTIVES IN READING RESEARCH NO: 5

Fall 1994

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NRRCNational Reading Research Center


Michael PressleyUniversity at Albany

State University of New York

in long-term collaboration withPamela El -Dinary

Georgetown UniversityRachel Brown

University at BuffaloState University of New York

Ted L. SchuderMaryland Department of Education

Baltimore, MarylandMaryrose Pioli

Minnetonka, MinnesotaKathy Green

Rosetree-Media School DistrictMedia, Pennsylvania

SAIL Faculty and AdministrationMontgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Maryland

Irene GaskinsBenchmark School Faculty

Benchmark School, Media, Pennsylvania

PERSPECTIVES IN READING RESEARCH NO. 5Fall 1994

The work reported herein is a National Reading Research Project of the University of Georgiaand University of Maryland. It was supported under the Educational Research andDevelopment Centers Program (PR/AWARD NO, I I7A20007) as administered by the Officeof Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings andopinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the NationalReading Research Center, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S.Department of Education.

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NRRC NationalReading ResearchCenter

Executive CommitteeDonna E. Alvermann, CoDirectorUniversity of Georgia

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Publications Editors

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About the National Reading Research Center

The National Reading Research Center (NRRC) isfunded by the Office of Educational Research -.idImprovement of the U.S. Department of EducatiLi toconduct research on reading and reading instruction.The NRRC is operated by a consortium of the Universi-

ty of Georgia and the University of Maryland CollegePark in collaboration with researchers at several institu-tions nationwide.

The NRRC's mission is to discover and documentthose conditions in homes, schools, and communitiesthat encourage children to become skilled, enthusiastic,lifelong readers. NRRC researchers are committed toadvancing the development of instructional programssensitive to the cognitive, sociocultural, and motiva-tional factors that affect children's success in reading.NRRC researchers from a variety of disciplines conductstudies with teachers and students from widely diversecultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in prekinder-garten through grade 12 classrooms. Research projectsdeal with the influence of family and family-schoolinteractions on the development of literacy; the interac-tion of sociocultural factors and motivation to read; theimpact of literature-based reading programs on reading

achievement; the effects of reading strategies instructionon comprehension and critical thinking in literature,science, and history; the influence of innovative groupparticipation structures on motivation and teaming; thepotential of computer technology to enhance literacy;and the development ur methods and standards foralternative literacy assessments.

The NRRC is further committed to the participationof teachers as full partners in its research. A betterunderstanding of how teachers view the development of

literacy, how they use knowledge from research, andhow they approach change in the classroom is crucial to

improving instruction. To further this understanding,the NRRC conducts school-based research in whichteachers explore their own philosophical and pedagogical orientations and trace their professional growth.

Dissemination is an important feature of NRRC activi-ties. Information on NRRC research appears in severalformats. Research Reports communicate the results oforiginal research or synthesize the findings of severallines of inquiry. They are written primarily for re-searchers studying various areas of reading and reading

instruction. The Perspective Series presents a widerange of publications, from calls for research andcommentary on research and practice to first-personaccounts of experiences in schools. InstructionalResources include curriculum materials, instructionalguides. and materials for professional growth, designedprimarily for teachers.

For more information about the NRRC's researchprojects and other activities, or to have your nameadded to the mailing list, please contact:

Donna E. Alvermann, Co-DirectorNational Reading Research Center318 Aderhold HallUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, GA 30602-7125(706) 542-3674

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Patricia AdkinsUniversity of Georgia

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Jessie PollackMaryland Department of EducationBaltimore, Maryland

Sally PorterBlair High SchoolSilver Spring, Maryland

Michael PressleyState University of New York

at Albany

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About the Authors

Michael Pressley is a Professor of Education-al Psychology and Statistics, University atAlbany, State University of New York, and aprincipal investigator with the NationalReading Research Center. He has publishedextensively in the areas of reading, memory,and cognition and instruction. His currentwork is diverse, including studies ofexemplary primary-level reading instruction,comprehension strategies instruction, andstudent use of graphing calculators in post-secondary mathematics.

Pamela El-Dinary and Rachel Brown wereboth graduate students working at theNational Reading Research Center, Universityof Maryland, when this article was written.Pam is now a researcher at GeorgetownUniversity and Rachel is an assistantprofessor of educational psychology a:University of Buffalo, State University ofNew York.

Ted L. Schuder was the curriculum designerresponsible for the SAIL program. MaryrosePio li and Kathy Green were teachers in theprogram through spring 1993. Maryrose nowresides in Minnetonka, Minnesota a:t1 Kathyteaches in the Rosetree-Media Schools outsidePhiladelphia. The SAIL Faculty and Admin-istration who participated in the collaborativeresearch that permitted this article includemore than two dozen educators, most ofwhom continue to use SAIL in their Mont-gomery County, Maryland classrooms.

Irene Gaskins is the founder and director ofBenchmark School, who, along with theBenchmark School Faculty, collaboratedwith Pressley to study the transactional strate-gies instruction at Benchmark. Benchmark isin Media, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia.

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N a mond Reading Research CenterUniversities of Georgia and MarylandPerspectives in Reading Research No 5Fall PPM


Michael PressleyUniversity at Albany

State University of New York

in long-term collaboration withPamela El -Dinary

Georgetown UniversityRachel Brown

University at BuffaloState University of New York

Ted L. SchuderMaryland Department of Education

Baltimore, MarylandMaryrose Pioli

Minnetonka, MinnesotaKathy Green

Rosetree-Media School DistrictMedia, Pennsylvania

SAIL Faculty and AdministrationMontgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Maryland

Irene GaskinsBenchmark School Faculty

Benchmark School, Media, Pennsylvania

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutelyno guarantee that we shall be good teachers. Toadvance to that result, we must have an addi-tional endowment altogether, a happy tact and

ingenuity to tell us what definite things to sayand do when the pupil is before us. That in-genuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil. thattact for the concrete situation, though they arethe alpha and omega of the teacher's art, arethings to which psychology cannot help us inthe least. (William James, 1899/(958. p. 24)

For two decades, I have been interested inchildren's use of strategies that is, the pro-cesses they use when performing demandingtasks. Teaching students to use effective strate-

gies, especially cognitive strategies they do notuse autonomolisly, has been of particular inter-est. Because of the importance of learning from

text, much of my work in the past six years has

been concerned with strategies that can in-crease children's comprehension and memory

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2 Pressley, et al.

of what they read. Thus, the focus of this paperis the teaching of comprehension strategies.

have never contended that strategies

instruction alone could produce skilled reading,thinking, or remembering (see Pressley, Bor-kowski, & Schneider, 1987, 1989; Schneider& Pressley, 1989). Rather, my view is thatstudents must be taught strategies in conjunc-tion with knowledge they already possess. Forstrategies to be coordinated with factual andconceptual knowledge, the learner must possess

metacognitive knowledge, including the knowl-edge of when, where, and how to use strate-gies. In addition, the active use of strategiesand other knowledge depends on students'motivation to learn, for example, the text beingused in class.

My interest in instructional issues hasmeant that most of my theories about the nature

of effective thinking have been posed as theo-ries of instruction (e.g., Harris & Pressley,1991; Pressley, Borkowski, & Schneider,1989; Pressley, Goodchild, Fleet, Zajchowski,& Evans, 1989; Pressley, Harris, & Marks,1992). I have proposed. for example, thateffective strategies instruction must be longterm and aimed at developing the coordinateduse of strategies in conjunction with otherknowledge. Such instruction must be metacog-nitively rich, including information aboutwhere and when to use the strategies taught.Although extensive practice is necessary topromote the efficient and automatic use ofstrategies, such practice permits additionalopportunities to discover how, when, andwhere to use the strategies one already knows.Effective instruction develops in students thesense that they can be effective thinkers.

My perspective shares components withother popular theories of intelligent cognition.All such models include procedural knowledge(e. g. , strategies), declarative knowledge (i.e.nonstrategic factual knowledge), and rnetacog-nition (e.g., Baron, 1985; Brown, Bransford,Campion, & Ferrara, 1983; Chipman, Segal,& Glaser, 1985; Nickerson, Perkins, & Smith,1985; Segal, Chipman, & Glaser, 1985). Theemphasis on motivation in my model reflectsincreasing scholarly interest in the role ofmotivation in determining academic cognition(see Borkowski, Carr, Re:linger, & Pressley,1990; Pressley, El-Dinary, Stein, Marks, &Brown, 1992). 1 suggest that effective instruc-tion should enhance understanding of strate-gies, nonstrategic knowledge, metacognition,and academic motivation.

I originally developed my theories ofinstruction like many psychologists do, byreflecting on research; theories of thinking,learning, and development; professional inter-actions with schools; and personal experiencesas a student. I have abandoned that approach,convinced that psychology provides only partof what must be known in order to proposerealistic and complete instructional theories.More positively, effective educators have beenable to take the many instructional prescrip-tions provided by psychologists and transformthese bare-bones and inadequate ideas aboutteaching thinking into pedagogy that fits intoschool and transforms the thinking of students.

As the opening quote by William James im-plies, my view is that teacher ingenuity is animportant part of successful instruction, andcompelling theories of instruction must captureeducators' insights. The ideas of skilled teach-

NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, PERSPECTIVES IN READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 5

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Transactional Strategies Instruction 3

ers are well-grounded in experiences, whereasthe experiments and quantifiable observationsso preferred by the educational psychologycommunity in the past are not sufficient to thetask of generating sound instructional theory.

The research tactic my colleagues and 1have taken in the past three years has been toidentify educational settings in which effectivestrategies instruction was being carried out, inparticular, the effective teaching of readingcomprehension strategies. Then, a variety ofqualitative methods (Lincoln & Cuba. 1985;Strauss & Corbin, 1990) ware used to docu-ment the nature of the strategies instructionoccurring in these settings (see Pressley, El-Dinary, Gaskins et al., 1992). These qualita-tive investigations produced a detailed under-standing of the components of strategies in-struction in two successful programs. The firstwas in Benchmark School in Media, Pennsyl-vania, which serves high-ability elementarystudents who experience difficulties learning toread; most Benchmark students do learn toread and subsequently succeed in regulareducation. The second was a comprehensionprogram developed in and used by the Mont-gomery County, Maryland, public schools.This program was created for Chapter 1 stu-dents and produced much better reading com-prehension in at-risk students than did otherinstructional programs.

This perspective will describe these studiesand detail the conclusions about instruction thatcan be drawn from them. The instruction willthen be analyzed in terms of its transactionalqualities, its place among constructivist theo-ries of learning, and with regard to theories ofintelligent assistance. Although the instruction

we have analyzed is far from being perfected,the teachers in these programs are in a goodposition to provide insights about possibleimprovement. Thus, the perspective concludeswith teachers' ideas about how comprehensionstrategies instruction might be made moreeffective.

COMPREHENSION STRATEGIESINSTRUCTION IN THE 1970s AND 1980s

Most research on comprehension strategiesinstruction has been of the following form; Aresearcher believes that if students wouldconstruct representations of text (e.g., mentalimages representing the story or summaries),or react to texts in a certain way (e.g., relatethem to prior knowledge and seek clarificationswhen unsure of meaning), both the comprehen-sion and long-term memory of texts wouldimprove. These experimenters usually hadreasons to believe that students were not al-ready engaging in such thinking when reading,or that they were doing so less systematicallyand completely than they could. Thus, theexperimenter created instruction to stimulatethe desired thinking processes. The readingcomprehension of students receiving suchinstruction, as measured by an objective test ofunderstanding (e.g., multiple-choice items overliteral and inferred messages in text), wascompared to the reading comprehension ofstudents not receiving such instruction (e.g.,control subjects permitted to read as theynormally would in preparation for an objectivetest). When strategy-trained students outper-formed control students, the experimenterconcluded that the students probably were not


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4 Pressley, et al.

using the new strategies on their own or werenot using them systematically. More positively,students could be taught to do so. Studentswere production deficient to use Flavell's(1970) term in that they were capable ofproducing the strategies but did not unless theywere instructed to do so.

Many such experiments in the 1970s and1980s produced evidence that students couldbenefit from instructions to use a number ofthinking strategies aimed at improving learningfrom text (see Pearson & Dole, 1987; Pres-sley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, & Kurita,1989). Among these were:

Summarization: constructing of summariesof text content as reading proceeds.

Representational imagery: constructinginternal images to represent the meaning oftext.

Mnemonic imagery: constructing imagesthat transform text meaning to make itmore memorable (e.g.. when reading a bio-graphy of Charles Dickens, imagining eachof the events occurring to a "Mr. McGoo"Scrooge in order to remember that thesewere events in Dickens' life, rather thanevents from some other biography).

Story grammaranalysis: explicitly identify-ing and attending to the setting, characters,problems, and resolutions in a story. Re-membering these permits recall of the mostcritical parts of the story.

Question generation: thinking of questionsbout the meaning of text as reading pro-ceeds.

Prior knowledge activation: relating whatone already knows to related informationcontained in text. If this activation occursbefore reading, it can be the basis of expec-tations about of the content of text.

A collection of strategies resulted that canbe applied before (e.g., making predictionsbased on prior knowledge), during (e.g., imag-ery generation), and after (e.g., summariza-tion) reading (Levin & Pressley, 1981). Evenso, this research was not aimed at the coordi-nated use of strategies before, during, and afterreading but rather at the validation of a specificstrategy. More complicated studies of cognitivestrategy instruction were required, becausemany sophisticated models of thinking wereemerging in which multiple strategies wereneeded to make sense of the world, includingworlds created in texts (e.g., Baron, 1985;Brown et al., 1983: Levin & Pressley, 1981;Nickerson et al., 1985).

Several major investigations of this typewere conducted in the 1980s. For example,Scott Paris and associates (e.g., Paris & Oka,1986) developed a set of lessons that uld beused during a year of elementary leadinginstruction. "Informed St ratries for Learning"included instruction of many of the strategiesthat had been validated in research, as well asattention to the metacognitive and motivationalcomponents of strategy use. Although approxi-mately 20 weekly lessons resulted in improvedperformance on some of the specific taskspracticed in the curriculum, more generalchanges, such as those documented by stan-dardized reading comprehension assessments,did not occur.

More positively, Duffy et al. (1967) report-ed success with a year of instruction in which

NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER. PERSPECTIVES IN READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 5

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Transactional Strategies Instruction

third-grade teachers recast the skills they taughtas strategies. These teachers provided manypossible explanations of how to attack text andcomprehend it. Collins (1991) produced im-proved comprehension in fifth- and sixth-gradestudents by providing a semester (three days aweek) of lessons on reasoning skills. Shetaught her students to seek clarification whenuncertain, look for patterns and principles,analyze decision-making that occurs during textprocessing, solve problems (using backwardreasoning and visualization), summarize,

predict, adapt ideas in text (including rearrang-ing parts of ideas in text), and negotiate inter-pretations of texts. Although the trained stu-

's did not differ from controls before the...,ervention with respect to standardized com-prehension performance, there was a differenceof 3 SDs between treated and control condi-tions on the posttest. Bereiter and Bird (1985)demonstrated that students in the seventh andeighth grades benefit from instructions to usestrategies that more sophisticated readers use,such as restating difficult text. backtracking asnecessary, watching for pertinent informationin text, and resolving apparently anomalousinformation in text. These data, combined withDuffy et al.'s (1987) and Collins' (1991) out-comes, make me optimistic that instruction inthe use of multiple strategies is an interventionthat can be effective during most of the ele-mentary- and middle-school years.

Notably, the research of Duffy et al.

(1987), Collins (1991), and Bereiter and Bird(1985) used direct explanations of cognitivestrategies by teachers to students. In all threecases the teachers helped students make theirmental processes public by thinking aloud (i.e..mental modeling; Duffy, Roehler, & Herr-mann, 1988). Students were provided extensive

practice opportunities; teachers assisted duringpractice only as required. And, in all threecases, there was opportunity for gradual acqui-sition of the repertoire of strategies as well aslong-term instruction in the coordination ofthose competencies.

The best-known multiple-strategies inter-vention developed during the 1980s was recip-rocal teaching of comprehension strategies,perhaps because this was the first classroom-deployed multiple-strategies intervention thatseemed to promote reading comprehension(Palincsar & Brown, 1984). This interventionproduced consistent increases in lower-abilitystudents' use of processes such as prediction,clarification, question-generation during read-ing, and summarization. This type of instruc-tion often produced at least modest gains onmore general measures (e.g., standardized

reading comprehension; for a review, seeRosenshine & Meister, 1994).

Reciprocal teaching of the four comprehen-sion strategies occurs in reading groups. Anadult teacher introduces the prediction, clarifi-cation, questioning, and summarization strate-gies to the group using explanations and mod-eling, and helps the group as needed. The roleof the adult teacher in group functioning isdownplayed, however. For any lesson se-quence, one of the students is designated"teacher" of the group; this student leads adiscussion of the content. This student leadertypically begins the discussion of a segment oftext by asking a question and concludes byoffering a summary, that leads to a predictionabout subsequent text content. The adult teach-

er, provides prompting and feedback to mem-bers of the group as needed.

Palincsar and Brown (1984) believed thatthis instructional arrangement is extremely


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6 Pressley, et al.

motivating. The availability of feedback asneeded should reduce frustration and increasetask persistence and long-term participation insuch groups is presumed to lead to the internal-ization of the cognitive processes practiced inthe group. This expectation is consistent withthe idea (Vygotsky, 1978) that interpersonalprocesses can be internalized by individualsand become the basis for intrapersonal cogni-tive processes.

In summary, by the end of the 1980s, therewas substantial evidence that instruction insome specific cognitive process improves textcomprehension. In addition, a few investigatorssucceeded in teaching multiple strategies inways that improved reading comprehension, as

measured by standardized comprehension

instruments. Information about how real educa-tors were translating strategies instruction intoeffective educational practice was missing.however. As I reflected on this issue near theend of the 1980s (see Pressley, El- Dinary,Brown, et al., in press, for extensive commen-tary on these reflections), I had many ques-tions. For example, I knew of educationalresearchers who were having some successusing cognitive strategies instruction of varioussorts in school, e.g., Deshler & Schumaker,1988: Englert, Raphael, Anderson, Anthony,& Stevens, 1991; Gaskins & Elliot, 1991).However, the strategies instruction they wereoffering to students was long-term, that isprovided over years. Why did such instructiontake so long? In addition,.strategies instructionwas clearly taking place in the context of anongoing curriculum: How was it meshed withother parts of the school day? As 1 read theexperimental studies, including the ones detail-ing multiple-strategies interventions, 1 felt thatlittle attention was being paid to the instruction-

al dynamics of lessons the interweaving ofteacher and student behaviors that form thebasis of instruction. What did complete strate-gies instruction lessons look like? What doyears of such lessons look I ike? These concernswere disturbing because I suspected that thedissemination of effective strategies instructionmight be facilitatec, if educators could beinformed about how successful teachers adaptthe recommendations of theoreticians andresearchers to real schools. ft was time toproduce such information.

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIESINSTRUCTION PROGRAMS

Before attempting a systematic study ofeffective school-based strategies instruction, 1traveled to sites where such instruction wasoccurring and talked with the curriculumdevelopers and educators responsible for suchprograms. I observed strategies instruction inschool when possible. 1 went to the Universityof Kansas to learn about the Kansas StrategiesInstruction Model, a curriculum that had beendisseminated nationally by the University ofKansas Learning Disabilities Institute (seeDeshler & Schumaker, 1988, for a summary ofthe evidence validating the Kansas model).

A trip to Michigan State for visits withGerry Duffy, Laura Roehler, Annemarie

Palincsar, Carol Sue Englert, and Taffy Rapha-el was instructive. Tom Scruggs and MargoMastropieri welcomed me to their program atPurdue and provided substantial instructionabout how some of my basic research onelaboration and mnemonics was being translat-ed into long-term special education curricula(see Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1991). KarenHarris and Steve Graham detailed their instruc-


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tional programs with learning disabled studentsand informed me about how writing strategiesinstruction can be shaped so that it is effectivewith mildly handicapped students. Irene Gas-kins hosted a visit to Benchmark School so Icould observe and discuss the reading strategiesinstruction offered there. These trips to re-search sites were complemented by visits toclassrooms where teachers struggled to imple-ment ideas that seemed good to them and werebased on some exposure to the cognitive strate-gies instruction literature. These teachers told"war stories" about the challenges of under-standing strategies inst ructions and adapting theapproach to the needs of their students usingonly the resources available to a classroomteacher.

An especially illuminating opportunitycame when three counselors from the Univer-sity of Western Ontario studies skills centerenrolled in one of my graduate seminars. FionaGoodchild, Joan Fleet, and Richard Zajchow-ski provided me with many hours of conversa-tion about the challenges associated with teach-ing cognitive strategies to bright and motivatedstudents such as those attending a selectiveuniversity like Western Ontario.

Pressley, Goodchild et al. (1989) summa-rized the informal knowledge I had accumu-lated from the many visits and conversations Ihad with strategy instruction practitionersbetween 1987 and 1989. The main themedeveloped in that article was that effectivestrategies instruction was not easy; it requireddemanding forms of teaching such as directexplanation and mental modeling tailored tostudent needs. These methods require thesensitive and continuous diagnosis of howlearners are reacting to explanations. Pressley,Goodchild et al. (1989) made the case that such

teaching must be long-term if students are tounderstand fully when and where the strategiesthey are learning can be adapted to new situa-tions. They argued that challenges to strategiesteaching are aggravated when teachers arealready committed to approaches that areinconsistent with good strategies instruction.Sometimes teachers have been exposed tomisinformation about cognitive strategiesinterventions, for example, from publishedstrategies instruction kits produced by authorswho are not well informed about the challengesof cognitive strategies instruction, 'hts in whichmany strategies are offered tor use in a shortperiod of time. Pressley, Goodchild et al.(1989) also acknowledged that much of the bestinformation about strategies instruction was notavailable to educators because it was publishedin archival. scholarly journals that are inacces-sible to teachers. They concluded that much ofthe expertise gained by educators as theyattempted to implement strategies teaching wasnot documented at all. By 1989, my colleaguesand I were ready to do the documentation andreport it in ways that would make sense toeducators and to scientists as well.

Benchmark School Studies

The first studies in this p ;ogram of researchwere conducted at Benchmark School in Me-dia, Pennsylvania. Benchmark is dedicated tothe education of high-ability students whoexperience difficulties learning to read in thefirst two years of schooling. Even thoughBenchmark students are at great risk for long-term school failure, most emerge after four toseven years at Benchmark well-prepared toreturn to regular education. Virtually all gradu-ates complete high school, and many attend

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college. Because much of the Benchmarkapproach involves teaching higher level think-ing strategies to accomplish reading and otherliteracy tasks, the school was a perfect place todo an initial investigation of effective strategiesinstruction.

Irene Gaskins, the founder and director ofthe school, and I worked on several researchprojects during the course of my year at Bench-mark (1989/90). One was an interview study inwhich the questions posed were largely in-spired by the instructional possibilities I hadencountered when visiting the strategies in-struction sites that had informed Pressley,Goodchild et al. (1989). The 31 academicteachers at Benchmark were asked 150 ques-tions; each required an objective answer (e.g.,a response on a Likert scale) but also permittedadditional comments the responding teachermight wish to make. Up to five hours of face-to-face interviews permitted ample opportunityfor teachers to provide detailed explanations ofwhat they believed, and why, about strategiesinstruction based on their extensive experience.

The 31 Benchmark teachers agreed onmany points, including the following:

Direct explanation and modeling are essen-tial components of effective strategiesinstruction. My observations at Benchmarkconfirm that such explanations occur dur-ing both small- and large-group instructionand as part of one-to-one tutoring and rein-struction. Teachers reported that their ini-tial explanations and modeling are morecomplete than later ones, although thefaculty members, especially the moreexperienced ones, were emphatic thatexplanations and modeling should continue

for a long time after the introduction ofstrategies.

Extensive practice in the use of strategies isessential, as is extensive guidance and feed-back in response to students, needs duringsuch practice. Even so, the teachers admit-ted that it is often difficult to diagnose theproblems experienced by students and todevise remedies. The teachers were awarethat students did not learn cognitive strate-gies quickly, but did so easily if given achance to use strategies across a wide rangeof tasks and materials, and to practiceextensively.

Strategies teaching and the use of strategiesoccurred across the curriculum.

Extensive information must be provided tostudents about when and where to apply thestrategies they learn as well as informationabout the benefits produced by the use ofstrategies.

Transfer of the strategies to new academictasks and contents is not automatic, but re-quires extensive teaching about when stra-tegies might be applied as well as practiceapplying them in a number of situations.

Only a few strategies should be introducedat a time; in-depth instruction of strategiesover months and years is the preferredapproach to teaching at Benchmark. Theirview was that students develop strategicthinking repertoires over the course of theiryears in the school cognitive strategiesinstruction was not seen as a quick remedy.


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The explicit reinforcement of students'efforts and successes in applying strategiesand in accomplishing difficult academictasks is needed. The teachers thought feed-back to students was essential, and positivefeedback following success is critical ifstudents are to be motivated. The teacherswere well aware that their students hadalready experienced several years of schoolfailure and believed that their Benchmarksuccesses must be rewarded in order tooffset the damage produced by previousfailures.

Developing students who are habituallyreflective is an important goal of instruc-tion. Cognitive strategies instruction wasseen as a way of accomplishing this higher-order goal.

1 was struck by how easy it is to discernbroad-based agreement in these interview data.Perhaps the agreement represents an institu-tional consensus produced by selective hiringand retention, combined with common in-ser-vice training at the school. Another possibilityis that the consensus represents the collectivegood sense that emerges when good teachersdeal with the challenges of strategies instruc-tion, especially in a school serving studentswho have academic difficulties. Pressley,Gaskins, Cunicelli et al. 0991) produced datathat supported the latter inference.

Pressley, Gaskins, Cunicelli et al. (1991)presented the same questions that had beengiven to the Benchmark teachers to a sample ofnine nationally known researchers in strategiesinstructions. These distinguished investigatorshad all had extensive experier.-,e in implement-

ing long-term strategies instruction at theirhome institutions. The congruence in theresponses of the Benchmark teachers and Cisresearcher sample was striking, with correla-tions from .65 to 1.00 between teachers andresearchers (depending on the subscale). I

concluded was that extensive experience withstrategies instruction did produce perceptionsof that instruction that are consistent with theperceptions of the Benchmark teachers.

Two additional studies at the school provid-ed even more detailed understanding of howBenchmark teachers do what they do. One wasa case study the use of semantic maps in oneBenchmark classroom during spring semester,1990 (Pressley, Gaskins, Wile, Cunicelli, &Sheridan, 1991). The generation of sematticmaps was taught as a way to understand textand included the analyses of text to determinerelationships such as cause and effect, temporalsequence, compare and contrast, as well assimple description. Teaching of these strategieswas thoroughly integrated with the teaching ofcontent; focal strategies instruction occurredduring reading, writing, and social studies asteachers and students interacted to create se-mantic maps. For example, semantic mapswere generated by students as they plannedwriting assignments as part of social studies.Students' social studies homework often re-quired semantic mapping.

Consistent with the teachers' claims in thelarge interview study, explanations and model-ing of the semantic mapping strategy was moreextensive and explicit early in the instruction.After several months, students often began tomap the meaning of a text when given a simpleone-line direction from the teacher to do so(e.g., "Make a map of what's in this text"). At

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this point, teachers only helped students asneeded, often giving gentle hints about howspecific relationships in a text might be repre-sented in a semantic map.

The instruction of other strategies did notstop when semantic mapping was introduced.Rather, teachers modeled and explained the useof semantic mapping in conjunction with otherstrategies. For example, the cognitive strate-gies of activating prior knowledge, predicting,seeking clarification, and summarizing were allprompted frequently during lessons intendedprimarily to provide new information aboutsemantic mapping as a strategy.

I noted at Benchmark that cognitive strate-gies were being taught as ways to encourageindividual interpretations. For example, teach-ers in the Pressley, Gaskins, Wile et al. (1991)case study taught their students that no twosemantic maps should be alike and that eachstudent's map should reflect individual reac-tions to the content of the text.

Interpretive activities were especiallyapparent in the analyses of Benchmark class-room dialogues produced by Gaskins, Ander-son, Pressley, Cunicelli, and Sallow (1993)who studied the strategy instruction lessons ofsix teachers at Benchmark. The discourse inthese classrooms was very different from thediscourse in conventional classrooms. Cazden(1988) and Mehan (1979) observed that typicalclassroom discourse includes many cycles of ateacher asking a question, a student respond-ing, and the teacher evaluating the response(IRE cycles: [teacher] initiation, [student]response, and [teacher] evaluation). IRE cycleswere not found in the Benchmark data, how-ever. Instead, the teachers engaged in interac-tive dialogues with their students 88% of the

time in what Gaskins et al. (1993) called pro-cess-content cycles. The teacher used contestas a vehicle to stimulate the application anddiscussion of strategies.

When students make comments in discus-sions, Benchmark teachers do not attempt toevaluate their responses but rather encouragethe students to elaborate on them encour-aging students to process the content addition-ally using strategies. The goal is to encouragestudents' understanding of content throughstrategic processing. Thus, a teacher mightrequest that a student summarize a passage.Once the summary is offered, the teachermight ask the student td describe any imagesthat came to mind while reading the text orencourage the student to liven up the summaryby relating the text content to prior knowledge(e.g., When you visualize how a third-classlever works, where do you see the fulcrum?How is that picture different from what youvisualized when the author described first- andsecond-class levers? Can you tell about an oc-casion when you have used a third-class lever?How did this simple machine benefit you?).

An important finding in the Gaskins et al.(1993) investigation was the identification ofevents that occur often in lessons:

Students are provided instruction abouthow to carry out the strategies.

Teachers model the focal strategies (andsometimes use of other strategies as well).

Students practice strategies, with teacherguidance and assistance provided as need-ed.


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The focal strategy for a lesson and the focal

curriculum content for the day are identi-fied for students early in the lesson.

Information is presented about why thefocal strategy (and sometimes nonfocalstrategies as well) is important. Oftenteachers provide anecdotal informationabout how strategies have helped them.

Information about when and where strate-gies apply is conveyed to students.

The Benchmark studies were satisfying tome as a researcher. When teachers were inter-viewed, when they were observed, and whentheir discourse was analyzed their ways ofexplaining strategies and then following upwith student practice were apparent. Thepractice was guided and assisted by teacherswho carefully monitored students' attempts touse strategies, offering help when needed.Elementary content coverage was not displacedin favor of strategies instruction but rather,strategies were applied as students learnedelementary content. The outcomes of theBenchmark investigations are congruent withthe outcomes of the studies conducted in theMontgomery County. Maryland, schools.

Montgomery County, Maryland, StrategiesInstruction Programs

Ted Schuder, Jan Bergman, and Marcia York.all working as curriculum developers for theMontgomery County schools, developed anddeployed several strategies-based programsaimed principally at encouraging readingcomprehension. My colleagues and I focused

on two of these programs, one called SAIL(Students Achieving Independent Learning),which was designed for implementation acrossthe elementary years beginning with primaryreading. The second program, SIA (SummerInstitute for Achievement) was a summerschool program emphasizing similar strategicprocesses and methods of teaching. The strate-gies highlighted in SAIL are ones validated inthe research of the 1970s and 1980s: predic-tion of content based on picture, title, and textcues; evaluation of predictions and updating ofexpectations as reading of text proceeds; gener-ation of questions in response to text; produc-tion of aesthetic responses to text (includingpersonal evaluations and interpretations); sum-marization; clarification; visualization; andselective attention to important and interestingparts of text.

SAIL and SIA instruction occurs aroundhigh-quality texts, often in reading groupssmall enough to encourage exchanges amongall students about interpretations of text, imagi-nal reactions to content, and summaries. Whenstrategies are introduced initially, for examplein first or second grade, lessons often focus onindividual strategies. There may be severalweeks in which students make prediction afterprediction, followed by weeks of practicingvisualization. Once students are familiar withthe strategies, the lessons emphasize the coor-dinated use of strategies. A great deal of teach-er prompting is required for this to happen,and the need for substantial prompting contin-ues for months and perhaps years. Eventually(e.g.. in the third year of SAIL instruction),students meet in groups and carry out strategicprocesses in a self-directed fashion that is,teacher prompting and cuing is much less


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pronounced than it had been in previous years.El- Dinary, Pressley, and Schuder (1992; Pres-sky, EI-Dinary, Gaskins, et al., 1992) haveobserved a number of common activities inSAIL and SIA lessons:

Students are provided instruction abouthow to carry out the strategies emphasizedin curriculum. Usually this is re-explana-tion of strategic processes somewhat famil-iar to the students, amounting to a recastingof the strategies in new terms.

Teachers model use of the SAIL/SIA stra-tegies.

Students practice strategies, with teachershelping as needed. Often prompts are in theform of questions suggesting additionalstrategic processing or possible ways toextend or expand an interpretation.

Information is presented about why thefocal strategies (and sometimes nonfocalstrategies as well) are important. Oftenteachers provide anecdotal informationabout how strategies have helped them.

Students are often required to model andexplain the use of the SAIL/SIA strategies.

Information about when and where strate-gies apply is conveyed to students. Thepositive effects of strategies are continu-ously pointed out to students.

Sophisticated processing vocabulary (e.g..terms like "predictions," "clarifications.""validation of predictions," and "summa-ries") are used frequently.

Flexibility in strategy use is apparent, withteachers emphasizing how different stu-dents might apply strategies in differentways to the same content.

Teachers send the message that students'thought processes matter.

Of course, these behaviors were apparent atBenchmark as well. Both settings had devel-oped strategies instruction involving a greatdeal of direct explanation and modeling, con-sistent with the claims in Pressley. Goodchildet al. (1989) about the nature of effectivestrategies instruction. At Benchmark and inMontgomery County, students and teacherstalked about their thinking processes. Theyshared their interpretations of texts in an openand relaxed group context. Coordination ofstrategies was emphasized in both programs;both provided years of practice in such coordi-nation.

In these two settings, educators with yearsof field experience were aware of the compre-hension strategies research literature. Theyselected the strategies and methods from thatliterature that made the most sense to them inlight of their years of experience as educators.They were particularly impressed with thework of Gerald Duffy and his associates (e.g.,Duffy et al., 1987. 1988) on direct explanationof strategic processes. Indeed, I would say thatDuffy's perspective on direct explanationincluding mental modeling and subsequentguided practice of students is the mostinfluential perspective to date on how to teachstrategic processes in classrooms. It is alsoconsistent with the method of strategies teach-ing in some of the most influential basic re-search studies relating to strategies (see Pres-


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sky, Snyder, & Cariglia-Bull, 1987, for ananalysis).

Explaining strategies to students, showingthem how to use strategies, and helping themas they attempt to apply strategies as part ofin-school practice seems sensible to manyteachers. Although the explanation of strate-gies, modeling, and guided practice of strate-gies were all studied in the basic researchliterature, transactionA strategies instructiongoes well beyond anything presented in theliterature. The transactional strategies instruc-tion described here evolved as teachers workedwith it. Credit the educators more for thisintervention than the researchers, althoughbasic research provided the impetus and guid-ance for initial efforts, as well as informationabout which strategies might be worth teach-ing.

Often applications are not theoreticallyinteresting; that is not so with respect to trans-actional strategies instruction. The studiesreported here have provided many new theoret-ical insights about the nature of cognitivestrategies instruction at its best including itstransactional nature, relation to effective in-struction in general, and constructivist features.

THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION I:TRANSACTIONAL NATURE OF

STRATEGIES INSTRUCTION

What an instructional approach is called iscritical. Well-known educational interventionsusually have memorable names that capture animportant characteristic of the interventionsuccinctly (e.g., reciprocal teaching, nnopera-five learning, criterion-referenced instruction).One possibility was simply to use Duffy'spreferred term "direct explanation." 1 did not

do that for two reasons: First, the term some-times evokes the behavioristic conception ofeffective teaching known as "direct instruction"(e.g., Rosenshine, 1979). Since even hints ofbehaviorism are not received well in the cogni-tive and constructivist circles I frequent, directexplanation did not seem right. Second, theterm focuses on the teaching behaviors ratherthan on what happens between teachers andstudents and in the minds of the teachers andstudents. I wanted a summary term that reflect-ed the dynamic give-and-take between teachersand students that is typical of the effectivestrategies instruction I had witnessed.

The descriptive label "transactional strate-gies instruction" seemed appropriate because ofLouise Rosenblatt's (e.g., 1978) classicalanalyses of text interpretations as products ofreader/text transactions. Rosenblatt said thatmeaning is not in text alone or in the reader'shead alone but is constructed by readers as theyconsider text content in light of their previousknowledge and experience. Such meaningconstruction was certainly emphasized in theinstruction 1 was watching; students wereencouraged to use strategies such as prediction,visualization, and summarization to createpersonalized interpretations and understandingsof text.

The term "transactional" is appropriate forother reasons as well, however. In the develop-mental psychology literature (e.g., Bell, 1968),that term is used to refer to child/adult interac-tions in which the child partially determines thebehaviors of others in the child's world. Thus,a child who is sanctioned by a parent cancontrol the patent's next behavior by his or herreaction to the sanction, with immediate defer-ence to the parent likely to result in a cessationof punishment and immediate defiance likely to

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result in additional and more severe reactionsfrom the parent. Analogously, teachers' reac-tions are determined largely by the reactions ofthe students at Benchmark and in the SAIL and

SIA programs. Teachers react to student inter-pretations and student difficulties. If a studentoffers a good mmmary, the teacher mayprompt elaboration of th' mtnmary; if thestudent's summary is poor, the teacher mayprompt rereading or reconsideration of thetext. What happens in transactional strategiesinstructional groups is determined largely bythe reactions of students to teachers and toother students.

The strategies instruction I have becnstudying is transactional in yet a third sense.Organizational psychologists (e.g., Hutchins,1991) in particular have been concerned withthe types of solutions produced during groupproblem solving compared to individual prob-lem solving. Groups invariably produce solu-tions that no one person in the group wouldhave produced. Groups also produce memories

that would never have occurred to individualsunless they had participated in the group (e.g.,Wegner. 1987). There is a transactive mindwhen individuals get together to think aboutthings. So it is with the strategies instnictionalgroups we have been studying; ideas about textemerge as one student's elaboration of contentstimulates another child's elaboration of thesame text.

Thus, there are three senses in which theclassroom strategies instruction I have docu-mented is transactional: (a) Meaning is deter-mined by minds applying strategies to textcontent. (b) How one person reacts is largelydetermined 1_ what other participants in thegroup are doing, thinking, and saying. (c) The

meaning that emerges is the result of the effortsof everyone in the group. Such instruction istransactional in all of these senses because what

goes on during strategies instruction is ex-tremely intelligent assistance by teachers ofstudents.

THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION II:INTELLIGENT ASSISTANCE THEORY

The term "intelligent assistant systems" hasbeen coined in the cognitive science literaturewith respect to machine systems that can assistpeople in performing complicated tasks (e.g.,Boy, 1991). The goal of workers in this area ofartificial intelligence is to produce somethinglike C3PO and R2D2, the robots in Star Wars,although the technology is far from the point ofproducing machines with the intellectual sensi-tivities of the Star Wars' androids. Nonethe-less, this movement in artificial intelligence hasproduced sophisticated models of what occurswhen any intelligent entity gives assistance toanother entity. A brief consideration of four ofthe most important ideas in intelligent assis-tance will make clear that strategies teachingby human teachers to human students is simplyone instance of intelligent assistance. Theseanalyses will also shed more light on the com-plicated nature of such assistance.

Ausomatic, Situated Knowledge of StrategiesPossessed By Intelligent Assistants Versus TheKnowledge of Cognitive Strategies That MustBe Conveyed to Novices

Comprehension strategies instruction teachersare often very good readers. They know avariety of strategies in cognitive science


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terms they have procedural knowledge andare facile at the coordinated use of these strate-gies in conjunction with factual (declarative)knowledge (e.g., Anderson. 1983). They canuse comprehension procedures automaticallyand recognize situations immediately that callfor the strategies they are using. There is noneed for reflection about what to do when theyare reading; they simply do it (see Flower etal., 1990, for discussion of highly skilledreading and writing in these terms). Suchautomaticity and situational knowledge is builtup through years of practice and experience.

Paradoxically, such facility in strategies usecan make strategies teaching difficult. To usea computer programming analogy, such astrategy expert must "decompile" his or herknowledge of comprehension processing inorder to teach beginning readers modelingthe execution of strategies in a step-by-stepfashion rather than as a rapid, continuoussequence of events. In the strategies instructionprograms I have studied, teachers are provideddecompiled information by the program curri-culum developers about what young readerscan do to understand better. Thus, the automat-ic comprehension processes of good readersare broken down into simple descriptions ofprocesses such as predicting, relating to priorknowledge, clarifying, generating questions,problem solving, and summarizing.

At first, teachers encourage execution ofthese strategies one at a time; students carrythem out slowly. The assumption is that with agreat deal of teacher-cued practice duringreading, automatic execution of the processeswill develop, as will the situational knowledgepermitting students to recognize points duringreading that call for each of the strategic pro-

cesses. With the development of automaticityand situational knowledge, strategy use be-comes more flexible. For example, the situa-tional knowledge that develops is not a rigid setof rules but rather general notions about whento be active during reading and in what ways tobe active. The irony is that the initial teachingmust be directed at the reflective, deliberateuse of strategic procedures (in computer sci-ence terminology, procedures not yet com-piled), even though the long-term goal is

automatic, nonreflective comprehension pro-cessing that resembles the processes specifiedby the strategy formulae but is much faster andvaried (compiled knowledge) than the strategyattempts of novices.

Intelligent Assistant Diagnosis of DifficultiesExperienced By Persons Being Assisted

Workers in machine intelligent assistanceare painfully aware of the problem of diagnos-ing the needs of those receiving assistance. Forexample, intelligent assistance devices in

cockpits must be able to recognize pilot errorsand their significance and provide informationabout how to correct such problems. Althoughsome systems can recognize a limited numberof problems (e.g., when a plane is headedstraight for a mountain) and can provide alimited repertoire of directives (e.g., a voicecommand to, "Pull up," as the mountain ap-proaches), artificial intelligence is a long wayfrom producing a robotic copilot who ap-proaches the competence of an experiencedhuman copilot.

An especially great challenge for computerscientists is to figure out how to build machinesthat can accumulate knowledge of the types of

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errors made by those being assisted and theresponses from the machine that produceimproved performance. The development ofsuch knowledge is especially challengingbecause it is nonspecific knowledge. The errorcommitted by a person receiving assistancetoday can at a deep level be the same errorcommitted by another person tomorrow, al-though the two errors may appear to be verydifferent because of different surface features.Thus, the system must be able to recognize thedeep structural similarities between the difficul-ties being experienced by those being assistedand difficulties detected and corrected previ-ously.

Analogous problems of diagnosis and thedevelopment of expertise in correcting errorsexist with respect to strategies instruction.Strategies teachers must be able to evaluatestudent needs. This can be challenging as it

requires a great deal of knowledge beyondknowledge of the strategies. Only throughyears of experience with students can teachersbuild up a sophisticated understanding ofstudent problems and appropriate reactions tothose problems. A challenge for educationalscientists is to determine how best to developsuch knowledge in teachers, although it seemsalmost certain that years of teaching experienceis going to be required for expert diagnosticteaching to develop (see Chi, Glaser, & Farr,1988).

Communication Breakdowns and Miscom-munications During Intelligently AssistedInstruction

The analyses of intelligent assistance incognitive science help explain why the infor-

mation provided by teachers often seems tomiss the mark, and why many redundant expla-nations are sometimes required to get importantideas across about strategies and their use(e.g., Ellis, 1989). Suppose a child in a read-ing group hears how to apply summarization toa particular type of text. What can go wrong?(See Chapter 9 of Boy, 1991.) The instructionmight not be complete enough for the child tounderstand it. There may be ambiguities be-cause of a mismatch between the knowledge ofthe teacher and that of the child. Unfortunately,some explanations teachers offer in the middleof a story are simply incoherent. Sometimesthe explanation of the strategy is fine, but doesnot apply in the current situation. For example,suggesting that a student relate what he or shealready knows about a topic when in fact thechild knows very little about the topic would heunproductive. The analyses of intelligent assis-tance have made clear that the assistance mes-sage is only sometimes helpful. Having wit-nessed many teacher explanations that didnothing for the student, I know that this prob-lem in the world of machine/human interac-tions is every bit as keen with respect to in-structional encounters of the strictly humankind.

Perception of Questions By the IntelligentAssistant

In order to understand questions posed bythose needing assistance, intelligent assistancedevices must have "beliefs" about the peoplethey are helping (Maida & Deng, 1989). Somust human teachers (Bowers & Hinders,1990). The question Why? following a teach-er's explanation of a strategy can be construed


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to mean Why use this strategy what immedi-ate goal does it fulfill? or Why use this strategy

what long-term goal does it fulfill? or Whywould you do it that way rather than anotherway? (e.g., Cooke, 1989; Hayes-Roth, Water-man. & Lenat, 1983). These beliefs also affectwhat is said in response (e.g., an answer re-quiring high or low prior knowledge), how tosay it (e.g., with advanced or simple vocabu-lary), and how much to say about it (e.g., withthe detail of a technical manual or an owner'smanual) (Weiner, 1989). The intelligent assis-tant must determine whether a short answer issufficient in light of the intelligent assistant'sperception of the importance of the question,or whether a longer answer is critical since theperson being helped seems to have fundamentalmisunderstandings. Determining how to buildmachines that can do this is a critical part ofresearch on machine intelligence. It is alsocritical to the development of excellent teach-ers, in part because answers to questions can-not exceed the learner's total mental resources-- including hi., or her attention span (short-term memory).

Sensitivity to Capacity Limitations of ThoseBeing Assisted

Any help that comes from an intelligentassistant cannot be too complicated. Humanbeings have limited short-term memory capaci-ty. When humans need help with something.their capacity is often already stretched to thelimit. Consider a situation in which a first-grade teacher is the intelligent assistant. WhenRobbie is having difficulty sounding out aword, for example. "Frog," a great deal ofRobbie's limited attention is devoted to the task

(La Berge & Samuels, 1974). That is, humanscan only attend to a few things at once, and ifthey are attending to something very difficult,there is little attentional capacity (sometimesknown as short-term memory capacity, some-times known as consciousness) left over toattend to other things. Thus, assistance such as,"Remember 'r sounds like f-f-i and 'r' soundslike r-r-r and when they are blended, theysound like " probably would not beeffective because Robbie would not be able toattend to it and work away at the word at thesame time. Prompts that demand less short-term capacity would work better, so a hint like"What would you already know that has thesame vowel sound that has 'o-g' in it?"might be more helpful. Experts in intelligentassistance are always attempting to devisesimple cues that prompt desired actions. Thus,some rapid transit systems have developedcomputer-controlled oral directions that areautomatically broadcast over speaker systemswhen there is trouble on a train. These mes-sages are simple, which is necessary becausethe anxiety and confusion of a train emergencyconsume cognitive capacity. One such messageis, "Get out of the train!!"

Summary

Helping a person perform a cognitive taskor learn a cognitive skill is challenging, wheth-er the helper is a computer or a human teacher.The analysis in this section suggests that it isnot nearly enough for the intelligent assistant toknow how to do something, the intelligentassistant must also know how to communicatethe process in question to novices. This in-volves being able to slow down a process and


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discuss it in a step-by-step fashion. Theseexplanations must be formulated to accomino-date learner limitations. For example, theyshould not be so long or complicated that themessage demands more short-term capacitythan the student has. The intelligent assistantcan also re-explain processing so that studentswho do not get it the first time might be able toget it with additional explanation. Part of theability to re-explain is the ability to discern thespecific difficulties a student experiences.including the meanings of questions that thestudent might pose.

This analysis complements the earlierdiscussion by establishing that while effectivestrategies instruction inchides processes such as

direct explanation, modeling, and guidedpractice. knowing these is not enough to under-stand the sophistication of effective strategiesinstruction. During the last two years, El-Dinary and Schuder (1993; also EI-Dinary etal., 1992) studied teachers who were usingstrategies instruction for the first time. It wasrough going. Even those teachers who quicklyunderstood that they had to model and explainarid guide practice often experienced difficul-ties doing it. They could not rephrase strategies

explanations fluidly; they could not understandwhy some students might be faltering. Intelli-gent assistance theory provides a frameworkfor understanding such difficulties.

One paradox is that theoretical analysesemerging from models of machine learning donot lead to a mechanistic conception of strate-gies instruction. The analysis presented in thissection makes clear that strategies instruction is

not a "pouring" of information from the teach-er to the student but rather involves intelligentassistance in constructing an understanding of

strategies and their applications. Thus, thetheoretical analyses presented in this section set

the stage for an expanded discussion of theconstructivist nature of strategies instruction.

THEORETICAL INTERPRETATION III:THE CONSTRUCTIVISTIC NATURE OF

STRATEGIES

One criticism of strategies instruction (e.g.,Poplin, 1988a, 1988b) is that it is mechanicaland encourages rote responding. Students areportrayed as being taught to execute strategiesin a rigid fashion. Karen Harris, MarilynMarks, and I (Harris & Pressley, 1991; Pres-sley, Harris, & Marks, 1992) recently con-fronted these claims, making the case that goodstrategies instruction does anything but encour-

age rote passivity. Good strategies instructioninvites the creative and flexible constructionand use of strategies by students clearly aconstructivist approach.

Analysis of strategies teaching according toMoshman's (1982) three types of constructiv-ism is helpful in understanding how somestrategies instruction s constructivist: (a)

Endogenous constructivist teaching, based

largely un Piagetian theory, mostly involveschild- determined exploration and discoveryrather than direct instruction. (b) Exogenousconstructivist teaching emphasizes explicitteaching much more than does endogenousconstructivism. For example the modeling andexplaining that makes up teaching according tosocial learning models (e.g., Bandura, 1986;Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989) certainly in-volves exogenous constructivism. The learningthat occurs is not rote, however, but involvespersonalized understandings and interpretat ions

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of content. Students discover a great deal asthey grapple to understand the explanationsprovided to them and to act like the modelsthey have observed. Thus students' understand-ings of the content they are learning are differ-ent from the understandings their teachershave.

(c) Dialectical constructivist teaching isespecially favored by those who identify them-selves as constructivists. This form of teachinglies in bet -'een endogenous and exogenousconstructivist teaching. Those using this ap-proach recognize that students left to discoveron their own will learn inefficiently at best;even so, dialectical constructivists are uncom-fortable with teaching as explicit as that fa-vored by exogenous constructivists. Dialecticalconstructivists like to provide hints andprompts to students rather than large doses ofdirect explanation and modeling (althoughsome explanations and modeling are used).Dialectical constructivists favor providing justenough support so that students can proceedwith a task or learn a new skill. The idea is thatby interacting with an adult who gentlyprompts and guides efficient processing, thecnild will eventually internalize such process-ing operations, an idea consistent with Vygot-sky 's (1978; also Wood, Bruner, & Ross,1976) theory of the socially-mediated develop-ment of cognitive competence. Pressley, Sny-der. and Cariglia-Bull (1987) characterizeddialectically constructivist instructional interac-tions that presumably produce long-term com-mitment to and use of approaches to process-ing:

Mature thought develops in social contexts.Children first experience sophisticated

processing in interpersonal situations, withmore mature thinkers modeling good think-ing and guiding young children's problemsolving, often by providing cues to assistthe children when they cannot manage ontheir own. The adults provide what hasbeen referred to as proleptic instruction(i.e., instruction that typifies the child'sneeds) Adults direct children's attentionappropriately; they provide strategies tochildren; in general, they serve a supervi-sory role, making their own good process-ing as visible as possible. They also try toguide the child to process in the sameefficient fashion (e.g., Brown & Ferrara,1985; Childs & Greenfield, 1980; Day,1983; Greenfield, 1984; Palincsar &Brown. 1984; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch,1985; Wood et al.. 1976). Eventuallychildren adopt as their own the thoughtprocesses that adults have externalized forthem and encouraged them to use. Theyinternalize the mature processing they have

witnessed and participa74:1 in, although theinternalized version is not an exact copy ofthe external processing. The explicit, heav-ily verbal processing that characterizes theadult-child interactions becomes abbreviat-ed and highly efficient as it becomes intra-psychological functioning(Vygotsky, 1962,p. 102).

I now take up three characteristics of effec-tive strategies instruction that show such in-struction to be constructivist. (See Pressley,Harris, & Marks, 1992, for a longer list.) Eachof these characteristics contrasts with claimsabout strategies instruction made by somecritics of strategies instruction.


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Strategies Teaching Accomplishes WholeTasks

Some critics believe that strategies instruc-tion breaks tasks down into parts rather thandealing with wholes and that it resembles skillteaching rather than education, That is not truefor the cognitive strategies instruction consid-ered in this perspective; it involves teachingchildren how to tackle whole texts. Similarly,contemporary writing strategies instruction isaimed at the creation of whole texts. Goodproblem-solving strategies instruction is aimedat teaching students to resolve challengingprohlems.

Complex tasks involve a number of pro-cesses used in a coordinated fashion. Forexample, reading comprehension includesgenerating expectations, relating text meaningto prior knowledge, seeking clarification whenconfused, visualizing, and summarizing. Effec-tive strategies instruction encourages the use ofthe many processes required to complete ambi-tious tasks. I have not been watching lessons inwhich students do text prediction drills orvisualization drills, or any other type of drillsout of the context of real reading. The instruc-tion I have been watching for years occurswhile students are reading entire stories andentire books. Students are encouraged to applya developing repertoire of procedures as part ofconstructing a rich and personalized under-standing of stories and expositions they hearand read.

Errors Are Important During Strategies In-struction

Some behavioristic models of teachingfocus only on correct performance and view

errors as something to be extinguished. Incontrast, constructivists view errors as revela-tions about student understanding and opportu-nities for cognitive growtiL So it is with effec-tive strategies instruction. Errors during strate-gies learning permit diagnosis of difficulties asstudents struggle to understand and applystrategies; the errors a student commits canreveal the student's understanding of the strate-gies being taught. The teacher can then craftinstruction to clarify the desired strategicprocessing.

Errors during strategies learning can alsoshow the student the value of strategies learn-ing. Good strategies instruction includes reflec-tion on how performance is improving as afunction of learning strategies; students areoften asked to explain why their strategies-mediated performances are getting better. (SeeSchank and Leake 119891 for a discussion ofthe power of creating such explanations inpromoting the construction of powerful think-ing competencies.)

What Is Learned From Strategies InstructionDepends in Part on What the Student AlreadyKnows

Constructivists believe that developmentallevel, interest, and prior knowledge are deter-minants of what students learn during anyinstructional interaction. An extreme exampleis the traditional Piagetian (see Flavell, 1963)notion that developmental stages determinewhen a concept can be acquired. A secondexample is schema theory (e.g., Anderson &Pearson, 1984), with its assumption that mate-rial is easier to learn if It is consistent withknowledge already possessed by the learner.For example, it is easier for a four-year-old to

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understand what to do at Pizza Hut if the childhas previous knowledge of the routines in other

sit-down restaurants.

Strategies instructors are also aware ofstudent characteristics; this awareness is trans-

lated into consistent monitoring of whetherstudents are learning from instruction. Wheninstruction is not successful, strategies instruc-tors try to discern how instruction might berestructured and represented so that learnerneeds are accommodated.

Summary

Pressley, Harris, and Marks (1992) sum-marized the nature of constructivist instruction,

based on a review of programs that are identi-

fied by many as constructivist instruction (e.g. ,

Pontecorvo & Zucchennaglio's [1990] literacylearning curriculum; instruction at Kame-hameha School [Tharpe & Gallimore, 1988];Pettito's [e.g., 1985] mathematics instruction).

Constructivist instruction has the followingcharacteristics:

Modeling and giving explanations are

aimed at promoting greater competence in

students, not by the simple emulating ofskills but by students' creative adaptationand personalization of the skills beingtaught.

Instruction is more explicit on some occa-sions than on others. The explicitness ofprompting is determined in part by whetheror not students react successfully to instruc-

tion (i.e., less prompting, instruction, andreinstruction when things are going well).

The student constructs knowledge in inter-action with a more competent adult. Muchof this knowledge construction occurs asthe student practices applying the skillsmodeled and explained, assisted by an adult

who intervenes when the student needsassistance but not otherwise.

Dialogues between teachers and studentsare not scripted. Adult reactions to studentsare somewhat opportunistic, providingfeedback and instruction matched to needas students attempt to write, read, speak, orsolve problems.

Sometimes these interactions go smoothly;other times there are difficulties. The na-ture of the difficulties can be used to adjustsubsequent instruction.

There is an emphasis on learning throughunderstanding.

Instruction occurs in groups in which stu-dents provide feedback to their peers.

The adult continuously assesses the child'scompetence, assuming that current compe-tence determines what the child will be able

to learn.

Constructivist teachers encourage theirstudents to apply what they are learning tonew tasks.

There are individual differences in rates ofprogress.

All of these characteristics of constructivistinstruction are also characteristics of effective


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thinking strategies instruction. The differencebetween the instruction given by those whoprefer the label "constructivist educator" andthose who embrace the term "strategies instruc-tor" is in the explicitness f the statement,modeling, and explanation of strategies. Goodcognitive strategies instruction is probablymore explicit in detailing for students theprocedures and processes they are being taughtthan is instruction identified as constructivist.The more the instruction is endogenouslyconstructivist, the less it resembles good strate-gies instruction. Both exogenous and dialecticalconstructivist positions share many characteris-tics with good strategies instruction. No goodstrategies instructor can ever completely speci-fy a strategy or strategies for students. Studentsare expected to fill in gaps in informationprovided about strategies, adapt the strategiesthey are learning, and use the strategies on newtasks. What the good strategies instructor doesis to provide beginning information aboutstrategies. Good strategies instruction is aspecific instance of providing students with"the 'material' upon which constructive mentalprocesses will work" (Resnick, 1987, p. 47).

FUTURE RESEARCH ONTRANSACTIONAL STRATEGIES

INSTRUCTION

My colleagues and I continue to work ontransactional strategies instruction. Threedirections for future research, all informed byour ongoing qualitative research, will be dis-cussed in this section.

Better Instruction at the Primary Level

As part of Pressley, Schuder, SAIL Facultyand Administration, Bergman, and EI-Dinary(1992), I held focus-group discussions with

SAIL teachers to identify benefits and prob-lems with the program. Then, I watched 'toursof such strategies instruction, follow...I byinformal interviews with teachers about thestrengths of the program and the potentialweaknesses. Finally, I prepared a formalquestionnaire, which was administered to 14teachers in the SAIL program who first hadanswered in written form. We had a face-to-face interview to permit the teachers to expandon their answers and offer insights that mightnot have come through in their written respons-es.

The SAIL teachers perceived many morestrengths than weaknesses with the program.They believed that many aspects of literacyhave been improved by SAIL, including oralreading, comprehension, student understandingthat comprehension is under student control,writing, higher-order thinking, use of back-ground knowledge to interpret texts, attentionto meaning of texts, intertextual comparisonsby students, involvement in reading groups,and student excitement about reading. Theteachers also perceived that academic self-concepts and self-esteem had improved sinceSAIL began and that social interactions duringreading were better. The teachers also felt thatSAIL was compatible with whole language,which is critical, since the whole-languageapproach is the umbrella curriculum philoso-phy for Montgomery County schools.

Even so, there were some concerns aboutthe comprehension strategies instruction thatdefines the SAIL program, especially at theprimary level. Teachers of nonreaders felt thatthe intervention made no provision for teachingof decoding and that hard thinking must bedone to determine how SAIL could be meshedwith decoding instruction. Primary teachersalso felt that it was difficult to identify grade-Istories that were complicated enough to justify


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the SAIL strategies. These insights from theenthnographic interview study provided theimpetus for change of the program during1991/92.

Pamela Beard EI-Dinary and I set out tostudy what might happen if SAIL primaryteachers tried to integrate SAIL and conven-tional decoding instruction, and if they wereassured that it was all right to use the methodmore flexibly than had been suggested inprevious years. One tangible form of supportwas provision of a decoding-oriented basalprogram to the teachers (Open Court Readingand Writing), which teachers were free to useas part of their reading instruction. (Primaryteachers in the 1990/91 SAIL program hadreviewed this program and believed it could bemeshed with SAIL.) Four of the five first-grade teachers who were studied in 1991/92used Open Court materials; the fifth teacheradapted materials from various reading seriesin order to provide phonics instruction to herstudents. Weaker readers received more pho-nics instruction during 1991/92 SAIL than theyhad in previous years of the program.

As in previous years, the grade-1 SAILlerions were designed to familiarize studentswith the strategic processes encouraged inSAIL. Students received repeated explanationsof the SAIL strategies and many lessons in-volving a heavy emphasis on one or two ofSAIL' s cognitive processes. In previous years,SAIL was used almost exclusively in the con-text of reading. In 1991/92, Pamela and I notedits predominant use as part of listening compre-hension. First-grade students can listen to andcomprehend much more complicated storiesthan they can read, so using SAIL as part oflistening comprehension in first grade seemssensible and circumvents the difficulty ofidentifying grade- I stories appropriate forSAIL processes.

Two primary-grades SAIL teachers, Mary-rose Pioli (grade-1) and Kathy Green (grade-2)taught a class Including many second-grade stu-dents with decoding difficulties. They provideinsight into the importance of meshing decod-ing and SAIL comprehension instruction:

MRP: Decoding skills help the grade-1 stu-dents become independent readers inthe sense they can at least read the textwithout stumbling over individualwords. By combining high-qualitydecoding instruction with SAIL com-prehension instruction, the grade-1students experience a lot of success inreading quickly. What is especiallyimportant is that the two approachesused together permit students to readmore on their own with confidence.

KG: Decoding instruction goes a littleslowly at first and more time with realliterature might be ideal. But when thegoal is to independently decode sto-ries, explicit decoding instructioncannot be beat. I used a motivatingapproach to decoding which was not atall aversive for the students. Oncethey were decoding well, it was natu-ral and easy to get started with theSAIL comprehension strategies.

These same teachers also saw the advantageof introducing SAIL strategies gradually, withlistening comprehension playing an importantrole in primary-grades strategies instruction:

MRP: When I read aloud and modeled theuse of strategies, my grade-1 studentscould begin to identify the strategies Iwas using as I read. That is a goodintroduction to strategies.


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KG: My oral reading of stories gets thestudents to listen to each other 1 ask

them to help me, with suggestions forstrategic processing of the story.Students help come up with predic-tions, suggest vivid images, and assistin construction of story summaries.From hearing each others' predictions,images, and summaries, the studentscome to realize that there is not oneright prediction or visualization orsummarization but many, dependingon their background knowledge. Thestudents acquire a good understandingof these strategic processes beforehaving to apply them to actual read-ing.

In summary, progress has been made inunderstanding how to improve one transaction-al strategies program, SAIL, at the primarylevel. The teachers themselves received verylittle outside help in revising this cognitivestrategies curriculum. The progress alreadymade in understanding how to conduct compre-hension strategies instruction at the primarylevel increases my optimism that systematiccomprehension instruction can be devised foruse at the primary level. More research anddevelopment is required for three reasons: (a)There is little guidance in the basic researchliterature with respect to teaching comprehen-sion strategies to students in the first twogrades. (b) The whole-language philosophy thatnow predominates in early reading instructionemphasizes comprehension. (c) My colleaguesand I have observed that primary children doseem able to predict, seek clarifications, sum-marize, and visualize as they listen to stories in

groups, and they seem to like doing it. Instruc-tion rich is such comprehension processes islikely to be much more engaging for studentsthan the skills-oriented instruction that haspredominated primary-grade instruction in thepast. The development of reading instructionthat promotes student engagement in literacy isand should be a high priority (Guthrie, Alver-mann, et al., 1992).

Teacher Development

In the first interview study of transactionalstrategies instruction conducted at BenchmarkSchool (Pressley, Gaskins, Cunicelli, et al.,1991), the teachers told us tales about howdifficult strategies teaching had been duringtheir first year. Similar sentiments were con-veyed by SAIL teachers when they were ques-tioned about their experiences in learning howto be strategies teachers (Pressley, Schuder, etal., 1992). No transactional strategies instruc-tion teacher has ever told me that the first yearwas easy.

Pamela LI-Dinary and I (EI-Dinary et al.,1992) have studied first-year SAIL teachers forthe last two years, watching and talking withthem as they have attempted to teach theirstudents the SAIL processes. The teachers wereintroduced to SAIL through professional devel-opment in-service meetings supplemented byobservations of teaching. The teachers receivedlimited feedback as they taught reading groupsaccording to the SAIL model.

Three teachers were studied in 1990/91 andfour in 1991/92. In the first year, one of thethree teachers made a clear commitment toSAIL and progressed well; in the second year,two of the teachers did the same. That is, less


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than half of the teachers were committed toSAIL after a year and were teaching in a fash-ion generally consistent with the model. Theother teachers either did not "buy into SAIL"or if they did, they could not implement SAILeffectively on a regular basis in their curricu-lum. None of the teachers felt totally comfort-able with SAIL after their first year; all feltthere was quite a bit yet to learn.

All of the reports I have heard about learn-ing to be a strategies instruction teacher and thestruggles my students and I have witnessedconvince me that research must to be done onhow best to prepare teachers to teach strate-gies. There is so much to learn and not nearlyenough information conveyed in faculty devel-opment workshops (although, see Anderson &Roit, in press, for some data on effectiveworkshops they have been studying). Enor-mous effort is required for teachers to becomegood at modeling and explaining strategies asthey cope with many other demands in theircurricula.

I am optimistic that many strategies instruc-tion teachers can be trained, for there arealready successful efforts to do so. For exam-pie, Deshler, Schumaker, and their colleaguesat .' nsas (e.g., Deshler & Schumaker, 1988)have trained thousands of teachers in the imple-mentation of the Kansas strategies instructioncurriculum. Gerald Duffy has educated anumber of teachers at Michigan State to bestrategy instructors. Irene Gaskins has devel-oped an entire faculty at Benchmark School. Ineach of these cases, however, teacher trainingwas long-term and involved extensive practiceand feedback. Indeed, a likely hypothesis isthat, like many complex skills, transactionalstrategies instruction teachers will continue to

improve their teaching of strategies for manyyears following introduction to the approach(see Brown & Coy-Ogan, 1993). Research onteacher development must be a priority duringthe next few years if effective strategies in-struction is to be widely disserr.nated.

Strategies Across the Curricula and SchoolDay

Any single transactional strategies instructionalintervention that is now being invented willoperate as part of an overall curriculum. Forexample, reading strategies instruction at

Benchmark School and in Montgomery CountyMaryland both occur in conjunction withwriting strategies instruction and process-ori-ented mathematics instruction. The reading andlanguage arts curricula also reflect whole-lan-guage influences. There is no single cognitiveprocess instruction predominating here; rather,a repertoire of strategies, many of which canbe applied in different ways throughout theschool day. It is exciting when such integrationoccurs, as when expository text analysis strate-gies are turned around by students and used toplan for the writing of essays; this happenedduring my semester case study at Benchmark(Pressley. Gaskins, Wile, et al., 1991). SAILstudents sometimes transfer visualizationstrate-gies from reading to mathematics. I spent manymornings in Montgomery County and Bench-mark classrooms when strategies were appliedthroughout the morning.

Sadly. however, integration is rare. Manyteachers teach strategies like separate skills.Many who offer in-service strategies instruc-tion as well as strategies instructions in basalmanuals assume that if the separate strategies

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26 Pressley. et al.

are practiced and mastered, somehow thestudents will get it all together. I have no suchfaith. I believe that strategic cognitive activityas a typical way of writing, reading, or prob-lem solving will be most likely to develop forthe largest number of children if school envi-ronments foster intelligent activity throughoutthe day. The refined understandings that haveemerged about how to teach writing, reading,and problem solving strategically (see Pressley& Associates, 1990) must be meshed in realschools settings.

Educators, rather than researchers, musttake the lead in creating whole schools thatfoster strategic competence. Researchers' tal-ents are better matched to documenting whatoccurs in such environments, and to developingsummaries of such instruction that can becomprehended by other educators and research-ers. That is what my colleagues and I did withrespect to the transactional strategies instruc-tion summarized here.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUDINGREMARKS

Experimental investigations of reading compre-hension strategies provided a great deal ofvaluable information. Particularly relevanthere, the experimental and basic researchliteratures informed the Benchmark and Mont-gomery County SAIL curriculum developersabout cognitive strategies that might be taughtto elementary students. These educators com-bined what they learned from the research-based literature with their well-grounded un-derstandings of classrooms to design strategies-based interventions. In trying to implementthese interventions, teachers discovered what

worked and what did not work and how toteach thinking strategies so that students would"get it."

The good strategies instruction teachers Imet several years ago seem better today. I

expect there are many refinements to come aseducators gain greater experience with strate-gies instruction and intermix it with ever-changing curricular demands. For example.there is now tremendous impetus to expand theSAIL program into all content areas because ofthe emphasis on strategies and strategic think-ing in the new state assessment.

My colleagues and I have documented howgood strategies instruction is carried out in twosettings. The basis of the instruction we ob-served is modeling and the direct explanationof cognitive strategies, followed by teacherguidance and assistance as students attempt toapply the thinking strategies to real academictasks. Effective strategies instruction is a

multiple-year enterprise (see Pressley, Facultyand Administration of Summit Hall School, etal., 1994), and there are many "wrinkles" to it,one of the most significant of which is thatsuch instruction encourages studentr. to beinterpreters of text.

One criticism of instructional research isthat even if the work is pragmatically impor-tant, it is theoretically vacuous. I disagree withsuch analyses. In the case of transactionalstrategies instruction, there are multiple link-ages to important theoretical perspectives. Forexample, transactional strategies discussionsare simultaneously examples of applied schematheory and applied reader response theory:Meaning is jointly determined by what is in thetext and what is in the minds of readers. Asour understanding of comprehension improves,


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new models of classroom communicationsshould develop: How communications be-tween diverse students and miscommunicationsbetween reading group participants shape thedevelopment of meaning are only two of theissues that should be addressed as the develop-ment of meaning in reading groups is studied.The implications of limited short-term memorycapacity for classroom functioning is anotherexample of an important theoretical directionthat should be pursued as work on cognitiveprocess instruction in classrooms continues.Transactional strategies instruction settings alsoprovide a laboratory for studying the dynamicsof constructivist instruction, since transactionalstrategies instruction is both exogenously anddialectically constructivist.

Much work on implementation in theclassroom remains to be done. How transac-tional strategies instruction can be useful acrossall grade levels remains to be spelled out. Thatis, as my colleagues and I make progress intailoring strategies instruction for the primarygrades, we are haunted by an awareness of theneed for much more comprehension instructionat the secondary lez1 and perhaps beyond that(see Pressley, EI-Dinary, & Brown, 1992). Aswe congratulate ourselves for coming to termswith what happens in reading groups, we knowthat our understanding of comprehensioninstruction during the remainder of the schoolday is much less complete. Even though muchhas been learned about how cognitive strategiescan be taught, little is understood about how todevelop teachers who are effective strategyinstructors.

My own progress in the last four years inunderstanding effective strategies instructionwas possible because I changed methodological

tactics. Qualitative methods seemed bettersuited to the task of developing an understand-ing of large-scale instruction than the experi-mental methods I had relied on exclusively inthe past. As I write this, Rachel Brown and Iare completing data collection on a quasi-ex-perimental evaluation of the efficacy of SAILinstruction; preliminary results suggest that ayear of SAIL affects both standardized andnontraditional measures of comprehension.Tommie DePinto and I are planning anotherquasi-experimental study of the effectiveness ofan alternative version of transactional strate-gies instruction, one that used Palincsar andBrown's (1984) reciprocal teaching as its

starting point (Marks, et al., in press). I nevergave up on experimentation (quasi-experimen-tation when random assignment is not possi-ble). That is reflected in the work in progressand in the planning stages. Nonetheless, manyof the dependent variables in these new quanti-tative studies are much more qualitative thanexperiments I conducted five or more yearsago. In addition, I continue to believe thatindividual strategies often can (and should) benurtured in the laboratory before they aretransported to a complex world, as is exempli-iied by my ongoing research on elaborativeinterrogation (Pressley, Wood, et al., 1992). Itis exciting to have one research foot in thelaboratory and the other in the real world ofschooling; it is also much more fully informa-tive about cognitive strategies instruction thanif both feet were planted in only one of the twoworlds.

To return to the James' quote that openedthis perspective, there is no doubt that I will belooking to effective teachers to inform meabout the nature of high quality instruction.


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With luck, I will continue to be able to saysome things to them in return that they can takeand use to improve their practice some more.Participating in never-ending cycles of re-searcher and teacher contact is an exciting andattractive career prospect for me. I suspect thiscareer will benefit schoolchildren more certain-ly than if I had continued as an aloof psycholo-gist who prescribed instruction on the basis ofonly carefully controlled experiments, observa-tions, and theories far removed from the class-room world of teachers. A quote that seemsappropriate for closing this chapter, which isdirected principally at graduate students, wasthe title of Robert Frost's compilation foryoung readers: You Come Too (Frost. 1959).

Author's Note. The program of research sutnma-rized herein was supported in part by the NationalReading Research Center of the University ofMaryland; and at various times in pan by grantsfrom the General Research Board and the GraduateSchool of the University of Maryland, and by agrant from the McDonnell Foundation to Bench-mark School. A version of this perspective appearedin a chapter in a volume edited by John Mangieriand Cathy Collins Block, Creating Powerful Think-ing in Teachers and Students: Diverse Perspectives,that will be published in 1994 by Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich. Correspondence concerning this per-spective can be addressed to the first author atDepartment of Educational Psychology, Universityat Albany, State University of New York, Albany,NY 12222.

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