Second, there is little use in teaching a strategy that students cannot use indepen-dently. For a strategy to be truly useful, students should be able to effectively use and maintain it without outside support or guidance. This level of self-regulation is con-cerned with maintaining effort and appropriate strategy use. It includes functions such as staying on task, blocking out or eliminating negative cognitions (“I can’t do this”), and consistently and correctly using a strategy.
FINAL THOUGHTS
As you can see by now, effective strategy instruction deals with much more than just academic content. For strategy instruction to be effective for students with LD, it’s nec-essary to attend to cognitive processes, motivational aspects, and information process-ing. In sum, strategy instruction deals with both cognition and emotional/motivational aspects of learning. It also requires teaching that is sensitive to problems students with LD have with information processing. Because effective strategy instruction—
especially for students with LD—requires attention to so many aspects of learning, it helps to have a teaching model that will focus attention on these aspects of strategy in-struction as well as teaching the actual strategy. And, that’s just what the SRSD model was designed to do. It serves as a “template” for teachers to help them attend to all the steps in the strategy instruction process. In the next chapter we discuss the SRSD model in detail.
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Borkowski, J. G., Estrada, M. T., Milstead, M., & Hale, C. A. (1989). General problem solving skills: Relations between metacognition and strategic processing. Learning Disability Quar-terly, 12, 57–70.
Borkowski, J. G., Weyhing, R. S., & Carr, M. (1988). Effects of attributional retraining on strategy-based reading comprehension in learning-disabled students. Journal of Educational Psychol-ogy, 80, 46–53.
Butler, D. L., & Winne, P. H. (1995). Feedback and self-regulated learning: A theoretical synthesis.
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Diener, C. I., & Dweck, C. S. (1978). An analysis of learned helplessness: Continuous changes in performance, strategy, and achievement cognitions following failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 451–462.
Dweck, C. S. (1975). The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned help-lessness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 674–685.
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Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 1–23). Mahwah, NJ:
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The Self-Regulated Strategy Development Model
I
n the previous chapters, we presented a rationale for strategy instruction and pro-vided some background knowledge about important characteristics of students with LD that affect strategy instruction. In this chapter we introduce a model for the strategy instruction process. The implementation model is based on Harris and Graham’s (1996) Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. We chose this model for four rea-sons. First, it is based on years of research and, more importantly, has a well-demonstrated 20-year history of effectiveness (Graham & Harris, 2003). Second, the SRSD model is a comprehensive approach to the strategy instruction process that takes into consideration critical cognitive, motivational, and academic characteristics of stu-dents with LD. Stustu-dents with LD have problems that go beyond academics, and these problems can adversely affect academic performance. The SRSD model stresses the need to provide students with essential metacognitive knowledge of the strategies, attends to the problem of maladaptive attributions that are common among students with LD, and stresses instruction that helps students process information more effec-tively. Third, the SRSD model is intended to be used in conjunction with different self-regulation strategies. This combination is particularly powerful for students with LD.Finally, the SRSD model is practical for the real-world classroom. Teachers won’t use models that are unwieldy or impractical. The SRSD model was designed with the needs of students and teachers in mind and has been used effectively by classroom teachers.
We cannot overemphasize how important it is to use an appropriate and effec-tive model for strategy instruction. Following the SRSD model has two major advan-tages:
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1. A good model gives you an instructional road map to follow. You know how to teach the strategy in an effective, systematic, step-by-step fashion. This ensures that critical steps in the strategy instruction process are not omitted or short-changed.
2. Second, strategy instruction involves a commitment of time and effort on the part of the teacher. To maximize the chances of a positive outcome (i.e., increased academic performance for students), it is crucial to use approaches that have been well validated.
You may be wondering why we have focused so much on the strategy instruction process and barely mentioned actual strategies. The reason for that is simple. Strategies are the easiest part of the process. In this book we introduce you to many powerful strategies that are effective for students with LD. However it is crucial to understand that strategies are not magical. Simply exposing a student with LD to a strategy will not be effective. Strategies are potentially powerful, but, unless they are taught correctly, strategies are unlikely to result in improved academic performance. Therefore, for strategy instruction to succeed teachers must adopt a systematic approach such as the SRSD model. The goal of SRSD is to make the use of strategies habitual, flexible, and automatic. Getting to this level will require time, practice, and effort. However, if teach-ers master the strategy instruction process most students will markedly improve their academic performance.
In this chapter we first discuss the six stages of instruction in the SRSD model. For each step we provide examples of activities and give examples of helpful tools. Second, we discuss evaluation of the SRSD process. Effective ongoing classroom evaluation is important for student growth. Teachers must be able to accurately gauge how well SRSD is working. Students who are taught a strategy that does not work for them will not be enthusiastic about learning a second strategy. Finally, we conclude with general guidelines for strategy instruction.