Week 2: Strategies for Effective Learning - Reading, Writing, and Math

The Interactive View of Reading and Writing

One of the strategies we learned about this week was the Interactive View of Reading and Writing. The goals of this strategy to learn and perform well in reading and writing are to "use reading and writing to accomplish personal, recreational, academic, and civic purposes". To me, this means that students should use reading and writing to function effectively in the real world, rather than just drilling and practicing the mechanics in the classroom. Vygotsky, through his social learning theory, believes that the way that teachers and anyone in society uses reading and writing reflect the views in the society in which the people live. Important functions in reading and writing will be taught and parallel what society believes is important. When instructing and assessing students who struggle, teachers must take into consideration the learner and the context. Keep in mind that skilled performance is both "variable and dynamic". The elements of skilled reading and writing performance include:
- Comprehension: using information to make meaning, understand, and learn and remember
- Composition: writing to convey ideas, in stages (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing)
- Vocabulary Development: essential for comprehension, knowing the meanings of words and how to infer meanings of new words
- Word Identification and Spelling: essential for reading and the process of constructing meaning, smooth flow of reading
- Rate and Fluency: grouping words into meaningful phrase units to maintain the process of comprehension, reading becomes more like speaking
- Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics: arrangement of words into meaningful units by a system of rules (grammar), choosing words to fit the context of writing (usage), punctuation, capitalization, in writing, mechanics clarify meaning, in oral language, mechanics express meaning (mechanics)

Contextual factors that influence performance include the instructional settings, practices, and resources available for the student to learn, in addition to the assessment practices used to monitor the performance of the student.

Learner factors that influence performance include the student's prior knowledge, knowledge about reading and writing, and their attitudes and motivations about their feelings of reading and writing.

When contextual factors and learner factors are favorable, then skilled reading and writing performance occurs. The image above shows the combination of both the learner and contextual factors creating skilled reading-writing performance.

Evidence-Based Strategies for Teaching Mathematics

Another strategy we learned pertained to teaching mathematics and different strategies to use to help students become independent learners. These strategies, when used in math instruction, help students to remember what they learn and how skills build on one another, rather than memorizing information for only one context. The six strategies mentioned can help students contextualize mathematics. The strategies include:

- Schema-Based Instruction: helps to understand and break down the structure of problems, uses backward chaining (converting to an equation) to solve the problem, determines the goal of the problem (or what the solution should be), and locating missing information to solve using diagrams

-  Cognitive Strategies: steps developed to generalize solving word problems, using checklists rather than diagramming, checklists help to stay on task academically and behaviorally; Say Ask Check involve reading the word problem, asking what information is needed, and solving and checking the solution; STAR stands for search, answer, translate, and review, and is used to solve word problems as well

-  Scaffolding: building new instruction onto previously learned skills, integrated approach makes connections between the mathematical disciplines to find applications among them, taught explicitly at first, then practice opportunities are presented, with the goal of independent problem-solving, using immediate feedback to improve

- Peer-Mediated Instruction: defined as "pairs of students working collaboratively on structured, individualized activities", inquiry-based with teacher planning to work smoothly, engages students in communicating about math, paired by ability level across the median, students take turns being the tutor and tutee, researchers find that student achievement improves using this method over teacher-led instruction   

- Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) Sequence: uses concrete manipulatives, representational pictures, and abstract symbols, that can be used at all levels of math instruction, students begin by physically using manipulatives, then move to semi-concrete representations (tally marks and pictures), then abstract representations (symbols, numbers, and equations) to solve problems, guides students to mastery of skills

- Mnemonics: words, sentences, or pictures to improve/strengthen memory, can be teacher- or student-created, keyword mnemonic (choosing sounds to represent the words to be remembered and creating a visual), pegword mnemonic (one word or phrase that starts the same letter in an acronym, as in PEMDAS), and letter, these help more with basic math facts and memorization in general