The author: Jan Bulgren is a research scientist at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. This article originally appeared in the December 1998 issue of Strategram, a newsletter for SIM teachers.
Return to Article ArchiveDiane is a resource room teacher who has taught strategies in the Learning Strategies Curriculum for many years. She welcomes new strategies and believes that her students benefit from them. The Storage Strand Strategies--The Paired Associates Strategy, The FIRST-Letter Mnemonic Strategy, and LINCS: A Starter Strategy for Vocabulary Learning--are particularly useful to her students. She believes that student success is often enhanced by use of the strategies in both resource room classes and inclusive general education courses, especially as students add new strategies to their repertoire and learn to generalize the use of the strategies to a variety of settings.
However, even with Diane's enthusiasm for new strategies, challenges seem to arise with the addition of each new strategy and each new student in her class. Among these challenges are that students just beginning to learn their first storage strand strategy may need extra practice, while those who have learned more than one strategy often need practice discriminating the best strategy to use for specific recall tasks.
For example, when Diane met with her students this fall, she found great diversity among her students and different levels of previous exposure to learning strategies. One challenge in her classroom was presented by Maria, who was just beginning to learn the strategies. Maria was a willing learner but needed more controlled practice to master the Storage Strand Strategies than was provided for in the manuals. However, this meant additional work to find appropriate texts and to identify supplemental materials for Maria to use; the additional time often could not be found in Diane's already overloaded schedule. Therefore, a major challenge for Maria was to have access to extra practice to assure mastery of the strategy she was learning.
A second challenge in Diane's classes was that a number of students had already learned several of the strategies and were ready to use them individually but had difficulty discriminating the best one to use for different recall demands. For example, Jeremy had already learned the Paired Associates Strategy and the FIRST-Letter Mnemonic Strategy. This fall, he was eager to learn the Vocabulary Strategy and was making good progress. However, Diane noticed that Jeremy often applied the strategy they had most recently worked on even though another storage strand strategy might have been more effective with far less effort. For example, she noticed that he was trying to apply a FIRST-Letter Mnemonic Strategy to an item that could have been recalled quickly using a mental picture. Therefore, a major challenge for Jeremy was discrimination among strategies.
The Practicing the Storage Strand manual was designed to respond to challenges such as these that teachers like Diane shared with us. The manual contains supplemental materials for three Storage Strand Strategies, which are part of the Learning Strategies Curriculum: The Paired Associates Strategy (Bulgren, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1996), The FIRST-Letter Mnemonic Strategy (Nagel, Schumaker, & Deshler, 1986), and LINCS: A Starter Strategy for Vocabulary Learning (Ellis, 1992). The materials have been designed so teachers can provide students with extra practice activities for each of the strategies as well as for using the three strategies in combination and for discriminating when each of the strategies is most appropriate for different recall tasks.
We have included in the manual several types of practice activities, which can be grouped into two categories.
First, there are the Single Strategy Activities. These are designed for students like Maria who need extra practice to master each of the Storage Strand Strategies. To accomplish this, the manual contains six passages designed for students to use as they practice each of the three strategies. Each passage contains information that can be learned using one of the storage strand strategies and comprises one to three paragraphs.
Each passage related to the Vocabulary Strategy contains two definitions. A definition comprises a vocabulary word and its meaning. For example, in one passage, students are challenged to identify and recall the definitions of "classify" and "endotherm." These words are cued by quotation marks and boldface type to more closely approximate cues that might occur in regular texts.
Passages to provide students with practice in the FIRST-Letter Mnemonic Strategy include two lists, one with five items, and one with three items. For example, in one passage, students are challenged to identify and recall five groups of North American birds and three characteristics of birds.
The short passages in the FIRST-Letter Mnemonic and LINCS strategies have been designed to look like material that students might encounter in science or health classes.
Each of the passages designed to provide students with practice in the Paired Associates Strategy contains four pairs or trios. That is, the passages contain two or three related pieces of information. These passages can be used during the Advanced Practice Stage of instruction when a student is learning Paired Associates.
The second set of activities comprise the Integrated Strategy Activities. These are to be used after students have learned all three storage strategies. They are designed to help students learn how to use the three strategies in combination and how to discriminate which strategy is most appropriate for any set of information.
We have provided three different types of integrated activities for practicing all three strategies. For example, the integrated sentence lists contain 12 sentences. Each sentence contains information to be learned through the use of one of the strategies.
Teachers also can select sentences specific to Paired Associates, FIRST, or LINCS if even more individual strategy practice is required than is provided in the Single Strategy Activities.
The manual also contains short integrated passages that consist of two or three paragraphs. Each of these passages contains one definition, one list, and four pairs or trios. In one lesson about labor unions, for example, practice is provided to learn a list associated with demands of the labor unions, a definition of the word "radical," and four opportunities to practice the skills associated with Paired Associates: mental pictures, familiar association, boxing, and coding dates.
Finally, the Integrated Strategy Activities contain long integrated passages. These consist of five or six paragraphs, and each contains two definitions, two lists, and eight pairs or trios. The materials in the long passages have been designed to be the most challenging of the practice activities because the information is embedded in a longer passage similar to one that might be found in a textbook.
The long integrated passages contain information similar to that found in the integrated sentence lists. That is, each contains two definitions, two lists of information, and eight pairs or trios. Each is designed to approximate a short lesson such as might be found in a history class. This provides further practice to get students ready to generalize the use of the Storage Strand Strategies to content instruction.
In addition to the sets of practice activities described above, the manual also contains quizzes, answer keys for study cards, and answer keys for quizzes as described below:
The Practicing the Storage Strand manual has been developed in response to needs expressed by teachers; the goal is to have supplemental materials closely matched to the Storage Strand Strategies. Teachers such as Diane now have another resource to which they can turn as they respond to the daily challenges of student diversity and content demands in their ever more complex classrooms.
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