Description:

Co-Principal Investigator: Mitchell Rabinowitz

Purpose: Classroom interactions among students and teachers include many activities intended to help students clarify, organize, and remember material. In contrast to classroom learning, learning during homework, for example, may be impoverished. Such learning is generally unsupervised, self-paced, and self-monitored. These characteristics may be disadvantages if the learning activities fail to evoke the effective cognitive events that occur in the supervised learning environment of the classroom. In this project, the research team examines whether it is possible to enrich the learning value of mathematics homework by selectively incorporating cognitive events that occur frequently in supervised group learning. The project's goal is to determine which of these events actually facilitates unsupervised individual learning, and which do not, so that ineffective study activities can be replaced with homework activities that result in significantly better comprehension and long-term retention.

Project Activities: The research team is applying a method previously used with homework in English literature to homework in mathematics. This method, called guided cognition, structures study tasks to guide the learner to engage in specific, observable cognitive events. These events are hypothesized to elicit underlying cognitive processes that have been shown to facilitate learning in laboratory-based experiments. In this project, the research team is adapting the intervention for use with middle school mathematics, and conducting 12 experiments that focus on the following research questions:

• What specific skills and strategies in mathematics can be learned more effectively as a result of guided cognition?
• How does guided cognition promote learning?
• How general is the guided cognition advantage in mathematics learning? Can it help in significantly different topics (e.g., algebra, geometry), ability levels, and age groups?
• What practical homework design issues must be understood to make the most of the guided cognition techniques?

Products: Products from this project include homework tasks in mathematics that may result in significantly better comprehension and long-term retention in comparison to traditional mathematics homework, as well as published reports on the potential impact of guided cognition on mathematics learning among middle school students.

Structured Abstract

Purpose: In this project, the research team is examining whether unsupervised learning of mathematics (e.g., homework) can be enriched by designing tasks to evoke cognitive events and their corresponding cognitive processes that occur in classroom-based learning, in order to guide cognition more effectively.

Setting: The study is being conducted in three public middle schools—one in New York and two in New Jersey.

Population: The sixth- to eighth-grade populations being sampled are ethnically diverse and represent a range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Intervention: Guided cognition is a method designed to guide the learner to engage in specific, observable cognitive events. These events are intended to elicit underlying cognitive processes that result in learning. For example, one such cognitive event is visualizing and illustrating with a diagram; a corresponding cognitive process is dual coding with verbal and visual elements. In this project, the research team seeks to identify cognitive events (e.g., visualizing and illustrating, relating to prior experience, considering divergent methods, role playing) and apply them to unsupervised individual learning settings in mathematics.

Research Designs and Methods: In this project, the research team is developing the guided cognition content that will be used with middle school mathematics students. A series of 12 experiments that use the same basic design will evaluate different aspects of the intervention. In this design, students are first taught content, followed by traditional unsupervised individual study (e.g. homework) on the content; then, additional content is taught, followed by either guided cognition homework (experimental condition) or traditional homework (control condition). Unsupervised individual study occurs in class, rather than at home, to control for variables that would be free to vary if the work were to be done at home. After a delay, students receive a surprise quiz on both sets of content. Sampling is random within classrooms using matched pairs. Each condition will include 20 or more students.

Control Condition: All students receive equal instruction with the experiments fully integrated into the standard middle school mathematics curriculum. The control condition receives traditional homework following each standard instructional set.

Key Measures: The research team is using performance on quizzes to compare learning from traditional and guided cognition unsupervised study.

Data Analytic Strategy: Planned comparisons within each experiment are being evaluated with standard analysis of variance techniques and t-tests.

Related IES Projects: Guided Cognition for Unsupervised Learning (R305H050062)

Products and Publications

Book chapter

Whitten, W. (2011). Learning From and for Tests. In A.S. Benjamin (Ed.), Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork (pp. 217–234). New York: Psychology Press.

Whitten II, W. B., Rabinowitz, M., & Whitten, S.E. (2019). Guided Cognition for Learning: Unsupervised Learning and the Design of Effective Homework (1st ed.). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817538-5.00003-1.