Structured Abstract
Setting
The schools are located in a suburban area located in the mid-Atlantic United States.
Sample
Participants include middle and high school English and science students in low, average, and advanced placement classes. The students are White, Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and African-American. Some students are recent immigrants and are classified as English language learners. Socioeconomic status ranges from lower-middle to upper class.
Intervention
A new method to improve the efficacy of unsupervised learning (e.g., homework) is introduced and evaluated in this project. This method, called "guided cognition", structures study tasks to guide the learner to engage in specific, observable cognitive events (e.g., drawing a diagram, listing multiple approaches to solving a problem, listing specific evidence that support conclusions). These cognitive events are hypothesized to elicit underlying cognitive processes that have been shown to facilitate learning in laboratory-based experiments. Unlike traditional homework, students completing guided cognition homework are provided with questions that are designed to elicit specific cognitive events. The researchers have developed these questions or tasks based on observations of the types of strategies teachers use to elicit thoughtful responses from their students. For example, in the context of classroom instruction, teachers often ask students to relate content to prior experience, to answer a question from more than one point of view, or to illustrate visually a principle described in a text. The research team has identified a set of strategies that teachers use and adapted them to create questions and tasks that can be incorporated into homework. Whereas a traditional homework question might be "Why does Macbeth visit the witches?" a guided cognition question might be "Give two opposite but potentially valid reasons for this visit by Macbeth to the witches." The researchers hypothesize that incorporating guided cognition questions into homework will improve student learning.
Research design and methods
The effect of guided cognition for students with different ability levels is being assessed through a series of 12 experiments in which students are randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions. Experiments are addressing the issues of time-on-task, learning-payoff-per-unit-time, novelty effects, guided cognition study without prior teaching, the relative effectiveness of specific cognitive events for facilitating learning, the extension of the paradigm to different subject matter and to different age groups, and transfer of learning as measured by students' abilities to construct learning strategies that include previously experienced cognitive events.
Control condition
In the control condition, students will study in a controlled but unsupervised individual setting and are provided with traditional verbal study questions.
Key measures
Learning is being assessed by unannounced quizzes on the content studied. Quizzes will not impact student grades. Student opinion data is being gathered via survey.
Data analytic strategy
Simple analysis of variance techniques are being used to examine student performance on the quizzes as a function of participation in the experimental or control condition.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Books
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. doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817538-5.00003-1.
Supplemental information
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Rabinowitz, Mitchell
THE FOLLOWING CONTENT DESCRIBES THE PROJECT AT THE TIME OF FUNDINGQuestions about this project?
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