Comprehension
Organising
Identifying key ideas (component II)
Relating to other contexts (component ill) Background filling (component V)
Half disappeared. Remainder absorbed into other components
Scales were created for each of the seven components. Items, component loadings, eigenvalues, means, standard deviations and alpha coefficients are reported in Table
7 . 1 . Given that students may not use all of the strategies in one component for any
given task it might be expected that the alpha coefficient values would be low. In the event they were quite high, ranging from 0.80 to 0.88. Each of these
components is now discussed in more detail.
Practice Strategies
The first component to emerge described practice learning behaviours. The ten items in this component reflect strategies students use after some initial attempt at comprehending information. Practice strategies enable the student to manipulate and apply knowledge. Comprehension strategies create declarative knowledge structures (that is, knowing about), but if the student intends to be able to use or apply information, rather than just talk about it, they must first use practice strategies. These practice strategies proceduralise the student's knowledge into a format that enhances accessibility and usability (Chi, Feltovich &Glaser, 1 98 1 ; Glaser, 1 988b ). Once knowledge has been proceduralised it is ready to be used.
The practice strategies described here mean more than the repetitive drill exercises
that might normally be associated with practice. The student is practicing using the
information in some way. This implies at least a minimal level of understanding. One type of practice involves students working through processes or procedures which they must be able to use. An example of this might be a student completing a set exercise of mathematics problems. Practice is also exemplified by strategies which
test the robustness of the new knowledge structures in contexts that are different to
the one in which they were learned. The student is practicing using it in new
situations. Changing a formula into words that describe the relationship contained in the formula is an example of this type of practice.
The importance of examples in this component is interesting. No other learning inventories could be found that included the use of examples as a learning strategy, yet examples are considered essential to learning and teaching (Reigeluth, 1 983). Examples can aid understanding because they are a concrete manifestation of an
. .
abstract concept, procedure or principle, and concrete ideas are easier to learn than abstract. Examples also provide a prototype or blueprint to the students. By modelling their own actions on the example they can be guided through the process. Anthony ( 1 99 1 ) noted that students used examples in this manner in their early attempts at working out new mathematics problems. Working through new examples or finding one's own represents a more advanced use of examples. In these cases the student is demonstrating his or her ability to apply abstract principles to new or unseen (to the student) concrete instances. For example, when a meteorological student looks at the sky and identifies a particular cloud as being a
cumulos nimbus she is showing that she can apply a definition of this cloud type
(abstract concept) to a particular instance.
Item 54 practice on simple tasks first differs from the other items in this component
Results 125
described as organisational had been suggested by students in the instrument studies but without any clear indication of the context in which they would be used. These organisational learning strategies were each associated with different components rather than cohering as an organisational component. The appearance of item 54 in the practice component suggests that students may consciously seek simple tasks first then move to more complex tasks as their skills develop.
Identifying Key Ideas
The second component to emerge comprises 1 0 strategiescollectively called identifying key ideas. This is one of the three components that
appear to serve a comprehension function. The first five items in this component
came from the original comprehension scale (see Table
7.2)
and have the highestloadings. Of the remaining five, three (items 3 5, 4 1 and 40) came from the original
anchoring scale. According to Spring ( 1985) these strategies don't aid
comprehension, but assist in remembering after comprehension has taken place. The
low loadings of these items on the remember information component don't lend
much support to this assertion. It is possible, however, they may act in a support capacity to other component II strategies. In fact, it is difficult to see how they _might usefully be used in the absence of one or more of those strategies.
Eight of these component II strategies describe the different ways m which
information can be reduced or condensed to extract key ideas. Each of these involves the student evaluating the significance of the ideas. In the process of doing this the student should come to understand the content. By stripping away the less important information the student may be more likely to reveal and recognise the relationships between key ideas in the knowledge structure, further enhancing understanding. The organising strategies associated with this component of breaking the task into parts and dealing with each facilitate the use of other comprehension strategies by organising the information into a more suitable format.
Relating to Other contexts
Component Ill, called relating to other contexts, ismade up of
7
learning strategies. As with component II, these strategies perform a(identifYing key ideas) the student would appear to simply recognise the meaning of
the information; when students relate information to other contexts (component Ill)
they not only recognise the intrinsic structure of the information but are able to make connections between this structure and other knowledge structures. They are working to extend their level of understanding to a more complex plane. No particular organising strategy was identified with this class of strategies.
Remembering Information
Component IV which also has7
strategies isremembering information. In the pilot study an attempt was made to distinguish
between rote and mnemonic scales, however reliability was improved when the two
scales were combined to a single remember scale. This component also combines
items that might be called rote and mnemonic.
These remember strategies orgamse or interact with information to increase its
memorability, without changing the students' level of understanding. Such strategies are appropriate for information that needs no understanding (for example, being able to name all the bones in the human body) or for remembering the details of
information that has already been comprehended, such as remembering the order of
steps in a procedure.
Background Filling
Component V is made up of 5 strategies and called background filling. All of these strategies came from the comprehension scale and load convincingly on this component. The items all describe the different methods students can use to collect additional material about the information they are learning. Building background can improve comprehension by developing the students' context for understanding the information they are learning.Projecting/Predicting
Component VI compnses 6 strategies called projecting/predicting strategies. These strategies are used when the student abstracts meaning from the information and uses it to predict or project information beyond its immediate, apparent meaning, for example predicting a trend. The strategy of visualisation may be used in conjunction with other strategies from theResults 127
·group. The organising strategy associated with this group of learning strategies is getting an overall picture before filling in the details. Building a framework before
determining the details is a logical strategy in the context of projecting or predicting
information as it is the framework or structure that is extended, not the details which may serve as distracters.
Grouping
Component VII is comprises 4 strategies collectively called grouping. These strategies organise and label information in a manner that enhances memory rather than understanding. All of the items came from the remember scale and loadheavily orify on component VII.
7.1.2 Study Management Skills
Study management skills were expected to influence the selection of learning strategies by creating important conditions under which learning strategies were used. Before this relationship could be tested it was necessary to determine if the 1 9 variables that made up this section could be represented b y a small number of interpretable components.
Principal component analysis was used to explore the data in four stages. An examination of the correlational matrix showed a number of coefficients were greater than 0.3 and the ratio of sample size to items of 25.2 to 1 was more than
adequate (Tabachnick & Fidel!, 1 989). Bartlett's test of sphericity ( 1 920, 7004; pS
.0000) and the Kaiser-Meyer-Oklin measure of sample adequacy (0. 8 1 5 1 9) established the appropriateness of the correlational matrix for component analysis (Norusis, 1 990).
Determining the number of components appropriate to fit the data while at the same time remaining parsimonious is one of the critical decisions in a component analysis
(Tabanick & Fidell, 1 989). Unfortunately, no single test or procedure provides an
adequate answer to this problem and most sources recommend a combination of
1 .0 were obtained and then subjected to the scree test (Cattell, 1 966; Tabachnick &
Fidell, 1 989). As Gorsuch ( 1 983) points out, when the sample size is large, communality values high, and each component has several variables with high loadings, the results of the scree test are more obvious and reliable. Both of these measures supported the retention of three components. Component loadings were set at 0.40 and considered in descending order. This three component solution accounted for 42. 1% of the variance.
A fairly simple structure was produced with only a small amount of cross loading on some of the components. Component scores were computed for each case.