ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with ways to help children improve their strategies for handling complex knowledge-processing tasks. In a companion chapter (this volume), “Cognitive Coping Strategies and the Problem of ‘Inert Knowledge’,” we described a common strategy by which children reduce a number of potentially difficult tasks to a relatively simple task of “knowledge telling.” Although this strategy has great coping value, enabling children to handle school tasks that would otherwise exceed their performance limitations, the strategy tends to defeat the educational purpose of much school work. There is a broad range of complex knowledge-processing activities in which the immediate consequences of deficient strategies are not definite enough to induce strategy change. In these activities, instruction therefore has an especially important role to play, but also an especially difficult one. Our research to date is still well short of providing instructional prescriptions, but we have identified two promising approaches that are described and explained in this chapter.
