ABSTRACT
Paradigmatic cases of teaching imply that learners are led from a state of relative incompetence to competence. Automatic processing is a fast, parallel, fairly effortless process that is not limited by short-term memory capacity, is not under direct subject control, and performs well-developed skilled behaviors. In contrast, controlled processing is often slow, generally serial, effortful, capacity limited, subject regulated, and is used to deal with novel or inconsistent information. Research on strategies has shown that strategy use is increased when learners are provided with information about the conditions under which a strategy produces these effects and about how it produces them, in comparison to information about the fact that it produces these effects. Nevertheless, there is good reason to expect that the described basic mechanisms of cognition and motivation are applicable to a broad range of strategies, although certainly more research is needed on more complex strategies.
