ABSTRACT
Research on student cognition has demonstrated that students’ prior knowledge as well as their use of a variety of cognitive strategies play a very important role in their actual learning from academic tasks (Alexander & Judy, 1988; Pintrich, Cross, Kozma, & McKeachie, 1986; Weinstein & Mayer, 1986). These cognitive models are very relevant and useful for conceptualizing student learning, but their reliance on a model of academic learning as “cold and isolated” cognition (Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983) presents some difficulties when it is applied to the classroom. In particular, cognition-only models have difficulty explaining why students who seem to have the requisite prior knowledge and relevant cognitive strategies do not activate them for many school tasks, not to mention out-of-school tasks. In addition, intervention studies that teach students to use specific cognitive strategies to improve their memory, comprehension, and learning often show that students fail to transfer their use of these strategies to other school tasks after the training (Brown et al., 1983; Schneider & Pressley, 1989).
