ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses some questions are what aspects of strategy use are important to measure, measurements that have been used to quantify and qualify strategy use, and how these measurements can be useful in formative evaluation. Dinsmore recently described three aspects of strategy use that have been measured—frequency, usefulness, and conditionality. The most common aspect of strategy use in the contemporary literature has been frequency, which is how often strategies have been employed. Thus, there is an onus on the individual to use the most appropriate strategy in a given situation, which is called conditionality. Thus, measuring the usefulness of a strategy is also important to understanding whether that strategy is ultimately helpful in problem or task completion. Measurements of strategic processing can be divided into three main types—retrospective self-report, concurrent self-report, and observations of observable behaviour. It is useful to distinguish between two types of assessment—formative and summative.