encounter in college and careers and
work backward from there.
In the past decade, my colleagues at
the Educational Policy Improvement
Center and I have analyzed the content
of thousands of entry-level college
courses and the expectations of the
faculty who teach these courses.
2 One of
our most consistent and important conclusions is that courses at two- and four-year postsecondary institutions expect
students to be proficient in a range
of key cognitive strategies. Although
students certainly benefit from general
content knowledge in key disciplines,
such as English and mathematics, this
knowledge is not sufficient if they lack
proficiency with these strategies.
3
Key Cognitive Strategies
Our research has led us to identify five
key cognitive strategies (see fig. 1 online
at www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/books/
el_201103_conley_figure1.pdf):
Problem formulation. Having students
formulate a problem before leaping
directly to a solution causes them to
first generate plausible hypotheses
and potential strategies for solving the
problem. This act of reflection gets students to entertain the universe of possibilities and makes them aware of the
strategies they need to employ to solve
the problem.
Research. With a strategy in hand, students can then collect the information
necessary to solve the problem. This
should involve data or information collection—in other words, research. Even
in this information-rich age, students
need considerable training in identifying
relevant resources. They need to be
able to collect the information from a
wider range of sources than what they
will encounter through a simple Google
search or a visit to Wikipedia.
Interpretation. With information in
hand, students need techniques for
As educators begin to translate the Common Core State Standards
into practice,
they have a new
opportunity to
think about what
is important.
interpreting what they have gathered.
Depending on the nature of the
problem, these techniques can include
pro-and-con lists; tables, grids, and
matrices; outlines of key points; lists
of consistencies and contradictions in
the data; and findings organized by key
aspects of the problem. Evaluation, a
judging process in which rules of relevance are applied systematically to the
collected data, is a skill developed over
time through multiple opportunities for
practice.
Communication. Students need to
learn how to organize the output of
their research and interpretation and
then construct an argument or pre-
sentation that derives directly from
carefully collected, analyzed, and orga-
nized information. Communication of
this type requires multiple steps and
iterations, not one draft dashed off and
never revisited. Careful consideration
of audience and the conventions of the
subject area also guide communication
strategies.
The Novice-Expert Continuum
We should think of students as moving
from novice to expert in their strategic thinking as the result of frequent
practice on progressively more complex
tasks, assignments, and activities. As
learners progress through the steps
from novice to expert, they become less
dependent on following rules literally
and more able to make decisions within
a larger framework. The expert thinker
can see the whole when presented with
only a subset of the pieces, whereas
the novice needs to have all the pieces
in place first before acting. The expert
operates with a likely outcome in mind
and is constantly testing assumptions
on the way to a conclusion. The novice
must proceed step by step in a literal
and linear fashion.
