Strategic Processing Within and Across Domains of Learning

• In Event: Investigating Strategies and Strategy Use: Where Do We Go From Here?

Abstract

Strategies are goal-directed procedures that are planfully or effortfully used to aid in the regulation, execution, or evaluation of a particular problem or task. Put another way, strategies are the processes that students actually do to improve their performance in school. However, the academic and school context is not monolithic, but is instead composed of a number of domains of learning (e.g., history, biology, music). Given the identification of these particular domains, some strategies can be useful across a number of domains (i.e., domain-general strategies) while other strategies are only useful within a single domain (domain-specific strategies). In this presentation, the particular conceptualization of strategic processing, the definition of a domain, and the empirical operationalization of generality are all interrogated in order to examine the distinction between domain-general and -specific strategies. Possible complications for this distinction, including the differential automaticity of procedural knowledge across domains, the unlikelihood of strategy transfer across domains, and the way expertise development interacts with domain-generality, are discussed.
The literature review and theoretical discussion that form the core of this presentation culminate in a number of theoretically relevant “thought questions” that are designed to shed light on currently ambiguous designations and definitions within the area of strategy research. For example, some of these thought questions include:
• In the literature, there is a very low rate of observed strategy transfer across contexts. Is a strategy domain-general because it is theoretically relevant across domains, or is it domain-general because a particular student or students actually does utilize that strategy across domains?
• Students may attempt to transfer a strategy across domains or contexts but be unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. In order to be considered a domain-general strategy, does that strategy need to be equally effective for students across domains?
• As students develop expertise in a given domain, the likelihood that they may transfer strategic processes across domains may change. Can a strategy be considered domain-general only for novices and not experts, or vice-versa?
• Over a certain level of complexity, nearly all educational tasks or tests can be solved using multiple cognitive processes. Is it possible to use the covariance among such tasks to determine whether a strategy is domain-general? Or is process-data collected across domains needed?
• Can direct instruction on a domain-general strategic process, not nested in any particular academic domain, improve student outcomes across multiple domains? What aspects of the instruction might moderate this effect?
These general thought questions are designed to stimulate conversation during the structured poster session and enable the experts assembled there to share their insights, empirical observations, and theoretical formulations, with one another and with the other attendees.

Author

• Denis Dumas, University of Denver