Teaching self-instruction to high school students |
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| Authors: | Jack Martin Steven Norris |
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| Institution: | (1) Division of Educational Psychology, University of Western Ontario Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada |
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| Abstract: | In an attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of instructional programming in counseling, an experimental evaluation of a ten-week program aimed at teaching skills and strategies of self-instruction to high school students was conducted. Thirty-two grade ten students were assigned randomly to an experimental self-instruction group and a control group. Dependent variables included Rotter's (1966) Control of Reinforcement Questionnaire, Rosenbaum's (1980) Self-control Schedule, a curriculum-specific test of self-instruction concepts, and a transfer test. Results revealed that students in the experimental, self-instruction program outperformed students in the control group on all dependent variables except for the Self-control Schedule. Content analysis of student responses to the transfer test showed a distinct pattern of skill development in the experimental group from pretest to posttest. Implications for the development and offering of instructional counseling programs are drawn.Many students of counseling have argued that counseling is essentially a kind of teaching (Carkhuff and Berenson, 1976; Ellis, 1977; Katz and Ivey, 1977; Krumboltz and Thoresen, 1976; Sorenson, 1967). More recently, Martin and his colleagues have developed an approach to counseling that employs models of instruction as a basis for the development and implementation of a broad range of counseling interventions and programs (Hiebert et al., 1981; Martin and Hiebert, 1982; Martin et al., 1981; Martin et al., 1980). Martin (1983) also has suggested that counselors in schools and elsewhere can make use of systematic teaching programs to help clients/students acquire functional skills in a variety of areas such as anxiety management, decision making, interpersonal skills, and so forth. In the development and offering of such programs, counselors act as curriculum developers and instructors. Initial evidence for the viability of this type of instructional counseling in schools was provided by Haynes et al. (1983), and Leal, Baxter, Martin, and Marx (1981) who developed programs based on cognitive and behavioral counseling methods that were successful in alleviating the test anxieties experienced by high school students. The experiment reported here extends the work of Martin and others in instructional counseling by evaluating an instructional program designed to teach a series of integrated skills of self-instruction to high school students. Note that the term self-instruction is used here to refer to the activities of people engaged in systematic self-change, and is not intended to connote the system of self-instruction training developed by Donald Meichenbaum (1977).]Nearly all teachers and curriculum specialists share at least one goal: to help students acquire the capacity to engage in self-directed learning. Most often, it is assumed that school students will acquire skills in areas such as self-instruction and critical thinking (skills often seen as necessary requisites to self-directed learning) as a result of stimulating interactions with traditional school curricula. A frequently voiced alternative is to attempt to teach such skills directly (cf. Beyers, 1984a, 1984b), more or less as a curriculum in their own right. Many attempts have been made to do this, but few have received detailed empirical, experimental analysis. In a recent meta-analysis of primary prevention studies conducted in schools, Baker, Swisher, Nadenichek, and Popowicz (1984) found 40 such studies that had been conducted since 1970. Most of the experimental programs in the studies reviewed were targeted at improving students' communication skills, decision making and problem solving skills, and self-awareness. None of the studies reviewed by Baker et al. included instructional interventions that attempted to teach a broad range of skills and strategies that would permit students to plan, implement, and evaluate programs of personal change and development. Teaching school pupils to engage in systematic self-instruction for purposes of personal change simply has not been attempted, to date, in the context of an experimentally controlled investigation. Given an increasing number of pleas for exactly this kind of broad-based school programming (Martin, 1983; Sprinthall, 1984), the need for controlled experimental studies in this area is acute.Self-introduction or learning to learn has been the subject of considerable theorizing by both cognitive and instructional psychologists (Gagné, 1977; Bransford, 1979). Experimental work by Ann Brown and her colleagues (Brown, 1978; Brown et al., 1979) has highlighted the difficulty of teaching various metacognitive strategies that would seem basic to the capacity to self-instruct so as to ensure the transfer of such strategies to tasks other than those employed during strategy acquisition. At the same time, Brown's research also shows that the teaching of generalizable metacognitive strategies such as self-testing is possible, even with educable retarded children (Brown, et al., 1979). Other research concerned with differences between expert and novice knowledge has highlighted the importance of the ability to access declarative knowledge stores and the availability of relevant procedural knowledge in attempting to explain these differences (Chi et al., 1982; Leinhardt, 1983). See Anderson, (1980) for formal definitions and discussions of declarative and procedural knowledge.] The greater ability of experts to function as independent learners or self-instructors in their areas of expertise likely is related to such differences. While it sometimes is unclear as to whether self-instructional competence resides in procedural knowledge stores or cognitive and/or metacognitive strategies, it seems clear that learning to learn involves more than simply acquiring necessary declarative knowledge in relevant substantive areas (Glaser, 1984). Thus, explicit, direct instruction in skills and strategies of self-instruction probably is necessary if students in schools are to learn to direct their own learning and development.The experiment reported here was conducted to supply initial experimental data about the possible effectiveness of a program designed to teach skills and strategies of self-instruction to high school students. It is a study of a ten-week instructional counseling program developed to teach self-instruction skills in areas such as decision making, gathering information, self-assessment, framing objectives, planning, and self-evaluation. As such, it is a more comprehensive program than other programs of primary prevention in schools that have been studied experimentally. While a variety of school and extracurricular situations were employed as illustrative contexts for presenting information about these skills to the students, the goal of the experimental program was to teach the self-instruction skills as detached skills that could be applied to a variety of situations and life circumstances. This approach was viewed as contrasting with traditional approaches in which such skills are thought to be acquired indirectly as a result of working through a series of tasks in defined substantive areas such as mathematics, history, or physics. In this latter method, it is likely that such skills, if they are acquired, become embedded in specific substantive contexts and are therefore less likely to generalize to situations or contexts other than those in which they were acquired (see Rigney, 1978 for the distinction between detached and embedded strategies). Dependent variables employed in the study were selected to test for the acquisition and transfer of targeted skills as well as for the acquisition of underlying beliefs about one's ability to control or influence external and internal events. The latter type of learning is thought by many counselors to be of great importance, particularly if attitudes and beliefs are learned that affect clients' attributional styles and/or tendencies (Strong and Claiborn, 1982).The overall purpose of the experiment was to determine whether instructional counseling curricula could be developed that would succeed in teaching detached strategies/skills of self-instruction to high school students. Should such instruction be possible, additional support would be provided for the notions of instructional counseling and counselors as curriculum developers and instructors. After all, a major part of counseling typically is associated with assisting clients to make decisions, gather information, frame goals and objectives, assess their situations and capabilities, plan actions, and evaluate the effects of their actions—all components of the self-instruction program taught to the experimental students in this study.The specific hypotheses investigated were that participation in the experimental instructional counseling program would increase: 1) students' knowledge of self-instruction skills (acquisition learning), 2) students' abilities to apply this knowledge to  everyday events (transfer learning), and 3) students' attitudes consistent with higher levels of self-control and internal attributional processes (general attitudinal learning).The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Chairpersons' Research Fund, Simon Fraser University.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Bruce Dallin, Louise Bourassa, Olwyn Irving, David Langton and the Abbotsford School District (British Columbia, Canada) in completing this work. |
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