Are the Skills We Are Teaching Obsolete?
A Review of Recent Research in Reading and Study Skills

Dr. Martha Maxwell MM Associates

In the past decade there have been many changes in the way educators and psychologists view learning. Research studies based on new theories in cognitive psychology, information processing, linguistics, and neurophysiology have produced results that challenge old ideas about memory, intelligence, and learning skills as well as teaching strategies. More sophisticated statistical designs and methods have made it possible to design studies that tell us more about the interaction between methods, student characteristics and learning outcomes, and experimenters are more cautious about controlling variables like background knowledge and motivation than were their forebears.

Not only have there been changes in theory, research methods and technology, the demographics of those who attend college have changed. Diversity in culture, educational background, age, and ability characterize today's college student, and this diversity has had an impact on every phase of college life. Many institutions, faced with budgetary restrictions, have increased the size of classes. Modern technology including computers and better teaching aids are increasingly incorporated into classes, and today's students may participate in a broader range of learning experiences including collaborative learning. College textbooks too have changed, as have the expectations of instructors. This paper addresses these challenges with these questions: "Do the skills we teach in reading and study skills reflect these changes and are we preparing today's students for the real world of college study? Or are our methods locked in the assumptions and traditions of the past?"

To address these questions, we will examine some recent research studies relevant to college reading and study skills. Specifically, we will look at research in time scheduling, note-taking, exam skills, textbook reading, as well as studies on the effects of affective factors such as locus of control on learning. This review is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely represents a sampling of research results that appear to have implications for skills teaching. I'll leave you to answer the question of whether what you are teaching and how you are teaching it is relevant and timely.

In examining the results of research, it is well to remember that no one study is meaningful unless it's placed in context with other studies. Fifty years of research history has not changed this basic tenet. For every five studies supporting a position, there may be one that negates the same conclusion. In other words, we still don't have the final answer and even if we did, it too may change as conditions change.

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Recent Research on Time Management

Study skills programs routinely include skills in time management, based on principles that are generally accepted in management training programs like Lakein's (1973) How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. Although there are many books on this topic, most agree that the student should identify needs and wants, rank them in regard to their importance or priority, and then allocate time and resources appropriately. Other time-honored tips include delegate work, handle each piece of paper only once, and continually ask yourself, "What is the best use of my time right now?"

That managing their time is a major adjustment problem of freshmen is attested to by the large numbers of schedules and time management tips requested by students from Learning Centers - some distribute as many as 5,000 time schedules each semester. Even at exclusive Harvard some students are reported to have difficulty making the adjustment from high school to college and planning time to study. R. Light (1992), in his assessment of Harvard students and faculty about teaching, learning, and student life, points out that for some students the inability to manage their time will spell failure and encourages advisors to work with those students on time management. He states that how freshmen allocate their energies and plan their study time is crucial to success. For example, K. W. Light trained 173 Harvard freshmen to track how they actually spent their time, and then debriefed each student with questions like, "How was your time actually spent?" "Are you pleased with the way you spend each day?" "Are there changes you might like to make?" He felt that it was helpful to ask students to divide the day into three parts, Morning, Afternoon, and Evening and encourage them to choose the extracurricular activities they might like as well as planning for uninterrupted study time. Furthermore, K. Light reports that logging time has another advantage, for it enables the advisor and student to get together with an agenda to discuss and states that it provides a great chance for an advisor to genuinely advise.

Despite the prevalence and pervasiveness of the problem for students, there has been surprisingly little research on time management. Academic skills counselors use the same strategies that were developed for business situations. What research there is has mainly concerned how training in time management can change behavior and, although a number have reported behavior changes, few studies have shown that time management training reduces stress or improves overall performance. Macan et al. (1990) point out that the research so far has dealt with time management training aimed at changing what is assumed to be a unidimensional construct of good time management. Not only has the concept of a uni-dimensional time management construct been untested, but there have been no systematic attempts to develop a test that assesses conventional time management behaviors. Furthermore, they state that little is known about the correlation of naturally occurring time management with personality and indicators of stress and performance.

In 1990, Macan et al. developed a time management questionnaire, administered it to college students, and then checked it against time management behaviors, attitudes, stress and self-perceptions of performance and grade point average. Of the four factors revealed by the questionnaire, they found that the one most predictive of GPA was Perceived Control of Time. Students who felt they were able to control their own time reported significantly

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greater evaluations of their performance, greater satisfaction with work and life, less role ambiguity, less role overload, fewer job induced and somatic tensions, and higher GPAs.

Overall scores on the time management questionnaire were found to be positively correlated with age and sex. Older students were more likely to engage in traditional time management activities while women made significantly higher overall scores on the time management questionnaire, but were significantly lower on one factor - they did not feel that they were in control of their time. In other words, women were better time managers than men but were lower on perceived control of time.

Macan et al. (1990) concluded that time management is multidimensional and is comprised of four independent factors: Factor 1, setting short-term goals and priorities; Factor 2, mechanics, scheduling, planning - time management behaviors taught in seminars like "I carry an appointment book with me." " I make a list of things to do each day and check off each task as it is accomplished"; Factor 3, representing the student's perception of control of time includes items like "I feel in control of my time" and "I feel overwhelmed by trivial and unimportant tasks"; Factor 4, preference for disorganization consisted of items like "I can find the things I need more readily when my workplace is messy" and "I have some of my most creative ideas when I am disorganized." (Note: As might be expected, those students with a high preference for disorganization felt more ambiguity about their roles as students, had higher somatic tensions and made lower GPAs.)

Although a limitation of this study is that it was based on self-reported information, the fact that multiple factors of time management were discovered suggests that time management is a more complex activity than was previously thought and that attitudes about one's ability to manage time are more important than the strategies one uses.

In a more recent study on time management, Britton and Tesser (1991) gave 90 freshmen a time-management questionnaire and compared their responses with their cumulative grade-point averages four years later. Two time management components were found to relate to overall grades: 1. a time attitudes factor - consistent with Bandura's 1989 concept of self-efficacy and the findings of the Macan et al. (1990) study mentioned above - that is, students with positive time attitudes seem to be able to control their time, say "No" to people, and stop unprofitable activities or routines. Feelings of self-efficacy, according to Bandura (1989), allow and support more efficient cognitive processing, more positive affective responses, and more persevering behavior; and 2) strong short-term planning skills. (Note: this study did not use the same questionnaire used in the Macan et al. study, but both studies agreed on these two factors.)

Interestingly, long-term planning skills were not related to final GPA, and the researchers postulate that, in a college environment, short-term planning may be more important than long term planning due to changes in expectations and demands that are relatively rapid and frequent. "Different parts of the course may unpredictably vary in difficulty; the overlapping of demand from different courses is often unpredictable; instructors may even change their mind about the due date on papers or the date an exam will be scheduled; on occasion, there is no syllabus, and even in courses where there is a syllabus, there are often consequential deviations from it. Perhaps in this type of environment if the

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goal is to maximize grades, a short-term planning window is more optimal ... long range planning may be more important in a less volatile, more stable environment" (Britton & Tesser, 1991).

The fact that long-range planning was negatively correlated with SAT scores was a bit more difficult to explain. Britton and Tesser suggest that several of the items on the long-range planning scale may reflect an inability to tolerate complexity; e.g., "keeping a clean desk." To the extent that items like this one indicate a low tolerance for ambiguity, people who score high on this factor may be unable to cope with other kinds of complexity such as the complexity involved in taking the SAT. These are questions for further research.

Implications. Current research suggests that time management is a more complex activity than we had previously considered and may be comprised of several independent factors. The fact that four independent factors were found in one study and two in the other indicates that more research is needed, but also suggests that time management is probably not a unitary trait. Both studies indicate that the most important factor in predicting achievement (whether it is current GPA or GPA at graduation) is whether students feel that they are in control of their own time, not the mechanics nor activities they engage in. Both studies agreed on a second independent time-management factor - short-term goals setting. The finding that people who are long-term planners are at a disadvantage in college and don't do as well as those who plan only for the short-term is intriguing. Perhaps we should avoid stressing the need to have long-term goals and encourage our students to be more responsive and adaptable to the inevitable changes they face in college.

Note - Taking

Using Notes for Review. Haenggi & Perfiti (1992) examined the roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge in processing expository text. Average and above-average college readers were instructed to either review their notes, reread notes, or reread their textbook on human decision-making. Results showed that the three strategies were equally effective in improving comprehension for text-explicit and text-implicit information, and reading ability and prior knowledge were more predictive for comprehension than was the type of reproductive activity. Rereading the text might help average readers compensate for their lower performance in answering test-implicit questions, whereas above-average readers seem to be better able to combine more text information with their previous knowledge. Working memory played the major role in comprehending text-implicit information, whereas knowledge was relatively more important for explicit and script-implicit information.

These results tend to support Arnold's data (1942) showing that a rereading strategy improved comprehension on immediate and delayed tests better than note- taking, summarizing, or outlining. In fact, Anderson (1980) in a review of research on study strategies found that only two studies reported rereading strategy was inferior to either note-taking or underlining, while several studies showed no difference. Subsequent studies tend to show that rereading is superior when processing time is constant.

Yet how many of us still warn students that rereading is less effective than SQ3R or note-taking? And do we still discourage students from rereading their textbook chapters?

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Kiewra et al. (1991) investigated three note-taking functions: taking notes/no review, taking notes/review, and absent self from lecture and review somebody else's notes. (Note, this third condition is similar to what students do when they rent note taking services or borrow notes from a friend.) The results indicated that taking notes and reviewing them was superior to taking notes and not reviewing them and to reviewing borrowed notes for performance on a recall test and superior to not reviewing notes on a test of synthesis. However, borrowing someone else's notes was superior to taking notes and not reviewing them on a test of synthesis. They also reported that taking notes in a matrix fashion (i.e., mapping) was superior to linear note-taking.

A similar study to the 1991 research by Kiewra et al. described above examined the relationships among information-processing, note-taking effectiveness and academic performance indicators of students with above average verbal SAT scores (McIntyre, 1992). Subjects were given four different note-taking conditions: notes/no review, notes/review, no notes/no review, and no notes/review. The results showed that information processing ability (as measured by two tests) accounted for a small percent of the variance of note-taking effectiveness (5%). However, as was expected, students who reviewed their notes outperformed students who did not review their notes on a lecture-specific quiz when verbal ability and information-processing ability were controlled. This result suggests that students who take notes process information better than do students who do not take notes.

Finally, McIntyre found that students averaged recall of less than 60% of the information in the lecture and were able to record only about half of the ideas in the lecture suggesting that note-taking skills need to be taught and practiced.

Mapping. Boyle and Peregoy (1991) studied the effects of mapping on students' learning from college texts and concluded that students trained in mapping improved their ability to write, but not their reading comprehension.

Recent Research on Textbook Reading

Reading specialists have long been aware of ways to measure the reading difficulty level of textbooks through applying readability formulae, but the effects of rhetorical structures on comprehension are less generally recognized. For example, some rhetorical structures are common in a number of disciplines such as argument, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, and these are familiar to many readers and taught in developmental reading courses. Other structures are more specialized and used for organizing information in a specific discipline, such as legal documents or scientific materials, and these special rhetorical structures make them difficult for the novice reader to comprehend. In this section, we will look at studies about the organization of college textbooks and how it impacts on reading comprehension.

How the Organization of Science Textbooks Affects Comprehension. Dee-Lucas and Larkin (1990), in a study aptly subtitled "Consider the particle p...," compared the rhetorical structure common to many mathematics and science texts (a proof-first structure) with an alternative organization that is more typical of expository writing - i.e., where the principle is stated first. For example, in science texts, the author may start a chapter by

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describing an atom and work up to a theory or principle. The researchers found that readers were more likely to recall the gist of the principle after a delay when they had read the principle-first texts. Furthermore, the amount of information recalled was greater, and more readers recalled the core-principle sentence after reading the principle-first than after the proof-first texts. The investigators posited a number of reasons for this including serial position effect, i.e., more new information is presented at the beginning of the text in the proof-first structure, and the habitual perceptions of readers who expect the most important information to be presented first.

In other words, readers had more difficulty determining what was important when reading proof-first texts and reorganized proof-first texts into principle-first texts when summarizing. The proof-first text also decreased the recall of the principle.

Implications. The authors point out that the traditional way of writing science texts (where the proof is given first) may penalize the novice reader who is uncertain about the importance of the information given in this sequence. Using the principle as a conceptual framework is typical of the thinking in other disciplines and some support for this can be found in research by Sheila Tobias, who had a group of liberal arts graduate students enroll in a basic freshmen chemistry course and describe their experiences (Tobias, 1990). One of the things that frustrated them in reading was the fact that the basic principles were not presented first and, unlike the rhetorical organization in their liberal arts courses, the chemistry text required them to infer the principle.

These studies suggest that we must either train students how to read proof-first materials and learn to find the principle quickly in science and math textbooks so that they can organize their ideas and process the material more easily (see Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988 for a description of strategies for comprehending scientific texts), and/or to encourage science text book authors to organize material in a principle-first manner, especially when writing to a general audience of beginning students.

In another study on the effects of text structure on comprehension, Zabrucky (1990) tested the ability of college students to find sentences that were inconsistent with the theme of texts in order to determine whether students were able to recognize their own comprehension failure (i.e., unfamiliar words, inconsistencies, violations of background knowledge, etc.). Previous studies suggest that beginning level college students often fail to evaluate their understanding while reading text material. The effects of two components of reading proficiency, comprehension ability and reading speed, on their ability to evaluate texts for errors were tested. Subjects were directed to look for inconsistencies or contradictions in the text they read. Despite these instructions, Zabrucky found that beginning college students frequently fail to evaluate their understanding of text material. Students who scored higher in reading comprehension and speed detected more errors than students who were slower readers and poorer comprehenders. However, even the better readers were surprisingly low on evaluation skills. In addition, student performance was weaker on texts that were less cohesive, and this could be a particularly large problem for the weaker readers.

Implications. The results of this study suggest that beginning college students, even though they may score high on reading speed and comprehension tests, are weak in evaluating

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inconsistencies in texts and overestimate their ability to comprehend textbooks. Poor readers are much weaker. Although other studies suggest that students develop evaluation skills with experience as they advance through college, it is important to provide training in evaluating one's own comprehension to beginning students, particularly for those whose reading skills are weak.

The Effects of Headings on Reading Comprehension. Grant and Davey (1991) studied the effects of headings on text processing behaviors during immediate and delayed testing. College students read an expository passage, answered questions about major ideas and supporting details, and then identified the placement of answers to questions using a prototype of the text. Headings did not appear to affect overall comprehension or overall answer location accuracy. However, those subjects in the headings group who answered major ideas correctly were better able to use the prototype to locate the place where answers appeared than were those who read the text with no headings. Since these findings were contrary to expectations that headings would improve comprehension, the researchers speculate that perhaps the text read was too easy, and students did not need headings to process the information. It is clear that more research should be done on this question.

Are College Textbook Authors Writing Texts That Take into Consideration Students' Problems in Comprehension? Smith and Chase (1991) examined introductory college psychology textbooks to find out 1) how often paragraphs included a topic sentence as an explicitly stated main idea and 2) when these topic sentences occur, with what frequency are they positioned in the first, middle, or last sentence? Their results show that over half (58%) of the paragraphs analyzed contained explicitly stated main ideas - a higher percentage than previous studies on social studies texts had shown. In addition, 66 of the topic sentences were in the beginning position in the paragraph, an aid to comprehension.

Noting that although the majority of paragraphs had explicitly stated ideas, the researchers stated there was still a need for students to be able to infer and construct main ideas from paragraphs that do not have a main idea, and this is a skill that needs to be taught.

Do College Reading Skills Textbooks Prepare Students to Read Difficult Textbooks? Schumm, Haager, and Leavell (1991) content-analyzed 46 college textbooks to determine the extent to which postsecondary reading textbooks provide an awareness of and strategies for the use of both considerate and inconsiderate text features. Considerate or "friendly" textbooks are defined as those that possess text-based features such as elements of text organization, explication of ideas, control of conceptual density, incorporation of instructional devices that facilitate information gathering. Inconsiderate texts do not have these features. The results show that substantially more strategies in reading texts concern considerate textbooks than inconsiderate text features and concludes that college reading textbooks are providing strategies for reading text that is easy, but not for reading difficult text. In other words, we're not teaching students how to read difficult textbooks.

Effects of Beliefs about the Nature of Knowledge on Comprehension. Schommer's (1990) research addressed the questions: "What are students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge?" and "How do these beliefs affect comprehension?" She found four factors in her

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questionnaire about the nature of knowledge reflecting degrees of belief in a) innate ability; b) simple knowledge; c) quick learning, and d) certain knowledge. In a second experiment she asked students to read a passage from either the social sciences or physical sciences in which the concluding paragraph was missing and had them rate their confidence in understanding the passage, write a conclusion, and take a mastery test. She found that those who believed in quick learning predicted oversimplified conclusions, had poor performance on the mastery test and were overconfident about how well they understood the test. Those who believed in the certainty of knowledge predicted inappropriately absolute conclusions.

Reading Methods

The Best Ways to Teach Developmental Readers. Stahl, Simpson & Hayes (1992) culled the ten best ideas for teaching developmental reading from their years of college teaching of reading and described them in an article that synthesizes research, theory and experience. These ideas should be particularly helpful for novice college reading instructors. Specifically, the ten ideas include: 1)adopt a cognitive-based philosophy (as opposed to a deficit view in which the goal for the students becomes increasing their scores on the Nelson-Denny or some similar test. The cognitive viewpoint assumes that students are active participants and in control of their own learning - capable of becoming effective independent learners; 2)use a course model that stresses transfer of skills learned to "real" college courses; 3)use reliable, process-oriented assessment procedures rather than an over-reliance on standardized tests; 4)broaden the students conceptual background knowledge since many developmental students lack the reading experience and have misconceptions about reading and college courses; 5)reconceptualize vocabulary development by helping students realize that "the fundamental avenue to college success is the ability to quickly expand their vocabulary, and that students must immerse themselves totally in the language of the academy"; 6)use learning strategies that have been research-validated and insure that students know how to use them and how to choose among them; 7)systematically train students to employ strategies through self-control training and other validated training approaches and insure that instruction is direct, informed, and explanatory; 8)promote strategy control and regulation by teaching students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning; 9) teach high utility strategies to maximize immediate acceptance and reduce the negative attitudes students have about taking developmental courses; and 10)incorporate writing into the curriculum to insure that students become co-creators of the texts they read, create their own understanding of content material, and can develop a way to monitor and revise their understanding.

Implications. This paper should be very valuable in training novice college reading instructors as well as in evaluating college reading courses.

Description of a Successful Course. Stone and Miller (1991) evaluated the success of a developmental community college reading course which includes a three- step reading comprehension cycle: predicting, confirming, and integrating, and teaches students the strategies to use at each step of the cycle. Also students were taught the KWL technique - to ask themselves and record "What I know," "What I want to know," and "What I learned." The instruction is described as following the direct teaching model of demonstration, guided practice, and independent practice, and the reading course is a corequisite with a sociology

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course and uses the sociology textbook. Evaluation measures show more students passing the revised reading course, a higher retention than in previous years, significant improvement in reading comprehension, and a high pass rate for the sociology course. Passing students were interviewed and found to be highly confident, self-aware comprehenders who transferred reading strategies to coursework in subsequent terms.

Effects of a Metacognitive Approach. O'Neill and Todaro (1991), after reviewing the literature on the positive gains in reading that developmental readers made following training using a metacognitive approach, designed a study to evaluate the relative effectiveness of metacognitive training in reading and study skills at two different reading levels - basic and upper level remedial. Students in the metacognitive intervention were taught what metacognitive strategies are and why, how, and when to use them. They were taught to monitor their own work, summarize and evaluate it by observing instructors modeling the skills, and then modeling them themselves for the whole class and in small groups. They found that, although students increased their use of metacognitive strategies, there were no significant differences between the comprehension of students who received metacognitive intervention and those who received traditional instruction. Both groups improved their comprehension. They suggest that the best time to introduce metacognitive strategies may be after the student has mastered the most basic reading skills.

Recent Research on Test Taking Skills

Does Planning Answers before Writing Help on Essay Exams? Gillis and Olson (1991) studied the notes students made on exam papers after they had been given instructions to plan their answers before writing by brainstorming or outlining. They found significant differences between the scores of students who did various amounts of planning, with students who did extensive planning scoring the highest.

Differences were significant between all three groups - those who did no planning, those who did some planning, and those who did extensive planning before answering the exam questions. The conclusion was that those students who plan before writing earn higher marks on essay tests, but the question remains as to whether students who are specifically required to plan, as were the students in this study, will do as well as those who use these metacognitive strategies spontaneously.

Differences in the Interpretation of Essay Questions among Test Makers, Test Raters and Test Takers. Tedick, Bernhardt and De Ville (1991) looked at how different groups of test makers, raters, and takers interpreted essay test questions. In this instance, test raters refer to those who design the topics, and test makers were those who wrote the items. Although previous research suggests that students often have different interpretations of a question than their instructors, this study was designed to examine not only if there were differences in interpretations between the three groups, but whether differences in interpretation of questions would influence the scores on the test writer's written responses. The results indicated that the three groups made highly similar interpretations of two test topics, but highly idiosyncratic interpretations of three topics. One topic where teachers felt that the questions were the most straight forward and simple turned out to be the most difficult for

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students, but, generally, whether students interpreted items differently from the instructors made no difference in their scores.

The Effects of Locus of Control on Achievement. Educators have long believed that marginal, at-risk students should be exposed to the most effective teaching from the best teachers. But previous research on control theory suggests that unless students perceive that they have some control over and can influence their environment, their capacity to learn from instruction is limited. In other words, high-risk students who feel they lack control over their academic performance are incapable of benefiting from good instruction. The feeling that one has lost control can be induced by many factors in the typical college classroom such as unannounced tests, excessive content, poor organization, as well as such internal factors as believing one cannot learn the subject. As Perry and Penner (1990) point out, "Ironically, the students who are in most need of good instruction are the least likely to benefit from it." However, research also suggests that when students with low perceived control are given feedback on an aptitude test before a lecture that temporarily altered their perceptions of control, their performance improved, a finding that has replicated in three separate studies.

Arguing that if perceived control can be increased in at-risk students, then their achievement should improve as a result of both their own effort and the quality of instruction, Perry and Penner (1990) studied the effects of attributional retraining, a therapeutic method for reinstating psychological control, in groups of students with internal and external locus of control. The training involved was a short, 8-minute videotape that was given before a class experiment. On the tape, a male college professor described his freshman year at university recounting an instance in which, despite repeated failure, he persisted only because a friend urged him and went on later to succeed in university and graduate school. He encouraged students to attribute poor performance to lack of effort and good performance to ability and proper effort. He also explained that persistence is a major part of successful effort and that long-term effort enhances ability. Following the training tape, students were given an aptitude test consisting of analogies where they learned the correct answer after they had answered each item.

The investigators found that the experiment improved external, but not internal, students' performance on a test following lecture, a test given a week later, and on homework performance. Having an effective lecturer also enhances lecture- and homework-related achievement in external-controlled, but not internal-controlled, students. The results suggest that cognitive factors influencing students' perceived control (e.g., internal or external locus) must be taken into account when remedial interventions for academic achievement are developed and that brief training can influence the learning of students with low perceived locus of control.

Conclusions. Attributional training and feedback on an aptitude test enabled high-risk students to learn more during a lecture and to make better use of study materials than they previously had. This is attributed to the effect of training to view academic achievement as being based on effort not on ability.

The Effects of Affect on Supplemental Instruction. Visor, Johnson, and Cole (1992) studied the effects of locus of control, self-efficacy, and self-esteem on students'

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participation in Supplemental Instruction (SI). Previous studies have confirmed that SI participation leads to higher course grades even when the non-SI group has significantly higher ability scores, and SI students earn higher GPAs. In this study, students were tested for the affective variables and given the opportunity to voluntarily attend SI sessions in a psychology course in which they were enrolled. Then they were divided into three groups: regular participants (attended four or more SI sessions), occasional participants (attended one to three SI sessions) and non-participants who attended no SI sessions. Results indicated that regular participants had the most internal orientation for locus of control and the highest mean on self-efficacy, and they were higher than the other groups on self-esteem although they did not improve on these scores significantly as a result of their participation in SI. The investigators discuss the implications of these finds for the marketing of SI to at-risk students who are often the target of SI programs. They point out that the study suggests that if we want students to attend regularly and actively participate in SI, the program must be marketed to appeal to students with different affective characteristics. Furthermore, the SI sessions themselves must be designed to demonstrate to students with low self-esteem and external locus of control that they can succeed. Information must be carefully sequenced so as not to frustrate these students, and leaders must find new ways to encourage them to continue to attend. Perhaps the attributional retraining described by Perry and Penner (1990) is one approach that might be helpful in SI classes also.

Correlates of Help Seeking. Karabenick and Knapp (1991) describe three studies in which they examined factors that correlate with a college student's seeking help when faced with the prospect of failing. In the first study, seeking help was found to be related to whether the student viewed help as learning the process (instrumentally motivated) rather than gaining the minimum assistance to solve the problem (dependency-motivated), directly related to the student's global self-esteem, and inversely related to students' perceptions that seeking help is threatening. In all three studies, students who were willing to seek help in an academic context viewed it as an enhancement-related rather than a dependent behavior.

The Downside of Help. Graham & Barker (1990) examined the possibility that unsolicited help can function as a low-ability cue. Children viewed a videotape of boys working problems - one boy received assistance from an a teacher or peer; the other didn't. Children judged the helped student as lower in ability.

"They'd Do It, but I Wouldn't." Researchers proposed that when students expect to fail and believe that failure will reflect their incompetence, they intentionally reduce effort so their failure can be attributed to low effort, not low ability. However, when Jagacinski and Nicholls (1990) asked college students how they would behave in a situation where they expected that failure would indicate their incompetence, they rejected the notion that they would not work hard, but said they expected others would reduce their effort. The study concludes, "Thus if students reduce effort when their perceived ability is threatened, it may not represent an intentional strategy designed to maintain perceived ability."

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Study Skills Tests

Studies on the LASSI. Nist and Others (1990) investigated the use of the LASSI (Learning and Study Strategies Inventory) in measuring students cognitive and affective growth following a study skills course and, in addition, examined how well it predicted grades in subsequent content area courses. They report that both regularly admitted students and developmental students showed significant improvement in LASSI scores as a result of taking the course. Although the LASSI scores were predictive of grades in regular courses for regularly admitted students, no score or combination of scores on the LASSI was predictive of grades for developmental students.

Implications. Instructors using the LASSI with developmental students should be wary of the results. More research is needed before the test should be used unequivocally for developmental students.

Cross Cultural Comparison of Study Habits. Moreno and Di Vesta (1991) describe the use of the Cognitive Skills Inventory (CSI) in a cross-cultural study where they administered the test to bilingual Puerto- Rican students, monolingual Spanish students, and English-speaking American students. They found differences between the three groups on scores reflecting cultural differences, but no differences on the test factors - integration, repetition, monitoring and coping. This suggests that factors measured by the test remain constant across cultures, although different norms should be developed for different cultural groups.

Summary

We reviewed studies in a number of areas related to college study skills and reading. The results suggest that in many instances the behaviors we wish to change are more complex and less amenable to change through teaching than we previously believed.

Affective factors such as locus of control, self-esteem, and self-efficacy make a difference in whether and how much students learn. Even in something as apparently simple as time management, the key seems to be whether the student feels able to control her own time, not her activities nor the logs nor the schedules she keeps nor the priorities she sets.

Similarly whether we are teaching reading, SI, or skills, it is apparent that it's not what we teach, but the way that we teach it that may be the determining factor in whether students learn skills and can transfer them to their mainstream college courses.

References

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Britton, B. K. & Tesser, A. (1991). Effects of time-management practices on college grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(3), 405-410.

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