Chapter 2:  Thought Question Essay

Question:  Pressley defines strategies as potentially conscious and controllable ways of achieving our goals.  Most of us are unaware of the extent to which we use strategic thinking until we must explain how to do something to someone who does not know how to do it.  Use one or more examples from your every day experience to illustrate this point (e.g., preparing a meal, movwing the lawn, etc.).  Distinguish as best you can between procedural knowledge (or skill) and strategic knowledge and skill.

            This question seems attempt to bring to conscious thought what strategies we use on a regular basis without realizing that they are occurring.  For instance, when attempting to put my children to bed for the evening, I employ several strategies for facilitating this process.  I give them a bath for relaxation purposes, I spend a few minutes quietly discussing their day to find resolution to any unresolved business, and I read to them to give them something to occupy their mind as they drift off to sleep.  The procedures that I use are having them brush their teeth, change into pajamas, climb into bed and then I cover them up with their blankets. 

            According to Anderson’s ACT* theory, the procedures that my children employ for getting to bed started out as declarative knowledge.  When my children were younger, it was necessary to ask the children what they needed to do next in the process to get ready for bed but as time has past they know without verbalization the steps necessary to complete this task.  This would indicate a proceduralization that is taking place in my children’s thought processes.  As my daughter, who is now nine, has grown older she is able to put into use strategies that I have used with her in the past to facilitate her own process, i.e. read a few chapters in a book and take a shower.  I wrote my expectations for her process of getting to bed on a dry erase board when she was seven, and able to read, and had her check off the steps as they were completed each evening.  This was an attempt to rehearse the strategies and procedures needed to go to bed easily and by age 9 she had mastered these steps and no longer needed the list to remember the steps that had been step up. On page 25, the book discusses research, by Sharp, Cole, & Lave, that indicates that this type of success with rehearsal of strategies could be attributed to the number of years she has received formal Western-style schooling.

            Another example of a strategy I employ in my everyday life concerns keeping my home organized.  We own a two-story home and often there are items that need to be taken either upstairs or downstairs.  The procedure would be to take whichever item that needs to be moved at any given time to the other location immediately.  Often, this does not occur and clutter is the result.  The strategy that we have developed is the leaving of a basket at both the foot and top of the staircase.  When one of us recognizes that an item needs to go either up or down, we place it in the basket until we are either heading up or down for a more immediate concern, i.e. to let the dog out.  The procedure is the appropriate placement of an item and the strategy would be the cognitive reminder system of the visualization of a full basket to be transported.  As one might expect, often I am the only person in the family that carries out this procedure unprompted.  But it is interesting to note that the text states, page 39, research that concludes that individuals will carry out a procedure if prompted to do so but will not do it if unprompted.  I have found this to be true in my household as well.  I gentle reminder to any one individual is enough to facilitate the procedure of placing the items in their appropriate places at convenient moments.  I wonder if this issue is related to short-term memory capacity.  For example, if my six year old is thinking about the ice cream truck that is driving by, whether he has enough allowance to buy anything, concern about not letting the dog out when he opens the door, wondering where he left his bike so that he can catch the ice cream truck and worrying about trying to be the first neighborhood kid to get to the truck, he may not have the capacity in his working memory to remember to take his plastic bat and ball back to the garage as he heads down the front staircase.

            While employing strategies through rehearsal memory to go to bed may be effective with my children, I have not been able to think of a system of pattern recognition to tackle the strategy of taking their possessions either up or down the staircase when visually prompted to do so.  I have had greater success with the first instance and perhaps that can be explained by the development of a concrete way, checking off a list of dry erase board instructions, of rehearsing the strategies.