Problems of understanding in classrooms: Students' use of clarifying tactics

Abstract Problems of understanding in classrooms, while painfully apparent to most teachers and students, have not been systematically explored. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory investigation designed to identify the types of understanding problems that students experience in classrooms and the tactics that they use to resolve those problems. One hundred and twenty‐four students responded to a survey instrument in which they were asked to describe a particular classroom understanding problem and report on the behaviors that they used in coping with that problem. Our findings indicate that meaningful distinctions can be made among classroom understanding problems and that tactical usage varies systematically in relation to characteristics of the situation (i.e., size of class and typical instructional format) and the type of understanding problem experienced.