Strategy Instruction for Academically At‐risk Students: An Exploratory Study of Teaching “Higher‐order” Reading and Writing in the Social Studies

This paper describes a “cognitive apprenticeship” approach to instruction (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989), used with 58 seventh‐grade social studies students who were identified as at risk of academic failure. Their three teachers were given 20 hours of training with this approach, which emphasizes explicit instruction of higher‐order cognitive strategies within the contexts where they are used through modeling, monitoring, and collaborative role‐play activities. The teachers developed lessons based on this approach over 7 months. Changes in communicative and cognitive strategy use were assessed through analyses of biweekly observations of classroom dialogue (Cazden, 1988) and reasoning scores in students’ written arguments (Hillocks, 1987). There were notable increases in exploratory, higher‐order instruction by these teachers over time, as well as increases in students’ interactions involving higher‐order questions. The students’ written argumentation scores significantly improved, both in comparison to their own initial essays and to a random sampling (N = 24) of “general” students’ written arguments composed without apprenticeship support; the scores improved independently of teacher‐based judgments of the amount of information available about a chosen topic. Comparisons of grades awarded to the final written arguments by two other social studies teachers yielded no significant differences between at‐risk and general student groups. The results of this study are discussed in relation to recent cognitive theory and research of at‐risk students’ learning.