STUDENT SERVICES

GENERAL ACADEMIC STRATEGIES

  • Entertaining Ideas for Educating Students

    Read on for some ideas on how to adapt common games to promote student learning, to change quiz formats to make them more enjoyable, and to introduce other classroom activities that educate students in an entertaining manner. While these strategies may appear to be designed simply to be fun, don't be misled. Each strategy has the potential to push students to take a more active role in recalling and applying previously taught academic content.

    http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/study/games.php

  • Group Response Techniques

    When students respond as a group to academic content, they are actively engaged and more likely to learn the material being taught. Just as important, the teacher can observe student responses to get immediate feedback about whether the majority of students in the class are truly understanding the academic content. Here are two group-response techniques (Heward, 1996).

    http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/classroom/groupresp.php

  • Instructional Hierarchy: Stages of Learning

    When mastering new academic skills or strategies, the student learner typically advances through a predictable series of learning stages. At the start, a student is usually halting and uncertain as he or she tries to use the target skill. With teacher feedback and lots of practice, the student becomes more fluent, accurate, and confident in using the skill. It can be very useful to think of these phases of learning as a hierarchy (See chart below). The learning hierarchy (Haring, Lovitt, Eaton, & Hansen, 1978) has four stages: acquisition, fluency, generalization, and adaptation.

    http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/genAcademic/instrhier.php

  • Introducing Academic Strategies to Students: A Direct-Instruction Approach

    This framework includes four major stages: (1) you explicitly show students how to use the skill or strategy, (2) students practice the skill under your supervision--and you give frequent corrective feedback and praise, (3) students use the skill independently in real academic situations, and (4) students use the skill in a variety of other settings or situations ("generalization").

    http://www.interventioncentral.org/htmdocs/interventions/rdngcompr/dirinstr.php