2017 Volume 65 Issue 4 Pages 512-525
Recent changes in educational goals have emphasized mastering learning strategies, in addition to knowledge acquisition and utilization. To achieve these goals, an approach called "Thinking After Instruction" was introduced, and the following 4 processes were established: (a) students receive their teachers' direct instruction on basic concepts, (b) students, working in pairs, explain their understanding of what their teachers had instructed them about, (c) students attempt to solve problems that were designed to deepen their comprehension of basic concepts, and (d) students describe what they had understood and what they did not understand. The present study examined effects of interventions centered on the Thinking After Instruction approach. The interventions attempted to improve students' performance in a public elementary school mathematics class. Data from 6th grade students and their teachers were compared in the first and second year of implementation of the new method. The results from a national assessment of academic ability showed that the math scores for both knowledge acquisition (A-test) and knowledge utilization (Btest) were higher, and the variance of the A-test scores was lower in the second year. A learning-strategy test also revealed that the second-year students solved more math problems by drawing diagrams than the first-year students did. The scores of the teachers' lesson-plan task that represented effective teaching tended to be higher in the second year. The discussion deals with possible mechanisms mediating these effects.
