Improving secondary school students’ text-learning strategies and performance through a strategy-focused program : a multilevel study

The ability to learn informative texts effectively is becoming increasingly important in secondary education. At this point, textbooks across different curriculum subjects are asking for the effective use of text-learning strategies. Text-learning strategies refer to the variety of activities students apply whilst processing (i.e. selecting, organising, condensing, and retaining) text information (Vermunt & Vermetten, 2004). Particularly the ability to use a variety of text-learning strategies has shown to play a pivotal role in students' learning and performance (Alexander, 2005). Unfortunately, research shows that in today’s classrooms few teachers equip their students with such a repertoire, as the teaching of text-learning strategies is difficult and challenging (Weinstein et al., 2011). Therefore, this study focusses on the impact of an explicit strategy-instruction program to foster first-grade secondary school students’ text-learning strategy use and performance. A large-scale experiment with a switching replication design (with two groups and three measurement occasions) was set up, in which 689 students followed an eight-lesson teacher-delivered strategy program. At the three measurement occasions, students’ text-learning strategy use was assessed by a learning task and a task-specific self-report inventory. Their performance was measured using a cued recall test. Multilevel piecewise growth analysis was used to examine the evolution in students’ strategy use and performance. The results show that both students’ text-learning strategy use and learning performance improved significantly after receiving the intervention. Moreover, this improvement was maintained two months after the intervention, demonstrating that a strategy-focused teaching program is a promising approach to improve secondary school students' text-learning