Illuminating learning from informative texts in secondary education : a switching replication design study

This study examined the effectiveness of explicit strategy instruction (ESI) to foster seventh-grade secondary school students? text-learning strategy use and text-learning performance. A large-scale experiment in an authentic educational setting 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 ESI-program. Multilevel piecewise growth analysis was used to examine the short-and long-term evolution in students? text-learning performance and their self-reported and observed text-learning strategy use. The results show that students? text-learning performance and strategy use improved significantly after the intervention. However, this improvement declined two months after the intervention. The present study demonstrates that ESI is a promising approach to improve secondary school students? text learning