13.1 Appendix b: deciding for yourself about the research  (Page 14/20)

Facilitating complex thinking: identifying attitude-treatment interactions

As we have stated in various places in this chapter, and as many teachers will confirm from experience, there seems to be no instructional strategy that is best for all students. Instead a more guarded comment may be more accurate: there seem to be strategies that are especially good for certain students under certain conditions. Educational psychologists have long studied this idea and call it aptitude-treatment interaction (abbreviated ATI ) (Cronbach&Snow, 1977; Snow, 1989). The aptitude in this term is the unique quality, talent, or skill of a student; the treatment is the instructional strategy or approach being used; and the interaction is the combination of the two.

The idea seems intuitively appealing, but it has proved surprisingly difficult to identify particular ATIs scientifically. Part of the problem is the ambiguity of the term aptitude. Numerous qualities, talents, and skills of students have been identified and studied, including memory for verbal material, memory for visual material, memory for sequences of ideas, ability to analyze a problem into its parts, and creativity .

The situation is just as ambiguous in defining treatment. Is it a specific teacher-directed strategy such as the use of advance organizers described in this chapter? Or does treatment mean a broad approach such as Madeline Hunter’s effective teaching model that we describe in this chapter, or like student-centered inquiry learning that we also describe? Since both key terms have multiple possible meanings, it is not surprising that research studies of their combinations have also yielded ambiguous results. Sometimes a particular combination of aptitude and treatment help learning, but other times it makes little difference.

In spite of these problems with the research as a whole, the specific studies of ATIs have clearly been helpful to teachers. In one, for example, the researchers investigated human ecology students’ preferred styles of learning—their aptitudes (Crutsinger, Knight,&Kinley, 2005). Did they prefer, for example, to learn from visual information (pictures, diagrams) or from verbal information (text and oral explanations)? Did they prefer to scan new information in sequence, or to skip around in it and piece it together at the end? The researchers found that this particular group of students tended to prefer new information to be visual and sequential. As a result, they were able to improve students’ learning by adding to the course more computer-based instruction, which was relatively visual and sequential in its organization.

In another study, the researcher who initially was studying cooperative learning groups in university students discovered—and wondered why—some of the groups were more productive than others (Peterson, 2004). On closer investigation of the groups he found an ATI-related problem. Students in this particular university course were choosing their own group partners. They therefore tended to choose their own friends, a practice that inadvertently reduced the talents and resources available in some groups. Friends, it seemed, tended to duplicate each other’s styles of problem solving and of performing academic tasks, rendering the group as a whole less rich in talents and therefore less productive or successful.