Instructional strategies and conceptual changes.

Abstract

The schema activating instructional strategy of Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) has been demonstrated as an effective way of teaching vocabulary and comprehension. This study compared the SFA to three other strategies of Direct Instruction (DI), Vocabulary Look Up (VLU), and Read Only (RO) for their effectiveness to help students clarify prior misconceptions. Student responses on multiple choice pre and post tests and their written recalls were the dependent variables in this study. Subjects were four classes of 127 normal seventh and eighth grade students. The classes were randomly assigned intact to the four instructional strategies: SFA, DI, VLU, and RO. Students were pretested and then instructed using a passage on the Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution according to their assigned strategies. They then took the posttest and wrote recalls. Students misconceptions in the pretest were tabulated and compared to those in the posttest to determine which of the four strategies was most effective in helping students clarify their prior misconceptions about the Fourth Amendment. Then students' written recalls were analyzed according to various conceptual categories to learn which strategy helped the students to recall the reading passage. The structure of the students' writing was also examined to find out which of the four strategies helped the students the most in integrating the new information and writing most coherently. The SFA group clarified and corrected significantly more items on the multiple choice test than any of the other groups. This finding suggests that an interactive strategy such as SFA facilitates student memory and learning of content area material. The results also demonstrated that students taught through the strategy of semantic feature analysis recalled more conceptual units than the other groups. They also wrote more cohesively with clearer structure than the others.