Topic: Literacy; Thinking skills and assessment

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Triarchic (analytical, practical and creative) instruction

Grigorenko, E. L., Yale University U.S.A. and Moscow State University, Russia, and Jarvin, L., and Sternberg, R.J., Yale University, U.S.A.

Contemporary Educational Psychology 27, 167-208 (2002)

(Original title: School-based tests of the triarchic theory of intelligence: three settings, three samples, three syllabi)

How can psychological theory help to improve students' achievement in school?

Many studies have investigated how to improve students' achievement in school, but, the authors argue, these strategies are rarely derived from psychological theories. This paper reported the effects on students' achievement and thinking skills of a teaching intervention strategy derived from a psychological theory of intelligence.

Three large scale studies were conducted, involving altogether 1,300 middle and secondary school students, mostly from low socio-economic backgrounds. Students' vocabulary and comprehension skills were compared through before and after tests in different curriculum areas over time. The students were taught in one of two different ways: conventional (memory-based) instruction and what the authors referred to as ‘triarchic’ (analytical, practical and creative) instruction.

The research found that, by integrating the theory into the normal school curriculum, which involved minimal teacher training, psychological theory could successfully support to improvements in educational achievement. Specifically, the studies showed that triarchic teaching was easily implemented in classrooms using existing textbooks and led to improved student performance when compared with conventional instruction.

Keywords

USA; Thinking skills; Literacy; Reading; Secondary schools; Teaching methods; Creativity; Cognitive development

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What is triarchic instruction?page 3

How can students be taught and assessed using the triarchic method?page 4

Was triarchic instruction an effective teaching approach?page 5

Why was triarchically based instruction found to be effective at

improving students' school achievement and thinking skills? page 6

How was the study designed?page 7

Implicationspage 8

Where can I find out more?page 9

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What is triarchic instruction?

Triarchic instruction is based on Sternberg’s theory of 'Successful Intelligence', which is defined as 'a set of mental abilities used to achieve one's goals in life' (Sternberg, 1998). In this, successful intelligence is assumed to involve three domains that are interrelated, but largely distinct: analytical, creative, and practical thinking.

Triarchic instruction is based on the assumption that in all subject areas, low achievement is sometimes caused by students not understanding what they are reading. Triarchic instruction targets the three main thinking skills identified by Sternberg:

  • analytical skills (analysing, judging, evaluating, comparing and contrasting, and critiquing);
  • creative skills (creating, inventing, discovering, imagining and supposing); and
  • practical skills (implementing, using, applying and seeking relevance).

Conventional memory-based instruction by contrast, involves memorising, recalling, recognising and repeating.

Typically, triarchic instruction involves a specific four-part lesson structure:

  1. Introduction - the teacher establishes ties between the concepts to be taught with previously acquired knowledge and encourages students to discuss them.
  2. Reading - a period of reading, either silently or aloud, a section from a textbook that covers the main concepts to be taught.
  3. Vocabulary - several activities are offered covering the following targets:
  4. identifying new words;
  5. teaching the meaning of the new words;
  6. reviewing newly acquired words and their meaning; and
  7. applying the newly acquired knowledge.

The activities are either individual or group exercises, focusing on analytical, creative or practical skills.

  1. Comprehension - individual or group comprehension activities focused on the main concepts and using analytical, creative or practical skills.

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How can students be taught and assessed using the triarchic method?

Instruction

The following examples of instruction materials designed to teach students' analytical, creative and practical vocabulary and comprehension skills, are taken from the first study reported in the paper, involving fifth graders (10 -11 year olds)

Developing analytical skills Classroom exercises were designed to help students analyse and solve problems in collaboration with others, or to evaluate opportunities and make choices. For example:

Each group to make a portrait of a given character using their own understanding of the character based on details supplied in the story - what the words tell them about the character etc.

Developing creative thinking involved going beyond the presented material. Creative exercises helped students to invent, explore, discover and imagine, by asking them challenging questions to which there were no 'correct' answers. For example:

How can you get the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?

Practical exercises encouraged students to use what they had learned. Students were asked to apply their knowledge to an everyday problem, or to think of practical applications of what they had read. For example:

In the story the students have read, the characters prepare for a major event. The students are asked to put themselves in the role of the main character and to describe what they would do to prepare for a big family relocation.

Assessment

The following examples of materials designed to assess students' analytical, creative and practical vocabulary and comprehension skills, are taken from the third study reported in the paper, involving students in grades 10 -12 (15 -18 year olds)

Analytical skills

The students were given a passage to read about Alan Stocker's paintings.

Analytical vocabulary skills were assessed by asking students to identify the most likely meaning of the word intricate:

Intricate most likely means a) entangled b) simple c) invisible d) rational

Analytical comprehension skills were assessed by asking students to:

Compare and contrast the distinct features of Stocker's paintings with the distinct features of any other painter you know.

Creative skills

The students were given a passage to read about human cells.

Creative vocabulary skills were assessed by asking students to:

Think of and write a sentence with the word senescent in it. (Modified sentences from the paragraph above are not acceptable).

Creative comprehension skills were assessed by asking students to:

Suppose that based on the experiments described above, a drug company develops a medication that prevents ageing. This company hires you to develop an ad two or three sentences long to go along with a picture of the container of the drug. What would you write?

Practical skills

The students were given a passage to read about the globe.

Practical vocabulary skills were assessed by asking students:

If you take off from Europe and keep going east, you start going west when you cross

a)the equator b) the Greenwich meridian c) the longitude d) never

Practical comprehension skills were assessed by asking students:

Suppose you move 40o eastward, but stay at the same latitude where you are now. What willbe the most apparent difference between the two locations - that is, a difference that will force you to change your daily schedule?

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Was triarchic instruction an effective teaching approach?

Statistical analyses, performed by the researchers, revealed that students taught triarchically profited more than those taught conventionally in the control group. An analysis, made by the digest authors, of the pre-test post test data, shows that students taught by the triarchic method made the following increases in their levels of performance over and above the control group:

Study 1 (Teachers and 10-11 year old students, four month programme based on six books from a standard reading scheme):

analytical skills, 8.1%; practical skills, 4.0%; creative skills 20.5%;

Study 2 (Teachers and 12-13 year old students, six week summer school reading programme based on two books):

analytical skills, 15.2%; practical skills, 16.3%; creative skills, 41.5%;and

Study 3 (Teachers and15-18 year oldstudents, daily lessons across a number of subjects):

analytical skills, 11.8%; practical skills, 42.5%; creative skills, 16.7%.

Other findings included:

Study 1

  • students in the triarchic group in both cohorts advanced more than their peers in the control group;
  • the students who gained most tended to be those who demonstrated lower standardised reading scores in the pre-test;
  • boys and girls of all ethnic backgrounds and at all levels of writing ability benefited equally from the project;
  • neither boys nor girls of any specific ethnic background showed differential improvement for a particular type of task - memory, analytical, creative or practical;
  • teachers rated the triarchic programme as highly interesting and motivating;
  • 80.8% of the students liked, or liked the programme very much, 12.1% were indifferent to it, and only 7.1% disliked it;

Study 2

  • the pattern of findings reported in study 1 were generally replicated;
  • all students on the summer programme improved their performance on all types of tasks; the improvement reached the level of statistical significance on the practical and creative tasks (i.e. the probability of the results having happened by random chance was very low) but not on the memory-analytical tasks;

Study 3

  • triarchic training had a significant impact on performance scores; and
  • teachers rated the triarchic programme highly, whilst 36% of students liked or liked it very much, 40% were indifferent to it, and 24% of students disliked the programme.

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Why was triarchically based instruction found to be effective at improving students' school achievement and thinking skills?

The authors gave the following reasons why triarchically taught(link to p3 ‘What is triarchic instruction?)students in their studies performed better than conventionally taught students:

  • with triarchic instruction, students 'thought in order to learn' and 'learned to think';
  • triarchic instruction linked new knowledge to what was already known, so it should help recall more than 'mindless repetition' of sets of words associated with conventional memory-based instruction;
  • triarchic instruction struck a balance in reading instruction between phonic and whole-language methods;
  • triarchic instructionallowed teachers to teach material in three different ways so studentswere better able to process what they learn;
  • teaching triarchically enabledstudents to capitalise on their natural strengths and helped them to correct or compensate for weaknesses;
  • instruction that enabled students to capitalise on their strengths was likely to be more motivating than instruction that did not allow them to do so; and
  • the method motivated students to succeed because the instruction was more interesting.

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How was the study designed?

Three separate studies were conducted, involving different curriculum areas and students of different ages and abilities, but drawn mostly from low socio-economic groups:

Study 1 involved thirteen teachers, and 323 fifth grade students, attending four middle schools. The four month programme was based upon six books selected from a standard reading scheme for fifth graders. The study was repeated one year later with a second cohort of 486 fifth grade students, attending seven middle schools, and taught by 20 teachers. Two cohorts were studied to determine whether improvements in a site noted in the first cohort were replicated.

Study 2 involved sixty-two, high achieving, seventh grade students, attending a six week summer school reading programme, based around two fiction books.

Study 3 involved 432 students from grades 10-12, studying one curriculum unit, lasting four-six weeks. Data was collected on a sub-sample of 199 students. The teachers met with the students daily for 80 minute lessons and used existing commercial textbooks. Various subject areas, such as mathematics, geography, biology, history, foreign languages and the arts were covered by the study.

The research design for all three studies was the same:

  • the students were randomly divided into evenly sized experimental and control groups, The experimental group was taught using triarchic methods while the control group was taught in the conventional way;
  • the students were assessed before the intervention started and after the intervention finished, to examine differences in achievement over time that might result from the two different approaches. Assessment includedmultiple-choice and open-ended questions, marked blind by trained independent assessors;
  • gender, ethnicity, standard achievement and reading ability - were 'controlled' for, in order to demonstrate that differences in the change in achievement could be attributed to the triarchic teaching approach specifically and not to the students’s backgrounds or their individual characteristics;
  • to counter any distortion of research results that might be caused by the response of students and teachers to the special attention they receive from researchers, both groups of teachers received training. Teachers in the experimental group participated in a two-part workshop covering triarchic instruction, assessment and general issues of teaching reading for content. Teachers in the control group had a one-part workshop on mnemonic memory technique training and teaching reading for content;
  • teachers were asked to rate, on a seven point scale, where one was low and seven was high, whether they found the programme to be professionally interesting and motivating, and evaluate the educational and motivational relevance of the programme to their students; and
  • students were asked whether/how much they liked the programme and what their favourite components of the programme were.

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Implications

In completing this digest, the authors began to ask the following questions about implications for practitioners:

  • the importance of students gaining a deep understanding of their work was central to the project - would greater use of formative assessment practices helpyou to deepen your knowledge of how well your students understand their work?
  • the study relied on a two-part workshop to train teachers to use triarchic teaching strategies - to what extent could you integrate triarchic teaching strategies into your own schemes of work and teaching plans, using the PACE website as a resource?
  • what sort of professional development activities would help you and your teacher colleagues to develop a range of activities and questions of the sort used in this study?

In completing this digest, the authors began to ask the following questions about implications for school leaders:

  • does it make sense to adopt a whole-school approach to triarchic teaching strategies? If so, how might this be developed effectively?
  • how can you make time available in your school or department for peer observation and professional dialogue in order to offer teachers the opportunities to reflect on and refine their strategies?

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Where can I find out more?

Sternberg, R. J. (1998) Principles of teaching for successful intelligence. Educational Psychologist, 33, 65-71.

Triarchic teaching involves an approach to teaching and learning which shares some features of approaches in the UK which are aimed at improving students’ thinking. For example see the work of Adey, P. and Shayer, M. (1994): Really Raising Standards: cognitive intervention and academic achievement. London: Routledge. A summary of this work is available here: