Category

Definition

Identifying similarities & differences

Helping students compare, classify, and create metaphors and analogies

Summarizing & note taking

Helping students analyze, sift through, and synthesize information in order to decide which new information is most important to record and remember

Reinforcing effort & providing recognition

Teaching students about the role that effort can play in enhancing achievement and recognizing students for working toward an identified level of performance

Homework & practice

Providing students with opportunities to learn new information and skills and to practice skills they have recently learned

Nonlinguistic representations

Helping students generate nonlinguistic representations of information, including graphic organizers, pictures and pictographs, mental pictures, concrete representations, and kinesthetic activity

Cooperative learning

Creating opportunities for students to develop positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills and group processing

Setting goals & providing feedback

Helping students set their own learning goals in order to establish direction and providing students with timely feedback about their progress

Generating & testing hypotheses

Helping students generate and test hypotheses through a variety of tasks, through systems-analysis, problem-solving, historical investigation, invention, experimental inquiry, and decision-making

Activating prior knowledge

Helping students retrieve what they already know about a topic