Elaboration Strategy: Episodes

This posting focuses on Steps One and Two of an Elaboration Strategy when the Elaboration Task in Step One uses Episodes. Episodes represent the sequential structure of events as narrative incidents or stories Learners recall episodes in temporal order, such as "First the person did this, and then did that." [1] During the many tens of thousands of years between the time we homo sapiens possessed language but not writing, we learned prodigious amounts of information about our culture by listening to the elder's stories containing that information. Our brains seem to be hard wired for episodic memory. It is a useful cognitive ability to employ in helping students learn target information.

STEP ONE: ENCODE TARGET AND ELABORATION INFORMATION

The purpose of instruction in Step One is for students to initially encode the target information and elaboration information together in long-term memory.

ELABORATION TASK (Episodes)

Episodes are an effective elaboration for verbal target information, whether written or spoken. Single words are remembered better when they are presented in meaningful episodic sentences than if the words are presented by themselves [2]. The more meaningful an episode is for a student, the greater its effectiveness as an elaboration. Sentences supplied by students that describe personal experiences are remembered better than sentences supplied by the teacher that describe someone else's experiences [3]. Students' retrieval of a sentence is enhanced when it is presented together with other sentences that tell a story [4]. And when stories in students' reading text are personalized by substituting familiar names and places for those in the story, students remember the target information presented in those stories better [5].

Episodic elaboration consists of a story containing the target information. The most natural subject for using episodic elaboration is history, which is, after all, a chronological account of events. For example, the target information might be a list of the major events occurring and actors involved during Theodore Roosevelt's presidency in the conflict between the Army Chief of Staff, General Nelson Miles, and Elihu Root, Secretary of War. Root wanted to "modernize" the military by promoting line and staff officers based on merit rather than seniority, and creating a general staff answerable to the civilian control of the War Department. The general liked things the way they were. Because of their opposition, the general wanted revenge on the President and the Secretary of War, and he thought he had found the lethal weapon, a secret report of atrocities perpetrated by American forces against the insurrectos in the Philippines. A shining example of target information woven into an engrossing episodic elaboration is found in in the book Theodore Rex in Chapter 6, entitled "Pilots Aboard, and Rocks Ahead." [6] The chapter begins with a quote that has a decidedly current ring to it: "It looks to me as if this counthry was goin' to th' devil." The stories could be presented as a lecture, or students could read it. If students were assigned to read the information, the teacher should spend some time in class reviewing the information, perhaps as post-adjunct questions.

ELABORATION GUIDANCE

If the information is presented by the teacher as a lecture, the teacher will want to keep students' focus on the task, perhaps by including some humor, or some references to current events, such as the feeling in 1902 that there was chaos everywhere, and how some people are expressing that feeling today.

STEP TWO: PRACTICE RETRIEVING TARGET INFORMATION

Have all students retrieve the target information from long-term memory outside of the context of the episodic elaboration. In other words, concentrate on the target information.

RECALL-PRACTICE TASK

Students should practice recall the target information by itself after they read or heard it along with the episodes. The teacher might ask adjunct questions that involve both summarizing the target information, and making analogies to other information, such as how the conflict etween Army Chief of Staff General Miles and Secretary of War Elihu Root during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt is analogous to the work of Senator Goldwater and others did in the 1960s in reorganizing the senior military commanders and their relationships to the civilians in the Department of Defense. Students might be asked orally in class, or they might be given questions to answer in writing.

RECALL-PRACTICE GUIDANCE

While students answer questions the teacher provides confirming feedback when students respond adequately. When students are unable to recall an item of target information, the teacher refers them back to pertinent episodes. For example, students might be unable to recall the details of President Theodore Roosevelt's involvement in the conflict between Army Chief of Staff General Miles and Secretary of War Elihu Root. The teacher could ask students to think about the letter President Roosevelt wrote to General Miles about how the so-called atrocities against the Philippine insurrectos was like how the troops under General Mile's command had killed many women and children during an earlier fight at Wounded Knee. The specificity of the teacher's guidance should vary as students' ability to retrieve the target information increases. For example, less specific teacher guidance than the one shown above might be to simply say, "Think about Roosevelt's letter to Miles." The way the teacher provides guidance provides students a model of how they can retrieve target information themselves from a remembered episode.

READING EXAMPLE

Episodic memory can be utilized effectively when teaching beginning readers or low-ability readers of almost any age. The purpose is to help students learn to read the words in their oral vocabulary, the words they use when speaking. The target information for a student consists of all the words he or she uses when speaking but is unable to read. The teacher usually carries out the first step of the Elaboration Strategy with only one students at a time. In carrying out the Elaboration Task, the teacher elicits from the student a personal experience that has some chronological order. This could be accomplished a group of students once if they had a common experience, such as a field trip they took yesterday to the local bakery. A student draws a picture of the personal experience, possibly on a large enough piece of paper for a story to be written below the picture, so the pictorial representation of the story and the written story are in close physical proximity, which facilitates their being encoded together. When the picture for the story is completed, the student is asked to describe the experience; this elicits an oral rendition of the story. Then the teacher helps the student dictate sentences for the story, and the teacher prints them on the paper. The student is then asked to read each sentence in the story. If the students has difficulty with any word, the teacher says the word and prints it on another piece of paper or tag board. The students reads the sentences with the teacher providing guidance until he or she can read each word correctly.

The second step of the strategy, Recall Practice, can be carried out with a small number of students at one time even though students may have different words to learn. The Recall-Practice Task for each student is based on the words the teacher printed individually for the student on pieces of paper or tag board. The teacher shows the student a printed word and asks him or her to say it. If the students says it correctly, they go onto the next word. If the student cannot say it correctly, the teacher provides Recall-Practice Guidance by asking the student to think back to the story. If the student still cannot say the word, the teacher provides more explicit guidance by having the student describe the story. If the student still cannot say the word, the teacher brings out the story and picture and asks the student to read it and locate the word in the story he or she is having difficulty saying. Then the story and picture are taken away and the student is again shown the word in isolation and asked to say it. Then they go onto the next word card. The first and second steps of the Elaboration Strategy can be accomplished fairly competently by volunteer adults. The second step of the strategy can be carried out by cross-aged tutors or older adults. In order for them to carry out the strategy effectively the tutors, whether they be adults or older students, should be trained on how to carry out the strategy.

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1. (For example). Schank, R.C. (1975). The structure of episodes in memory. In D.G. Bobrow & A. Collins, (Eds.). Representation and understanding. New York: Academic Press.

2. (For example). Delaney, H.D. (1978). Interaction of individual differences with visual and verbal elaboration instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 306-318.

3. (For example). Ley, R., & Lacascio, D. (1977). Subject-generated and experimenter-supplied association as cues in recall of associatively encoded words and paralogs. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 10, 139-141.

4. White, R.T., & Gagne. R.M. (1976). Retention of related and unrelated sentences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 68, 843-852.

5. Bracken, B.A. (1982). Effect of personalized basal stories on the reading comprehension of fourth-grade poor and average readers. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 7, 320-324.

6. (An interesting, 772-paged chronological account of episodes occurring during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. 1901 - 1909, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize) Morris, E. (2001). Theodore rex. New York: Random House.