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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Educational Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Review of Educational Research.The aim of this review is to identify features of study skills interventions that are likely to lead to success. Via a meta-analysis we examine 51 studies in which interventions aimed to enhance student learning by improving student use of either one or a combination of learning or study skills. Such interventions typicallyfocused on task-related skills, self-management of learning, or affective components such as motivation and self-concept. Using the SOLO model (Biggs & Collis, 1982), we categorized the interventions (a) into four hierarchical levels of structural complexity and (b) as either near or far in terms oftransfer. The results support the notion of situated cognition, whereby it is recommended that training other than for simple mnemonic performance should be in context, use tasks within the same domain as the target content, and promote a high degree of learner activity and metacognitive awareness.The present article reviews studies of attempts to improve student learning by interventions outside the normal teaching context. Generically, these can be called study skills interventions, although this term has had varied usage to cover a multitude of disparate programs. For present purposes, a normal teaching context is one in which teaching is principally focused on the content to be taught and learned, although secondary aims may be to focus on procedural skills or other cognitive, metacognitive, and affective attributes of the learner. An innovation or other departure from normal teaching becomes an intervention in the sense intended in this review when it (a) is outside what the teacher(s) involved in the study intended to do in the course of teaching; (b) requires, therefore, an outside person (e.g., the experimenter) to design and evaluate the intervention; (c) involves a formal experimental design that includes provision for evaluating the effects of the intervention; and (d) focuses on independent variables that aim to increase various kinds of performances, usually including academic performance but going beyond content learning itself.These interventions have aimed at enhancing motivation, mnemonic skills, selfregulation, study-related skills such as time management, and even general ability Effects of Study Skills Interventions others appear not to? Under what conditions do interventions work best, if they work at all?In more recent years, the discussion has turned to study skills in relation to such factors as learning strategy training, motivation, self-efficacy, self-regulation, transfer, and the context of interve...

This study examines differences between Australian and Japanese secondary school students' conceptions of learning and their use of self-regulated learning strategies. Australian students have a narrow, school-based view of learning. The Japanese students view learning from a much broader perspective. For them, learning is not only related to what happens at school, it is also seen as a lifelong, experiential process leading to personal fulfillment. However, in spite of these differences in learning conceptualizations, the strategies used by students in a Western learning context are similar to those used by Japanese students. A conception of learning as "understanding" is associated with a greater total use of strategies for both Australian and Japanese students.There are many clear descriptions of the characteristics of good self-regulators of learning. Typically, self-regulators are characterized as purposeful, strategic, and persistent in their learning. They possess the ability to evaluate their own progress in relation to the goals they have set and to adjust subsequent behavior in light of those self-evaluations. Selfregulated learners generate and direct their own learning experiences rather than act in response to external controls. In sum, they are self-initiators who exercise personal choice and control of the methods needed to attain the learning goals they have set for themselves.Although such descriptions provide important information about the students in classrooms, they do not tell why or how students become self-regulators. A model of selfregulated learning, set within the framework of social cognitive theory, proposes that personal, environmental, and behavioral factors operate separately but interdependently as students engage in academic tasks (Zimmerman, 1990). Of the personal factors that influence learning, social cognitive theory emphasizes the role of students' self-efficacy beliefs. A less emphasized set of beliefs, but nevertheless one with the potential to influence the learning strategies used, is students' conceptions of learning itself. In turn, how

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This meta-analysis examined 74 studies in which there had been an intervention that aimed to improve the behavioral, cognitive, and/or social functioning of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or attention deficit disorder (ADD). Overall, there were larger effects of the various interventions on behavioral than on educational outcomes. These overall effects were larger for medical interventions than for educational, psychosocial, or parent training interventions, but there was little support for flow-over effects, from the reduction in behavior problems to enhanced educational outcomes. The effects on educational outcomes were greater for educational interventions than for other types of intervention. KEYWORDS: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, educational interventions, medical interventions, meta-analysis, psychological interventions.In the 1990s, there was a remarkable increase in the number of students diagnosed as possessing attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity. This increase has been accompanied by an upsurge in the administration of drugs to "assist" these students, particularly in classroom activities, and this remedy has led to many controversies. The efficacy of a range of interventions for attention deficit disorder is still a matter of lively debate, and there is growing concern over the increase in diagnosis, the rate of prescription of drugs, and the use of medication as the sole method of treatment. Juxtaposed with the increase in diagnosis is a phenomenal growth in the literature on this topic. For instance, in searches of Medline, PsycLIT and ERIC from 1990 to 1999, we found 1,379, 2,546, and 436 citations, respectively, in which attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was a key phrase. In a similar period of time, one decade earlier, there were 40, 317, and 35 citations, respectively, in the same electronic databases. Even when the key phrase attention deficit disorder (ADD) was used (to account for the previously more commonly used term), the citations in this earlier period were 450 in Medline, 833 in PsycLIT, and 82 in ERIC.