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Strategies enhance learning. However, children and adults often fail to invoke strategic behaviors. In this article, five reasons for failure to use strategies are discussed: (a) poor cognitive monitoring, (b) primitive routines that yield a product, (c) a meager knowledge base, (d) attributions and classroom goals that do not support strategy use, and (e) minimal transfer. I argue that use and failure to use strategies are not fruitfully studied without consideration of setting. A theory of settings reminds us that, when context varies, the nature of strategic activity often varies as well.

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Dewey (1913) suggested some time ago that trying to find out what is of interest to students is an important part of schooling; on the other hand, “making things interesting” is artificial and often unsuccessful. Two studies investigating the placement of interesting detail in a text about a physicist and his scientific work are reported here. In both studies, undergraduate students were asked to read the science text under a variety of conditions and then to recall important information on a set of measures. Results indicated that attention of students was diverted from important generalizations in text to interesting, sometimes irrelevant, detail. Placement of the detail did not affect recall, but overall interestingness of the text did, particularly if students knew little about the topic of the text. Implications for instruction are discussed.