The overall meta-analysis found that study strategy interventions were moderately successful in improving academic performance relative to control groups that did not engage in the intervention. Importantly, these benefits were found regardless of student characteristics: low-ability students were able to benefit just as much as high-ability students. This finding is encouraging, particularly because it contradicts a previous meta-analysis that found no benefits of interventions to low-ability students (2). This suggests that over time, study strategy interventions have improved to accommodate a more diverse population of students.

Another piece of good news is that the most effective interventions were those that included retrieval practice exercises. For example, one successful reading intervention involved having children play games with flashcards to learn new vocabulary (3).

The Bad News

The interventions that appeared to be most effective may have been somewhat biased, because the outcome measure was designed by the same researchers that implemented the intervention (the dreaded phrase “teaching to the test” comes to mind). But interventions with independent outcome measures were also effective – just somewhat less so. The authors recommend that future intervention studies include standardized tests to measure academic achievement.

Characteristics of Effective Study Strategy Interventions

In a follow-up meta-analysis (4), the same authors dug deeper into the interventions in order to identify specific factors that determined whether an intervention was successful. Here are a few highlights:

Interventions delivered by the researchers themselves were more effective than those delivered by teachers.

themselves were more effective than those delivered by teachers. Longer interventions (e.g., 20 weeks) were no more effective than shorter interventions (e.g., 10 weeks) – if anything, there was a small effect in the opposite direction.

The number of sessions per week dedicated to the intervention did not matter, but a slight advantage was found for interventions that took up more class time.

Having students work collaboratively produced no benefits, and in fact somewhat reduced the effectiveness of the interventions.

An Unanswered Question

One problem with this meta-analysis is that multiple strategies were lumped together. For example, the “elaboration” category included effective strategies (e.g., elaborative interrogation), but also less effective strategies (e.g., summarizing). Part of the problem is that many of the interventions were designed before the field of cognitive psychology had crystalized on just a few key learning strategies that are known to be effective across a wide variety of learning situations. What would happen if an intervention was based entirely on strategies that are known to be most effective? We hope to find out soon!