Technical training: an application of a strategy for learning structural and functional information

Abstract

Little research has been directed to the development of learning strategies for acquiring technical information. The present experiment tested a strategy, developed from principles on general text processing, for learning technical material, specifically, structural and functional information. In addition, the effectiveness of cooperative learning was examined as a technique for learning technical information and as a vehicle for implementing the strategy. The results demonstrated that cooperative learning was effective for acquiring structural and functional information and the technical learning strategy was effective for acquiring structural information.