Un modelo mental de referencia

The basic assumption underlying Generative Instructional Strategy (GIS) is that learners are not passive recipient of information. Rather, they are active participants in the learning process, working to construct meaningful understanding of information found in the environment. The strategy is influenced by research in several areas of cognitive psychology, including cognitive development, human learning, human abilities, information processing, and aptitude treatment interactions.

The process of Generative Instruction has been described by Harlen and Osborne (1985) as learning through the person. Stressing the importance of generating learning, Wittrock (1974b) submitted that although a student may not understand sentences spoken to him by his teacher, it is highly likely that a student understands sentences that he generates himself.

Generative instruction is an approach to teaching that attempts to help students become active and responsible for constructing meaning from class activities by building relations across subject-matter concepts and between the subject matter and students' existing knowledge (Wittrock, 1991). Esfandiari (2003) described the objective of the Generative Instructional Strategy as an approach aimed at minimising the roles of the students as passive recipients of information and to maximising their roles in the learning process by helping them to: understand the relationships between the different parts of the subject or topic, generate links among the different parts of the subject or topic, generate relationships between their own prior knowledge and

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experience with the new information, and use the new information to solve real world problems and answer real world questions.

Further still, Generative learning has been described as a learner-centred instructional procedure with specified activities meant to encourage active cognitive processing during the course of instruction. Wittrock (1992) stated that generative learning activities require internal processing of external stimuli. Steps or activities in generative instruction should not assume dominance of the role of the learner, instructor or instruction but rather a partnership in the process. Also, Ogunleye and Babajide (2011) citing Osborn and Wittrock (1983) presented a 5-phase approach to implementing the Generative Instructional Strategy in actual classroom interaction and these are the introductory, focusing, activity, discussion and application phases.

An explanation of these phases is presented below:

Introductory Phase: The facilitator introduces learners to the task ahead of them.

He/she then distributes them into different activity groups. He/she supplies all necessary materials to each group and assigns learners in each group to specific tasks to be performed. He/she also exposes them to the concepts to be learnt. He/she familiarises learners with the processes and methods of Generative Instructional Strategy.

Focusing Phase: In this stage of the instruction, the facilitator presents the problem areas to learners. Learners are then expected to recall information and ideas from their memories as well as experiences on the problem presented. After this, every member of the group focuses on the problem, brainstorms and discusses the problem presented by the facilitator. All these pieces of information were expected to be written down and mentioned verbally. The facilitator then goes round to supervise but never correct learners‘ misconceptions.

Activity Phase: Every learner in a group is involved in performing diverse activities.

This includes carrying out some demonstration as well as performing some practical activities by following some procedural steps provided by the facilitator.

Discussion Phase: Learners discuss the results of the activities performed in their respective groups. The facilitator guides learners to provide correct answers to their misconceptions where applicable. Summaries of results are made in each group.

Application Phase: Learners present their summarised results to the whole class.

Also, they are expected to apply the new knowledge acquired to other similar or related situation with the assistance of the facilitator.

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Scholars have argued that in Generative Instruction, learners should be allowed to control their own generative processes. Meta-cognition is an important aspect of the generative process because it regulates the learner‘s cognitive activities in the learning processes and therefore surrounds the three Generative Learning processes of motivation, learning strategy, and knowledge generation. Self-monitoring is vital to the process of generating meaning because it informs the learners about their progress (Lee, Lim and Grabowski (2007). Through the process of meta-cognition and self-monitoring, learners manage their effort and available resources to generate meaning.

To generate meaning, learners actually create links or relationships between their memory and the new information. Learners need to be alert, mentally active and make use of various learning strategies in the knowledge generation process. Lee, Lim and Grabowski (2007) stated that the outcome of knowledge generation was originally investigated in reading comprehension, but other studies have since employed this model to investigate a variety of generative learning strategies that were expected to promote different levels of learning in a variety of domains such as recall, comprehension, higher order thinking and self-regulated learning skills.

The Generative Instructional Strategy is an active approach to teaching and its focus is to engage learners actively in the process of learning. This will be achieved only if learners can actively generate their own ideas and relate them together. It is a form of inductive reasoning, which is reasoning from observation to generalization.

Ogunleye and Babajide (2011) averred that one of the core areas of Generative Instructional model is that the strategy is learner-centred and learners perform activities by themselves. This strategy also motivates the students to present their conceptions, task them to identify their own misconceptions and correct such misconceptions. Also, Wittrock and Carter (1975) conducted a study to examine the ability of students to freely recall whatever has been learned using the Generative Instructional Strategy and Reproductive Strategy as treatments. The generative group was directed to organise the hierarchies, whereas the reproductive group was directed to simply copy them. The results showed better performance for the group exposed to generative treatment than the control group.

Further still, Emily and Zee (2000) investigated the effect of Generative Instructional Strategy on students‘ achievement in physics and found that the instructional strategy has a significant effect on achievement in teaching of Physics

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concepts and other science related topics. The situation in the experimental treatment group as described was quite different from that of the conventional teaching strategy where learners were passive recipients of information and the teachers were actively providing information and thereby dominating the lesson. This strategy encouraged learners to learn by rote and they would not be able to master whatever they were taught. Learners could easily forget the content of the lesson within a short interval of time.

Barab, Young and Wang (1999) reported that students in the generative activity group performed better in problem solving in a computer-based learning environment. Chularut and DeBacker (2004) investigated the effect of generative learning on students‘ achievement, self-regulation and self-efficacy in learning English as a Second Language and they found that students exposed to the generative instruction had significant greater achievement gains at post-test compared to pre-test.

Also, the results showed a positive effect of engaging in generative learning because there was an increase in the students‘ self-regulation and self-efficacy when compared with that of the control group. Available evidence from research suggests that there is little or no study on the effects of Generative Instruction on students‘ achievement in summary writing, therefore this study will determine the effects of Generative Instruction on students‘ achievement in summary writing.