Strategy, Competence and Conversation as Determinants of Learning.

Abstract The paper reviews some practical consequences of a recent theory of learning and teaching. In the light of these, it is contended that attention should be given to the student's learning and performance strategies; that the strategies employed in a teaching system should be matched to the student's underlying competence to execute them and that an effective teaching system should be conversationally structured insofar as appropriately matched strategies can only be determined in an active (though possibly mechanised) dialogue between the teacher and the student. These points of view are supported by a series of experiments on relation learning (fully reported elsewhere) that have been carried out in the author's laboratory.