The following is based on my dissertation research. I realized that while I have done formal papers/presentations on the topic, I’ve never shared this in this space. Please note that most of the following is lifted fairly verbatim from my dissertation and related papers.
What are Prompts?
Prompts are an instructional support mechanism. They are usually placed at the front and back end of content and activities, as well as other strategic points. They are usually textual in nature, but may incorporate other types of media. Prompts may be cognitive or metacognitive in nature. See Table 1 for a summary of the most common types of prompts.
TABLE 1
Summary of cognitive and metacognitive prompts.
| Type of Prompt | Function/Definition | Example |
| Cognitive Prompts | ||
| Procedural prompts | Assisted learners in the completion of global tasks (Ge & Land, 2004) or in seeing the “big picture.” | “As you analyze the problem, what are its parts?” |
| Elaboration prompts | Designed to help the learner to formalize thoughts and explanations (Ge & Land, 2004). Provided relevant examples to the learner, or elicited relevant examples from the learner. | “What is a new example of…” and “Why is it important?” |
| Activity prompts | Designed to assist in completion of specific, what-to-do-next aspects of the activity (Davis & Linn, 2000). | “The manual states you need to…” and “The major points of the document included…” |
| Metacognitive Prompts | ||
| Process prompts | Called student’s attention to their own processes while they were performing a particular task (Lin et al., 1999). | “What relationships did you observe between…” and “What happened when you did…”
|
| Process displays | Showed students what process they have gone through to accomplish a particular task (Linn et al., 1999). | “Here is a diagram of the steps you took…” – (Show diagram). A checkmark placed beside each menu choice as the learner finished a section.
|
| Process modeling | Showed students how an expert would think through or solve a similar problem (Lin et al., 1999). | “Joe, an expert in this area, did the following…” or “Here is an expert’s procedure for the following task…”
|
Why Use Prompts?
Eliciting motivation in educational environments has the potential to augment the learning experience. While most people agree that supporting motivation is an important aspect of education environments, a universal definition of motivation eludes us – it is like trying to grasp a slippery fish in a dark cave. Still, there are enough empirical studies surrounding the issue to provide some structures one can include in any educational environment to support and hopefully elicit motivation. Prompting is one such structure.
Prompts are a type of scaffolding (Rosenshine & Meister, 1992). Prompts may be procedural, stating what to do at a given time (Palinscar, 1987). Prompts may also appear in the form of a question (King, 1991). Prompts may be cognitive or metacognitive in nature (Ge & Land, 2004). Cognitive prompts include procedural and elaboration prompts. Metacognitive prompts include reflection cues.
Cognitive and metacognitive prompts can be used in a learning environment to help students to engage in more effective problem solving and reflective learning. One of the most promising approaches to prompting involves the use of questioning strategies. These strategies have been used in well-structured contexts effectively (King, 1991; 1992; Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Steinbach, 1984), and some evidence has shown their effectiveness in ill-structured problems (Ge & Land, 2003).
Question prompts help the learner focus attention and monitor their progress (Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996; Wager & Mory, 1993). Questioning strategies have been found to foster the following important functions: focusing attention, stimulating prior knowledge, enhancing comprehension, monitoring thinking and learning processes, and facilitating problem-solving processes (Ge, 2001).
Prompting mechanisms are relatively easy to create and insert prompting mechanisms in these environments is not difficult, can reduce barrier to motivation, and should be considered when creating an educational environment.
There – the Reader’s Digest version of instructional prompts!
Bibliography
Ge, X. (2001). Scaffolding Students’ Problem-solving Processes on an Ill-structured Task Using Question Prompts and Peer Interactions. Unpublished Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.
Ge, X., & Land, S. (2004). A conceptual framework for scaffolding ill-structured problem-solving processes using question prompts and peer interactions. Educational Technology, Research, and Development, 52(2), 5-22.
King, A. (1991). Improving lecture comprehension: Effectes of a metacognitive strategy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5, 331-346.
King, A. (1992). Facilitating Elaborative Learning Through Guided Student-Generated Questioning. Educational Psychologist, 27(1), 111-126.
Palinscar, A. S. (1987). Collaborating for collaborative learning of text comprehension. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association.
Rosenshine, B., Meister, C., & Chapman, S. (1996). Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 181-221.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Steinbach, R. (1984). Teachability of reflective processes in written composition. Cognitive Science, 8, 173-190.
Wagner, W., & Mory, E. H. (1993). The role of questions in learning. In J. V. Dempsey & G. C. Sales (Eds.), Interactive instruction and feedback (pp. 55-67). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
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