Educational Psychology Review, 7ol. 2, No. 1, 1990 A Primer of Research on Cognitive Strategy Instruction: The Important Issues and How To Address Them Michael Pressley, 1,6 Vera Woloshyn,2 Linda M. Lysynchuk,2 Vicky Martin, 3 Eileen Wood, 4 and Teena Willoughby 5 Five types of strategy research are reviewed. (1) We argue it makes sense first to determine whether there is a need for strategy instruction. If there is, (2) development of a treatment with preliminary evaluations can follow, as can (3) formal evaluation of the resultant intervention in true experiments. As instructional need research, strategy development, and experimental evalu- ation proceed, two other types of research should be conducted. (4) It is im- portant to study the acceptability of strategy interventions to educators and students. (5) Research on material modifications can provide information about how strategy benefits can be made available to students when strategy instruction is not effective or unlikely to occur. Very little strategy instruc- tion has been evaluated in all five types of research covered here, making obvious the need for more systematic research on strategies. Observational, ethnographic, and experimental methods are required in order to address the many issues comprising comprehensive empirical analysis of any type of strategy instruction, with many recommendations made here about how to conduct informative studies. KEY WORDS: cognitive strategies; instruction; cognition. ~Department of Human Development/Institute of Child Study, Benjamin Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742. 2University of Western Ontario. 3University of Windsor. 4Wilfred Lanrier University. sUniversity of Waterloo. 6To whom all correspondence should be addressed. 1 1040-726x/90/0300-0001506.00/0 © 1990 PlenumPublishing Corporation