Abstract: There are many, many problems that human beings attempt, with some strategies more likely to result in success than others. Understanding effective performance requires understanding the psychology of strategies; promoting human effectiveness at a task requires understanding of the strategies that can accomplish the task and how to develop such strategies among learners. Strategies development has deservedly received much study by cognitive psychologists, with educational psychologists doing much work to detail how affective, behavioral, and cognitive strategies develop, and can be developed, to increase student performance with respect to important academic tasks. In this chapter, we begin with a definition of a 'strategy' and a brief discussion of constructs related to research in this area, including procedural and declarative knowledge, long- and short-term memory, metacognition, and good information processing. We then turn to important findings from the earliest research on human strategies use, as these are both critical to understanding current research and to the development of further research. What we have learned about strategies use and strategies instruction in academic areas among students in the elementary through secondary grades then becomes the focus of this chapter.
