Month: June 2014

Creating a Metacognitive Movement for Faculty

by Charity Peak, U.S. Air Force Academy*

Faculty often complain that students don’t complete reading assignments.  When students do read, faculty yearn for deeper analysis but can’t seem to get it.  With SAT reading scores reaching a four-decade low (Layton & Brown, 2012) and nearly forty percent of postsecondary learners taking remedial coursework (Bettinger & Long, 2009), it’s not surprising that college students are increasingly unable to meet the reading expectations of professors.  Faculty sense the waning reading abilities of their students, but they struggle to identify how to address the problem.  After all, they weren’t trained to be reading teachers.

In February 2012, a group of faculty gathered for a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Circle at the U.S. Air Force Academy to discuss how to get students to read more critically.  The topic spurred such great interest that an interdisciplinary faculty learning community on Reading Critically was formed to investigate the issue and share strategies to use in the classroom.  What evolved was a collective movement by faculty to become metacognitively aware of why and how they were assigning and apprenticing students to read more critically within their disciplines.

Our first meeting tackled the big question, “What do we want to know about college reading?”  Despite our interdisciplinary nature, we easily identified several common areas of concern:  Compliance (completing reading assignments), Comprehension (understanding what they read), and Critical Analysis.  These Three C’s of College Reading guided our discussions over the next two academic years and eventually led to the creation of a website to assist other faculty members struggling with the same issues.

As academics, our first inclination was to dive into the literature to determine what other institutions had discovered about this issue.  Surely we weren’t the only faculty grappling with these concerns. Not surprisingly, the research literature confirmed that the vast majority of college students do not read assignments ahead of time and do not consider the textbook to be a critical component of learning (Berry et al., 2010).  In fact, a number of studies find that college students only read textbooks about six hours per week (Spinosa et al., 2008), with just 20-30% reading compliance for any given day and assignment (Hobson, 2004).  Faculty hoping to set the stage prior to class and engage learners in meaningful discussions during class must first address reading compliance among students.

Unfortunately, reading is not indicative of comprehension.  The combination of students’ weak reading abilities (particularly marginalized students) and difficult textbook structure produce unskilled learners, which faculty are unprepared to handle.  Hobson (2004) explains that most college teachers – content specialists – do not realize their students are struggling to comprehend assigned texts.  Furthermore, if faculty insist on emphasizing reading as part of their course structure, then “helping students improve their reading skills should be the responsibility of every college-level teacher” (p. 4). Without specific strategies to address the reading needs of students, typically far outside the spectrum of the usual subject area specialist, faculty are rendered helpless in creating deep thinking environments in the classroom.

Because low reading compliance predicts nonparticipation (Burchfield & Sappington, 2000), college faculty must address the issue in an effort to drive deeper learning.  Over the course of two years, our Reading Critically faculty learning community identified and shared several research-based strategies to assist faculty in improving reading compliance, comprehension, and critical analysis.  With no budget and nothing more than a dedication to the cause, we invited speakers to our meetings from our own institution to share how they were apprenticing readers within their courses. We discovered the value of pre-class reading guides, concept mapping, equation dictionaries, and even reading aloud in class. The interdisciplinary connectedness and learning through a common academic concern became a welcome respite from the typical silos that exist in higher education.

By the end of our first year together, our faculty learning community had gathered a wealth of research-based practices that could be implemented in courses across all disciplines.  While each of the group’s participants had learned a great deal, we weren’t sure how to spread the word and continue the movement.  Then, we discovered Carnegie Mellon’s Solve a Teaching Problem website.  Alas, a model for us to follow!  We set out to design a website for faculty to Solve a Reading Problem.   Collaboratively, we created a step-by-step way for faculty to address reading issues they were encountering in their courses:

Step 1: Identify a reading problem

Step 2: Investigate a reason for the problem

Step 3: Initiate a strategy to address the problem

Our learning community pooled resources together by suggesting various problems and solutions along with research-based literature to support our ideas.  Faculty then submitted lesson ideas and classroom strategies they found successful in their own courses to support better reading compliance, comprehension, and critical analysis.  While the website is still very much a work in progress, it represents two years of metacognition around why faculty assign readings and how to maximize those opportunities in the classroom.

Ultimately, our faculty learned that we have a responsibility to be metacognitive about our own teaching practices in order to improve learning.  This group’s commitment to the cause created an interdisciplinary metacognitive movement among our faculty that is still developing.  What metacognitive movement can you lead at your institution?

References:

Berry, T., Cook, L., Hill, N,. & Stevens, K. (2010). An exploratory analysis of textbook usage and study habits: Misperceptions and barriers to success. College Teaching, 59(1), 31-39.

Bettinger, E., & Long, B. (2009). Addressing the needs of underprepared college students: Does college remediation work? Journal of Human Resources, 44(3), 736-771.

Burchfield, C. M., & Sappinton, J. (2000). Compliance with required reading assignments. Teaching of Psychology, 27(1), 58-60.

Hobson, E. H. (2004). Getting students to read: Fourteen tips. IDEA Paper No. 40. Manhattan, KS: The IDEA Center.

Layton, L., & Brown, E. (September 24, 2012). SAT reading scores hit a four-decade low. Washington Post. Washington, D.C.

Spinosa, H., Sharkness, J., Pryor, J. H., & Liu, A. (2008). Findings from the 2007 administration of the College Senior Survey (CSS): National aggregates. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Are College Students Picky About Using Metacognitive Reading Strategies?

 by Roman Taraban, Texas Tech University

“Picky, picky” is a phrase we use to gently chide someone for being overly selective when making an apparently simple choice.  However, being picky is not always a bad thing, as I will try to show. Oddly enough, this phrase comes to mind when thinking about thinking about thinking, i.e., thinking about metacognition.  To explain the connection, I would like to consider the idea of being picky from two perspectives: research on metacognition and students’ metacognitive behaviors.

My students and I were first attracted to research on metacognition upon reading the work of Michael Pressley and colleagues, which focused on metacognitive strategies for reading comprehension.  Noteworthy in those early efforts were projects involving elementary school teachers and classroom interventions geared toward young students in an effort to teach them how to be more metacognitive in their daily schoolwork (Pressley et al., 1995).  Other work by Pressley and colleagues analyzed adult metacognitions when reading, using a think-aloud method (e.g., Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995), and metacognitions of experts when reading in their discipline (Wyatt et al., 1993). This research made a lot of sense, as it fit nicely within the broader constructs of active learning and constructivism — the belief that students needed to actively engage materials in order to benefit from study.  A simple inference to make is that the application of any active learning strategy will benefit students.   That was our assumption when we constructed and tested the Metacognitive Reading Strategies Questionnaire (MRSQ) (Taraban et al., 2000), drawing on the work of Pressley and others.   Data from 324 undergraduates from a variety of majors and levels were telling.  Of the 35 strategies that we tested, only seven were significantly associated with students’ grade-point averages (GPA).  The strategies were Evaluate text for goals, Set goals for reading, Draw on my prior knowledge, Vary reading style based on goals, Search out information for goals, Infer information, and  Look for important information (here presented in order of greatest to smallest effect sizes).  It was clear that all metacognitive strategies did not predict GPA equally well, and that the successful strategies were mostly related to reading goals. The significant correlations of academic proficiency, measured by GPA, with goal-related reading strategies, are consistent with Garner’s (1987) suggestion that skilled readers know multiple strategies and also know when to apply them.

Recent work on text recall (Schumacher & Taraban, 2014) with an undergraduate sample similar to the earlier study gave us another opportunity to examine students’ strategy use.  We asked students to read and study two expository texts and to recall as much as they could either immediately or after a 48-hour delay.  After they recalled the information, we asked them to report the strategies they used to learn the information. We organized the specific self-reported strategies into five types, as shown in the table below.  A hypothesis that application of any of these strategies would benefit subsequent performance was again not supported.  Of the five strategy types, Self-Testing was the only one that was significantly and positively correlated with recall.  We might infer that for this sample of readers and the criterion measure, which was recall, the most appropriate strategies were those related to Self-Testing.

Key Types of Self-Reported Strategies
1. REPETITION:  Re-Reading; Memorize; Repetition
2. FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC ELEMENENTS: Key words; Key concepts; Grouping terms or sentences; Identifying related concepts; Parts that stood out; Parts that were difficult
3. SELF TESTING: Summarizing; Recalling; Quizzing self; Forming acronyms
4. GENERATING COGNITIVE ELABORATIONS: Activating prior knowledge; Recalling related experiences; Re-explaining parts of the text in other ways; Comparing and contrasting ideas; Using analogiesusing mental imagery
5. SEGMENTATION: Grouping sentences for purposes of study; Divide by paragraph

In conclusion, we can draw a few observations.  As researchers, as instructors, as students, it is important to be cognizant of three interacting factors when students choose and apply metacognitive reading strategies: the criterion measure, reader-selected goals in light of the criterion measure, and readers’ sense of their own ability as it affects their choices of strategies.

ThreeFactors

The assumption that the application of any metacognitive strategy will always enhance performance is too simplistic.  It does not acknowledge the complexity of strategy choice, and it does not do justice to picky students, who are attempting to choose appropriate strategies for specific circumstances.  Some strategies lead to better retention of information and some to better grades. While these will often go together, it might further be the case that picky students know when to employ which strategy.  So maybe sometimes it’s good to be picky.

 

References

Garner, R. (1987). Metacognition and reading comprehension. Norword, NJ: Ablex.

Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading.  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pressley, M., Brown, R., El-Dinary, P. B., & Afflerbach, P. (1995).  The comprehension instruction that students need: Instruction fostering constructively responsive reading.  Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 10, 215-224.

Schumacher, J., & Taraban, R. (2014, April). Strategy use complements testing effects in expository text recall. Paper presented at Southwestern Psychological Association (SWPA) Conference. San Antonio, TX.

Taraban, R., Rynearson, K., & Kerr, M. (2000).  College students’ academic performance and self-reports of comprehension strategy use. Journal of Reading Psychology, 21, 283-308.

Wyatt, D., Pressley, M., El-Dinary, P., Stein, S., Evans, P., & Brown, R. (1993). Comprehension strategies, worth and credibility monitoring, and evaluations: Cold and hot cognition when experts read professional articles that are important to them.  Learning and Individual Differences, 5, 49-72.


Metacognitive Strategies: Are They Trainable?

by Antonio Gutierrez, Southern Georgia University

Effective learners use metacognitive knowledge and strategies to self-regulate their learning (Bol & Hacker, 2012; Bjork, Dunlosky & Kornell, 2013; Ekflides, 2011; McCormick, 2003; Winne, 2004; Zeidner, Boekaerts & Pintrich, 2000; Zohar & David, 2009). Students are effective self-regulators to the extent that they can accurately determine what they know and use relevant knowledge and skills to perform a task and monitor their success. Unfortunately, many students experience difficulty learning because they lack relevant knowledge and skills, do not know which strategies to use to enhance performance, and find it difficult to sequence a variety of relevant strategies in a manner that enables them to self-regulate their learning (Bol & Hacker, 2012; Grimes, 2002).

Strategy training is a powerful educational tool that has been shown to overcome some of these challenges in academic domains such as elementary and middle school mathematics (Carr, Taasoobshirazi, Stroud & Royer, 2011; Montague, Krawec, Enders & Dietz, 2014), as well as non-academic skills such as driving and anxiety management (Soliman & Mathna, 2009). Additional benefits of strategy training are that using a flexible repertoire of strategies in a systematic manner not only produces learning gains, but also empowers students psychologically by increasing their self-efficacy (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009). Further, a common assumption is that limited instructional time with younger children produces life-long benefits once strategies are automatized (McCormick, 2003; Palincsar, 1991; Hattie et al., 1996).

In addition to beginning strategy instruction as early as possible, it should be embedded within all content areas, modeled by teachers and self-regulated students, practiced until automatized, and discussed explicitly in the classroom to provide the greatest benefit to students. Pressley and Wharton-McDonald (1997) recommend that strategy instruction be included before, during, and after the main learning episode. Strategies that occur before learning include setting goals, making predictions, determining how new information relates to prior knowledge, and understanding how the new information will be used. Strategies needed during learning include identifying important information, confirming predictions, monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting. Strategies typically used after learning include reviewing, organizing, and reflecting. Good strategy users should possess some degree of competence in each of these areas to be truly self-regulated.

Additional strategies have been studied by Schraw and his colleagues (Gutierrez & Schraw, in press; Nietfeld & Schraw, 2002). They demonstrated that a repertoire of seven strategies is effective at improving undergraduate students’ learning outcomes and comprehension monitoring, a main component of the regulatory dimension of metacognition. Table 1 contains the seven strategies explicitly taught to students. Moreover, these strategies can function not only in contrived laboratory settings but also in ecologically valid settings, such as classrooms.

Table 1. Summary of Metacognitive Strategies and their Relation to Comprehension Monitoring

 

Strategy

 LearningProcesses

Hypothesized Influence on Comprehension
Review main objectives of the text and focus on main ideas and overall meaning Review and monitor Enhance calibration through clarifying misunderstandings and tying details to main ideas
Read and summarize material in your own words to make it meaningful; use elaboration and create your own examples Read and relate Enhances calibration by transforming knowledge into something personally meaningful
Reread questions and responses and reflect on what the question is asking; go through and take apart the question paying attention to relevant concepts Review, relate, and monitor Purposefully slowing information processing allows for a more accurate representation of the problem, thus decreasing errors in judgment
Use contextual cues in the items and responses, e.g., bolded, italicized, underlined, or capitalized words Relate Using contextual cues allows the mind to focus on salient aspects of the problem rather than seductive details, thereby increasing accuracy
Highlight text; underline keywords within the question to remind yourself to pay attention to them; use different colors to represent different meanings Review, relate, and monitor Highlighting and underlining can assist one to focus on main ideas and what is truly important, increasing accuracy; however, relying too much on this can be counterproductive and may potentially increase errors
Relate similar test questions together and read them all before responding to any Relate and monitor Relating information together provides a clearer understanding of the material and may highlight inconsistencies that need to be resolved; it may point to information the learner may have missed, increasing accuracy
Use diagrams, tables, pictures, graphs, etc. to help you organize information Review and relate These strategies help simplify complex topics by breaking them down to their constituent parts; this increases accuracy by decreasing errors

Adapted from Gutierrez and Schraw (in press).

However, while the studies by Shaw and colleagues have shown that teachers can effectively use these strategies to improve students’ comprehension monitoring and other learning outcomes, they have not thoroughly investigated why and how these strategies are effective. I argue that the issue is not so much that students are not aware of the metacognitive strategies, but rather that many lack the conditional metacognitive knowledge−that is, the where, when, and why to apply a given strategy taking into consideration task demands. Future research should investigate these process questions, namely when, how, and why different strategies are successful.

Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013).  Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417-447.

Bol, L. & Hacker, D. J. (2012). Calibration research: where do we go from here? Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 1-6.

Carr, M., Taasoobshirazi, G., Stroud, R., & Royer, J. M. (2011). Combined fluency and cognitive strategies instruction improves mathematics achievement in early elementary school. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 36, 323–333.

Dunlosky, J., & Metcalfe, J. (2009).  Metacognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Ekflides, A. (2011). Interactions of metacognition with motivation and affect in self-regulated learning: The MASRL model. Educational Psychologist, 46, 6-25.

Grimes, P. W. (2002). The overconfident principles of economics students: An examination of metacognitive skill. Journal of Economic Education, 1, 15–30.

Gutierrez, A. P., & Schraw, G. (in press). Effects of strategy training and incentives on students’ performance, confidence, and calibration. The Journal of Experimental Education: Learning, Instruction, and Cognition.

Hattie, J., Biggs, J., & Purdie, N. (1996). Effects of learning skills interventions on student learning: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66, 99-136. doi: 10.3102/00346543066002099

McCormick, C. B. (2003). Metacognition and learning. In W. M. Reynolds & G. E. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Educational psychology (pp. 79-102). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Montague, M., Krawec, J., Enders, C. & Dietz, S. (2014). The effects of cognitive strategy instruction on math problem solving of middle-school students of varying ability. Journal of Educational Psychology,106,469 – 481.

Nietfeld, J. L., & Schraw, G. (2002). The effect of knowledge and strategy explanation on monitoring accuracy. Journal of Educational Research, 95, 131-142.

Palincsar, A. S. (1991). Scaffolded instruction of listening comprehension with first graders at risk for academic difficulty. In A. M. McKeough & J. L. Lupart (Eds.), Toward the practice of theory-based instruction (pp. 50–65). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pressley, M., & Wharton-McDonald, R.  (1997).  Skilled comprehension and its development through instruction.  School Psychology Review, 26, 448-466.

Soliman, A. M. & Mathna, E. K. (2009). Metacognitive strategy training improves driving situation awareness. Social Behavior and Personality,37, 1161-1170.

Winne, P. H. (2004). Students’ calibration of knowledge and learning processes: Implications for designing powerful software learning environments. International Journal of Educational Research, 41,466-488. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2005.08.012

Zeidner, M., Boekaerts, M., & Pintrich, P. R.  (2000).  Self-regulation: Directions and challenges for future research.  In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.),  Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 13-39).  San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Zohar, A., & David, A. (2009). Paving a clear path in a thick forest: a conceptual analysis of a metacognitive component. Metacognition & Learning, 4(3), 177-195.

 


Webinar Slides: From ‘Student’ to ‘Informed Consumer’ of Learning

by Ed Nuhfer and Karl Wirth

http://www.calstate.edu/itl/documents/ITLFeb72014EN_KW_final.pdf

This very informative and useful set of webinar slides (supported by the CSU Institute for Teaching and Learning) starts with a discussion of metadisciplines, pointing out that “A realization that arises from becoming educated: every metadiscipline offers a valuable way of knowing.” Following that, the presenters discuss three types of learning (knowing, skills and reasoning), and assert that “Ideally, a curricula should help students become mindful of how to distinguish the three and how to learn all three effectively.” They present data showing that most courses in reality emphasize knowledge, followed by skills, and have very little emphasis on developing reasoning. They then propose that metacognition is a means by which to help develop reasoning, and share some specific metacognitive tools and some data that indicate the usefulness of incorporating these tools into our courses.