Month: September 2014

Everyday Metacognition

by Craig Nelson, Indiana University

This is my first post for this group. I have two goals. I want to illustrate some ways that we can use metacognition in everyday, non-academic situations. And I want to begin my posts with some reflections that are naïve. Naïve in the sense that I have not digested the work already on the blog and have not turned to the metacognitive literature. This will help me recognize later when other material really challenges my own ideas. We know from work in other contexts that making initial ideas explicit rather than tacit greatly facilitates cognitive change. In the present context, we could say that it activates metacognitive processing tools.

As always, a concrete example will make this clearer. Crouch and her associates (2004) asked “Classroom Demonstrations: Learning Tools or Entertainment?” They found that just doing a demonstration in physics had little effect on students’ understanding. It was simply entertainment. If you had a relevant misconception before the demonstration, you would probably still have it afterwards. Telling someone what is wrong with their misconception or even having them listen to a carefully constructed lecture or read a carefully constructed text is “futile,” their ideas are unlikely to change (Arons, 1976). Crouch et al. tried an alternative method. Before presenting the demonstration they asked students to write down what they thought would happen and then discuss their predictions briefly with their neighbors (thus activating prior conceptions and some relevant cognitive and metacognitive frameworks). Crouch and her associates then presented the demonstration and asked the students to compare what happened to their own predictions and to discuss the comparison with their neighbors. This led to significant conceptual change.

One of the most powerful metacognitive tools is exactly this. Ask yourself what a speaker or article or book or demonstration in class or real life is likely to say or show. Make explicit predictions. Whenever possible write them down. Then monitor the extent to which your predictions work out. Congratulate yourself when you are right and ask why you were wrong when they don’t.

A second powerful general metacognitive tool is related. Ask yourself how you do something. Then ask yourself what are some alternative ways you might do it and how you might decide which one to use in the future. For example: What pattern do you follow when you shop in the grocery store? Do you start with produce or end with produce? What else? How else might you systematically shop? And now the tough part: What criteria might favor each of the patterns? For example: Ending with heavy things such as dog-food might minimize your pushing effort but it might also risk crushing more delicate items. I try to minimize the temptation to buy junk food and processed carbohydrates generally. This means that in the grocery stores I visit, I generally shop the margins (produce, meat, diary) and avoid going through the aisles with canned food, sweets, chips and related foods unless I have something on my list that is found there. The bottom line is that for the things we do and the ways that we think, we should remember to ask, first, what are the alternatives and, second, what do we gain and lose by the ones that we choose.

I will close with two foreshadowings of points I expect to develop much more extensively later. Learning to think is a strange enterprise. Our best thinking at each point has limits that we cannot see and may not even be able to comprehend even if someone points them out to us. Misconceptions are a basic example. It is very hard to avoid taking any contradictory evidence we encounter and distorting it so that it seems to support our initial misconception (Grant, 2009). We have to make predictions or engage in strangely structured discussions (What would it take to convince you to switch to a new view if you held this misconception? Grant, 2009) or otherwise be effectively challenged. Seek out such challenges to even your most seemingly solid ideas.

This inability to see new ways of thinking applies even to the general way we perceive reality. Suppose that you think that knowledge in general and science and math in particular are based on objective truth and is likely to be eternally true. You then might have deep trouble with the titles and core ideas in for example, Kline’s Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Ioannidis’ Why Most Published Research Findings Are False or Freedman’s Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. Even deeper challenges would be presented by, among many others, Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be, or Baxter Magolda’s Authoring Your Life. But each of these implicitly or explicitly presents a metacognitive framework that can be very powerful once we master it. So my final hint today for metacognitive awareness is to play Elbow’s believing game: See if you can understand how an author comes to his or her conclusions even when they seem very different from your own. Or as Russell put it, the rationale for studying the history of philosophy is to understand how an intelligent person ever came to believe such things as a tool for recognizing the limits of one’s own beliefs. We need to do this broadly, not just historically.

 References

Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-To-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. Harpercollins.

Arons, Arnold. Arons, A. B. 1976. Cultivating the capacity for formal operations: Objectives and procedures in an introductory physical science course. American Journal of Physics 44: 834-838.

Baxter Magolda, Marcia B. 2009. Authoring Your Life: Developing an Internal Voice to Navigate Life’s Challenges. Stylus.

Crouch, Catherine H., A. P. Fagen, P. Callan and E. Mazur. 2004. “Classroom Demonstrations: Learning Tools or Entertainment?” American Journal of Physics 72:835-838.

Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press.

Freedman, David. 2010. Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/?single_page=true (or http://bit.ly/11aAmt0).

Grant, B. W. 2009. Practitioner Research Improved My Students’ Understanding Of Evolution By Natural Selection In An Introductory Biology Course. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, 6(4). http://tiee.ecoed.net/vol/v6/research/grant/abstract.html

Ioannidis, John. 2005. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine August; 2(8): e124. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ (The most downloaded article in the history of PLoS Medicine.)

Kline, Morris. 1982. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Oxford University Press.

Russell, Bertrand. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster.


What Metacognitive Skills Do Developmental College Readers Need?

by Roman Taraban, Dmitrii Paniukov, and Michelle Kiser

Texas Tech University

In a recent post to the CASP (College Academic Support Programs) listserve, a skeptical developmental programs instructor asked why more attention can’t be given to remedial readers when designing instruction for developmental education. The instructor’s concern highlights the question:  What do we know about students who are not “college-ready” and who enroll in developmental coursework? In particular, where does metacognition fit into their development as skilled readers?

We know that reading ability, as measured by standardized instruments, like the SAT reading test for high-school students, is significantly associated with reading comprehension (Taraban, Rynearson, & Kerr, 2000). But what underlies this reading ability and can it be enhanced in college students?  Prior research revealed a several things.  As University students progress from freshman to senior years, they show small but significant growth in their use of metacognitive reading strategies (Taraban, 2011). This growth happens naturally – i.e., college students typically do not take courses that teach metacognition.  In trying to deliberately develop metacognitive reading strategies in developmental reading students, however, we found that the process can be slow and costly, but it can be done!  In a study of developmental college readers, it took roughly one semester of regular practice with a look-back reading strategy (Garner, 1987) in order to show significant improvement in reading comprehension (Taraban et al., 1997).  In addition to semester-long practice, the intervention was implemented in one-on-one tutoring, pointing to the instructional costs of bringing about detectable gains in reading skills in a remedial population.

Recently my colleagues and I had an opportunity to work with developmental readers who were enrolled in a developmental reading course at a major public research university. The students were primarily freshmen (mean number of completed credits = 16.7). We were primarily interested in three questions: 1) Could a teacher-implemented intervention improve these students’ comprehension and retention of ideas from expository texts? 2) Which metacognitive reading strategies did these students apply on their own? and 3) Was students’ use of metacognitive strategies associated with better retention of information?

The students were asked to read two expository passages and to recall as much as they could either immediately or after a 48-hour delay. They were told that they would be asked later to recall the information from the texts, but they were not prompted to apply any specific learning strategies. The two texts used for the study were each about 250 words in length and had an average Flesch-Kincaid readability score of 8.2 grade level. The passages contained 30 idea units each. Idea units are simple units of meaning derived from the text, and here were used to score the recall data. The participants read and studied one of the passages without interruption (Uninterrupted Condition), and they read and studied one of the passages paragraph-by-paragraph, and then all together (Segmented Condition).  Participants spent an equal amount of total time (10 minutes) reading and studying each of the texts. After they recalled the information, we asked them to report the strategies they used to learn the information. The specific self-reported strategies were organized into six types, as shown in Table 1. To score the strategy-use data, participants were given credit for multiple strategy types, but not for repetitions of the same strategy for the same text.

 TABLE 1: Key Types of Self-Reported Strategies

  1. REPETITION: Re-Reading; Memorize; Repetition
  2. FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC ELEMENTS: 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 analogies; Using mental imagery
  5. SEGMENTATION: Grouping sentences for purposes of study; Divide by paragraph
  6. GENERAL: Read slowly; Read thoroughly; Concentrate; Understand passage

Regression analyses were conducted in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the reading approach (Uninterupted vs Segmented) in conjunction with participants’ self-reported use of the six strategy types (see Table 1). Turning to the immediate test, the reading approach mattered. When participants read and studied a segmented text they had significantly higher recall of idea units (M = 11.64) compared to non-segmented text (M = 7.93). Further, all of the participants reported using reading strategies.  Of the six strategy types, participants’ application of FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC ELEMENTS during reading was strongly associated with better recall of information from the text, and REPETITION was also important.  Considering the delayed test next, the reading approach used for the text that was read two days earlier did not matter.  However, using the strategy type SELF TESTING during reading was strongly associated with better recall, and FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC ELEMENTS was also helpful.

To address our skeptical developmental instructor, our data suggest that developmental reading instructors can structure how students process information in order to increase the number of ideas students retain, for follow-up activities like inferencing and brainstorming. The data also showed that developmental readers naturally use metacognitive reading strategies to boost their retention of information both immediately and at a delay.  Interestingly, there is no single best strategy.  Rather, FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC ELEMENTS during reading is most effective for immediate retention and SELF-TESTING during reading is most effective for longer-term retention.  Developmental students’ natural disposition to apply strategies may open opportunities for instructors to further guide, enhance, and channel these metacognitive skills to better benefit students.  What is heartening in these data is the finding that these academically-challenged students self-initiate metacognitive activities to monitor and regulate their study behaviors in order to enhance their academic performance.

References

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

Taraban, R. (2011). Information fluency growth through engineering curricula: Analysis of students’ text-processing skills and beliefs. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(2), 397-416.

Taraban, R., Becton, S., Shufeldt, M., Stirling, T., Johnson, M., & Childers, K. (1997). Developing underprepared college students’ question-answering skills. Journal of Developmental Education, 21 (1), 20-22, 24, 26, 28.

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.


Making Thinking Visible

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

In Making Thinking Visible, the authors propose that we must make our students’ thinking visible in order to create places of intellectual stimulation.   To do this, the authors suggest first determining which modes of thinking are necessary for our disciplines or courses.  Then, through a series of research-based thinking routines, we can scaffold and support the development of individuals who can think, plan, create, question, and engage independently as learners.  If you are looking for both inspiration and pragmatic strategies, this book offers ideas that can be applicable to all educational settings and audiences.


Faculty Metacognition of Verbal Questioning

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

Few faculty would argue that teaching requires asking questions of students, but rarely do instructors consider the what, how, or why of their verbal questioning behavior.  Without metacognition of questioning strategies, this foundational instructional technique can be wasted on habit rather than design.

Faculty question students for a variety of reasons.  Surprisingly, most faculty use verbal questioning as a classroom management technique.  This might look something like a machine gun approach, firing question after question in multiple directions in an effort to keep the class engaged.  See a student dozing? Fire!  Someone checking Facebook? Fire!  Some researchers estimate that teachers ask as many as 120 questions per hour—a question every 30 seconds (Vogler, 2005)!While this strategy may keep students on their toes, it does not necessarily aid student learning.  Often these questions are low level cognitive questions, requiring mainly recall of factual knowledge.  If teachers wish to develop deeper levels of thinking, they must stimulate their students’ own evaluation of the content rather than merely requesting regurgitation of the basics.

At the other end of the spectrum is a master teacher’s approach to instruction that utilizes a specific questioning taxonomy proven to be effective for a variety of disciplines.  Rather than using the run-and-gun approach, this faculty member masterfully leads students from one point to another through a series of thoughtfully derived questions.  He or she might start with the big picture and lead to a specific point or, in contrast, begin with minutia but guide students to one main relevant theme by the end of class.  Watching these instructors in action is often humbling.  However, even these most masterful teachers are often not cognitively aware of the strategies they are using.  They have figured out what works over time, but they likely can’t point to a specific methodology they were using to support their instruction.  Rather than shooting in the dark over many years, faculty would be wise to understand the metacognition behind verbal questioning if they wish to be effective in creating higher order thinking in their students.

Moving beyond simple recall in questioning is certainly good advice for creating more opportunities in thinking, but it’s easier said than done.  Faculty often report feeling uncomfortable trying new questioning strategies.  Asking higher order thinking questions for application, analysis, and synthesis often creates extensive dead air time in the classroom.  More difficult questions require more time to think, often in silence.  Also, students are reluctant to change the very well-established classroom culture of “getting the answer right.”  Based on years of classroom experience, students will often fire answers back, playing the game of “Guess what’s in the teacher’s head.”

Despite these cultural norms, it is possible through metacognition to improve verbal questioning.  Some scholars argue that faculty should understand some of the basic questioning taxonomies that exist and how they influence learning.  For example, asking open-ended versus closed-ended questions will alter the cognitive level of thinking and response (Rothstein & Santana, 2011).  Open-ended questions tend to achieve thinking which is higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Students are required to generate thoughtful answers to questions as opposed to firing one to three word facts.  For example, instead of asking, “What is an adverb?” faculty might ask students to apply their learning by identifying an adverb in a sentence or even creating their own sentences using adverbs.  Better yet, The Right Question Institute (Rothstein & Santana, 2011) encourages faculty to get students to ask their own questions rather than teachers doing all the work.  After all, the person generating the questions is arguably the person who is learning the most.

Other scholars suggest that faculty should consider the sequencing and patterns that are possible when asking questions (Vogler, 2005).  For example, cognitive psychologists often suggest a funneling or convergent questioning technique, which leads students from big picture to details because it mirrors the cognitive functioning of the brain.  However, depending on the subject area, faculty may find success in guiding students from narrow to broad thinking (divergent) by first asking low-level, general questions followed by higher-level, specific questions.  Some disciplines lend themselves to using a circular path to force critical thinking in students.  This pattern asks a series of questions which eventually lead back to the initial position or question (e.g., “What is justice?”).  While students often find these patterns frustrating, it emphasizes to students the value of thinking rather than correctly identifying the right answer.

Ultimately, though, faculty would be wise to spend less energy on the exact strategy they plan to use and instead focus on the main goals of their questioning.  In Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011), the authors propose that the purpose of questioning is really to make our students’ thinking visible by understanding our own expert-level thinking—aka metacognition.   To do this, the authors suggest that instead of complex taxonomies and patterns, we should focus our efforts on three main purposes for questioning in our classes:

  1. Modeling our interest in the ideas being explored
  2. Helping students to construct understanding
  3. Facilitating the illumination of students’ own thinking to themselves (i.e., metacognition)

By asking authentic questions – that is, questions to which the teacher does not already know the answer or to which there are not predetermined answers – instructors create a classroom culture that feels intellectually engaging, fosters a community of inquiry, and allows students to see teachers as learners (31).  Faculty must frame learning as a complex communal activity rather than the process of merely accumulating information.  Thoughtful questioning creates this classroom climate of inquiry, but only if faculty are metacognitive about their purpose and approach to using this critical pedagogical strategy.  Without metacognition, faculty risk relying on the machine gun approach to questioning, wasting valuable class time on recall of factual information rather than elevating and revealing students’ thinking.

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rothstein, D., and Santana, L. (2011). Make just one change: Teach students to ask their own questions. Boston: Harvard Education Press.

Vogler, K. E. (2005). Improve your verbal questioning. The Clearing House, 79(2): 98-103.

 

* 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.


Using metacognitive writing assignments to improve course performance

Mynlieff, Manogaran, St. Maurice, and Eddinger discuss the use of metacognitive writing exercises in large biology classes. Students were asked to explicitly consider why they made mistakes on exams and discuss why another answer would have been more appropriate. Students completing these assignments showed marked improvement in subsequent course assessments.

Mynlieff, M., Manogaran, A. L., Maurice, M. S., & Eddinger, T. J. (2014). Writing Assignments with a Metacognitive Component Enhance Learning in a Large Introductory Biology Course. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(2), 311-321.

 


Using metacognitive awareness to facilitate healthy engagement with moral issues

By John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

As the new semester begins, I am again looking out on a classroom full of students eager to discuss “hot button” moral issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, hate-speech, same-sex marriage, drug legalization). In an earlier post entitled, “Using metacognition to uncover the substructure of moral issues,” I argued that metacognitive awareness can help students move beyond media pundit drivel and towards a more careful consideration of moral issues. In “Cultivating the habit of constructive discomfort”, I argued that learning requires cultivating a certain healthy discomfort (much like the discomfort often associated with vigorous exercise) and it is metacognitive awareness that keeps us within our own “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky 1978). This post considers some of the sources of discomfort that threaten to undermine the discussion of moral issues.

Confronting “hot button” moral issues can be difficult because each of us brings our own complicated history to the conversation (replete with hang ups and blind spots). Based on my many years of teaching moral philosophy, I offer the following list of items that I found seem to derail discussion. The list is by no means exhaustive and whether these are the elements most likely to impede engagement is ultimately an empirical question that the needs to be answered. However, I argue that all of us (instructors, students, those outside the classroom) need to be aware of our own sources of discomfort with moral matters if we hope to move beyond them and towards a healthy engagement with these important issues.

Sources of discomfort: 

(1) Entrenched beliefs— some moral issues are difficult to consider because they force us to confront our foundational values.  For example, those from a wide variety of religious traditions can find it difficult to be completely open-minded to the possibility that abortion and same-sex marriage could be permissible. While they can summarize a particular position on the issue (e.g., for a particular course assignment), many find it difficult to move beyond a “bookish” articulation of the problem towards a genuine consideration of the issues because it threatens to undermine other firmly held beliefs (e.g., religious teachings).

(2) Peer pressure — many students find it difficult to swim against the current of peer opinion. When discussing sex, for example, students want to avoid being seen as either too prudish or too perverted. Sometimes students have views that fall outside the range of perceived acceptability but they refuse to voice them for fear of social disapproval. Other times, it doesn’t even occur them to consider anything outside the norm. In both cases, peer pressure can undermine full consideration of the issues.

(3) Self-interest — shifts in moral position require changes in our behavior. For example, “buying into” arguments for animal rights might demand that we change our eating habits. Often, it is easy to discount these arguments, not because they lack merit, but because we do not want to make the lifestyle changes that might be required if we became convinced by the argument.

(4) “Afraid of looking in the mirror” — discussions of moral issues can reveal uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Discussions of racial and gender discrimination, for example, can make us uncomfortable when we realize that we (or those we love) have attitudes and behaviors are insensitive and even hurtful.

(5) Ripple effects — because moral issues are interrelated, modifying our view on one issue can send ripple effects through our entire conceptual system.  For example, a discussion of euthanasia might lead us to the conclusion the quality life is important and even that some lives are no longer worth living (e.g., extreme pain without the prospect of relief). If true, then we might come to believe that it be better if some people were never born (e.g., extreme pain without the prospect of relief). Thus, thinking carefully about euthanasia might change our view of abortion. Likewise, becoming convinced by arguments for individual freedom in one area (e.g., free speech) can lead us to rethink our views in other areas (e.g., drug legalization, abortion, hate speech). However, if a student senses that a ripple might turn into a tidal wave, they often disengage.

In each case, becoming aware of the sources for our discomfort can help us move beyond a superficial consideration of the issues. In particular, asking a series of metacognitive questions can help uncover whether the discomfort is healthy (e.g., struggle with unfamiliar or difficult material) or unhealthy (e.g., blocked by entrenched beliefs, peer pressure, self-interest, or an inability to look in the mirror).

Questions we might ask our students (or even ourselves):

  • To what extent is my thinking on particular issue being influenced by my firmly held beliefs, the views of my peers, self-interest, a reluctance to take an honest look in the mirror, or concerns about the need revise my entire ethical system?
  • Am I taking the moral issue under consideration seriously? Why or why not?
  • Would I be willing to change my stance if the argument was compelling? Why or why not?
  • Is there something about the view that I cannot bring myself to consider? If so, what?

While awareness of our various blind spots and areas of discomfort will not automatically improve the quality of discussion, it can pave the way for a more meaningful consideration of the issues. As such, metacognitive awareness can facilitate healthy engagement with moral issues.

Reference:

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.