Year: 2015

Metacognition in STEM courses: A Developmental Path

by Roman Taraban, PHD, Texas Tech University

There is a strong focus in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses to solve problems (Case & Marshall, 2004). Does problem solving in STEM involve metacognition? I argue that the answer must surely be ‘yes’. That’s because metacognition involves monitoring the effectiveness of learning and problem-solving strategies and using metacognitive knowledge to regulate behavior (Draeger, 2015). But when does metacognition become part of problem solving, and how does it come about? Can we discern development in metacognitive monitoring and regulation? In this post, I will present some qualitative data from a study on problem-solving in order to reflect on these questions. The study I draw from was not about metacognition per se, however, it may provide some insights into the development of metacognition.

The study I conducted involved freshman engineering majors. These students were asked to solve typical problems from the course in mechanics in which they were currently enrolled (Taraban, 2015). Not surprisingly, students varied in how they began each problem and how they proceeded towards a solution. In order to gain some insight into their problem-solving strategies, I asked students to simply state why they started with the equation they chose and not some other equation, after they had solved the problems.

Students’ responses fell into at least three types, using labels from Case and Marshall (2004): surface, algorithmic, and deep conceptual. When asked why they started with their first equation, some students responded:

  • “I don’t know, it’s just my instinct”.
  • “No special reason. I’m just taking it randomly”.
  • “It’s just habit.”
  • “The first thing that came to my mind.”

Of interest here, these students did not appear to reflect on the specific problem or show evidence of modulating their behavior to the specific problemheir responses fit a surface learning approach: “no relationships sought out or established, learn by repetition and memorization of formulae” (Case & Marshall, 2004, p. 609).

Other students’ responses reflected an algorithmic approach to learning — “identifying and memorizing calculation methods for solving problems” (Case & Marshall, 2004, p. 609):

  • “I am getting three variables in three unknowns so I can solve it.”

Here the student verbally expresses a more structured approach to the problem. The student believes that he needs three equations involving three unknowns and uses that as a goal. Students who take an algorithmic approach appear to be more reflective and strategic about their solutions to problems, compared to surface problem solvers.

Case and Marshall (1995) regarded both the surface and algorithmic pathways as part of development towards deeper understanding of domain concepts and principles, the latter which they labeled the conceptual deep approach to learning: “relating of learning tasks to their underlying concepts or theory” with the intention “to gain understanding while doing this” (p. 609). Basically, their suggestion is that at some point students recognize that a goal of learning is to understand the material more deeply, and that this recognition guides how they learn. Case and Marshall’s description of conceptual deep learning fits Draeger’s (2015) earlier suggestion that monitoring the effectiveness of learning and regulating one’s behavior is characteristic of metacognitive thinking. Once students reach this level, we should be able to more readily observe students’ intentions to understand the material and observe their overt attempts to grasp the material through their explicit reflection and reasoning. Examples of this type of reflection from my study could be gleaned from those students who did not jump directly to writing equations without first thinking about the problem:

  • “If I choose the moment equation first, then directly I am getting the value of F. So in the other equations I can directly put the value of F.”

As students progress from surface to algorithmic to deep conceptual processing, there is certainly development. However, in the present examples that track that development, it is difficult to partial out students’ thinking about the problem content from their thinking-about-thinking, that is, their metacognitions. Draeger (2015) helps here by distinguishing between metacognition and critical thinking. The latter often requires domain-specific knowledge. Draeger suggests that “many students are able to solve complex problems, craft meaningful prose, and create beautiful works of art without understanding precisely how they did it” (p. 2). Basically, critical thinking is about methodology within a domain – e.g., the person knows how to format a narrative or select an appropriate statistical procedure, without necessarily reflecting on the effectiveness of those choices, that is, without metacognition. In the examples I provided above from my work with undergraduates on problem solving, there is invariably a mix of critical thinking and metacognition. Draeger’s distinction signals a need to better decouple these two distinct kinds of cognitive processes in order to better clarify the developmental trajectory of metacognitive processing in problem solving.

Finally, why do we observe such wide variance in students’ approaches to problem-solving, and, relatedly, to metacognition? One reason is that instructors may emphasize assessment and grades (Case & Marshall, 2004). As a consequence, students may focus more on gaining points for the correct answer rather than on the process. Welsh (2015) has suggested that course structure can act as a barrier to deeper learning: “high stakes assessments may overshadow resources designed for metacognitive development” (p. 2). Welsh found that students were more concerned with test performance than with reflecting upon their study strategies and implementing learning strategies recommended by the instructor.

How are we to understand this discord between concern with test performance and metacognition? At some level, when students set goals to do well on tests they are regulating their behavior. Metacognitive resources from the instructor may be in competition with students’ perceived resources (e.g., access to old tests, study buddies, cramming the night before). The instructor can facilitate change, but the leap from surface and algorithmic learner to deep conceptual learner must be undertaken by the student.

Passion and commitment to a topic are strong motivators to find the means to access and acquire deeper conceptual understanding. One measure of teacher success is class test performance, but another can be found in student comments. Here is one that I recently received that I found encouraging: Despite the fact that I was a bit uninterested in the subject matter, this was one of my favorite classes. By the end of the semester, not only was I interested in the subject matter, I was fascinated by it. Perhaps as instructors we need to facilitate good metacognitive practices but also nurture interest in what we teach in order to motivate students to pursue it more deeply through more effective metacognitive practices.

References

Case, J., & Marshall, D. (2004). Between deep and surface: procedural approaches to learning in engineering education contexts. Studies in Higher Education, 29(5), 605-615.

Draeger, J. (2015). Two forms of ‘thinking about thinking’: metacognition and critical thinking. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/two-forms-of-thinking-about-thinking-metacognition-and-critical-thinking/ .

Taraban, R. (2015, November). Transition from means-ends to working-forward problem solving. 56th Annual Conference of the Psychonomic Society. Chicago, IL.

Welsh, A. (2015). Supports and barriers to students’ metacognitive development in a large intro chemistry course. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/supports-and-barriers-to-students-metacognitive-development-in-a-large-intro-chemistry-course/


Lean Forward, but Do It Metacognitively!

by Lauren Scharff, Ph.D. (U. S. Air Force Academy)

As the Director for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at my institution, a large part of my job description involves helping faculty intentionally explore new approaches and how they impact student learning. In other words – I work with forward-leaning faculty who are ready to try new things. So, I think a lot about how, when, and why faculty members adopt new pedagogies, tools, and activities, and about when, for whom, and in what contexts these new approaches enhance learning. This work dovetails nicely with the development and goals of metacognitive instruction.

As a reminder if you’re relatively new to our site, one of the premises we’ve previously shared here (e.g. Scharff, March 2015) and elsewhere (Scharff and Draeger, NTLF, 2015) is that Metacognitive Instruction involves the intentional and ongoing interaction between awareness and self-regulation, specifically with respect to the pedagogical choices instructors make as they design their lessons and then as they carry them out.

I was happy to see these connections reinforced last month at our 7th Annual SoTL Forum. Dr. Bridget Arend was invited to give a morning workshop and the keynote address. Along with James R. Davis, she is co-author of Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective and Enjoyable College Teaching. In her workshop Bridget dug into how to facilitate critical thinking, promote problem-solving, and support the building of skills (3 of the 7 ways of learning), while in her keynote she focused more strongly on the concept of matching student learning goals with the most effective teaching methods. She went beyond the usual discussion of tips and techniques to explore the underlying purpose, rationale, and best use of these [pedagogical] methods.

Dr. Bridget Arend giving the keynote address at the 7th Annual SoTL Forum at the U. S. Air Force Academy
Dr. Bridget Arend giving the keynote address at the 7th Annual SoTL Forum at the U. S. Air Force Academy

7_Ways_of_Learning
Books such as these can help support metacognitive instruction.

While Bridget did not explicitly use the term “metacognitive instruction,” it struck me that her message of purposeful choice of methods directly supported key aspects of metacognitive instruction, especially those related to awareness of our pedagogical decisions. We (instructors) should not incorporate pedagogies (or new tools or activities) just because they are the ones typically used by our colleagues, or because they are what was “done to us as students and it worked for us,” or because they are the “new, latest-greatest thing” we’ve heard about. Rather, we should carefully review our learning goals and consider how each possible approach might support those goals for our students and our context.

We should also be mindful of other factors that might influence our adoption of new approaches. For example, administrators or institutions often reward faculty who are leading the adoption of new technologies. Sometimes the message seems “the more new technologies incorporated the better” or “out with the old and in with the new” so a program or institution can market itself as being the most cutting edge in education. However, while many of us appreciate being rewarded or showcased for new efforts, we also need to pause to consider whether or not we’re really supporting student learning as well as we could with these practices.

Questions we should ask ourselves before implementation include, How will our new pedagogical approach or a new app really align with the learning goals we have for our students? Will all of our choices complement each other, or might they work at cross-purposes with each other? Realistically, there are a limited number of learning outcomes we can successfully accomplish within a lesson or even across a semester.

As we implement these new approaches and tools, we should ask additional questions. How are they actually impacting aspects of student engagement, attitudes towards learning, and ultimately, the learning itself? How might they be adjusted (either “in the moment” or in future lessons) as we use them in order to better support our learning goals for our students in our context? No group of students is the same, and the context also shifts over time. What worked well in the past might need adjusting or more radically changing in the future.

In sum, we know that no single approach is going to work for all learning goals or all students across all situations. But if we build our awareness of possibilities using resources such as Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning (and many other published papers and texts) to help guide our pedagogical choices; if we carefully attend to how our approaches affect students and student learning; and we if modify our approach based on those observations (and maybe using systematic data if we’re conducting a SoTL research project), then we WILL be more likely to enhance student learning (and our own development as metacognitive instructors).

Thus, lean forward as instructors, but do it metacognitively!

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Davis, James R. & Arend, B. (2013). Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective and Enjoyable College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, Sterling, VA.

Scharff, L. & Draeger, J. (September, 2015). Thinking about metacognitive instruction. The National Teaching and Learning Forum, 24(5), p. 4-6. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ntlf.2015.24.issue-5/issuetoc


Teaching a new course requires metacognition

by John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

One of the joys of being an academic philosopher is the freedom to explore new ideas. For example, the recent retirement of a colleague left a gap in my department’s usual offerings. I agreed to take over a course on the philosophy of love and sex. While I have written scholarly articles on related topics, I confess that teaching this new material had me feeling the sort of constructive discomfort that I seek to foster in my students (Draeger 2014). As a result, I experienced a heightened sense of awareness concerning what I was doing and why. In particular, I came to believe that teaching a new course requires metacognition.

As I sat down to construct the course, I was guided by the thought that philosophy can help students learn to have careful conversations about ideas that matter. With respect to this new course, I wanted students to learn to ask tough questions. Can we really promise to love someone forever? Can sex ever be meaningless? Is becoming emotionally attached to someone other than your partner worse than sleeping around? Is it possible to love more than one person at the same time or does romantic love require some form of exclusivity? Such questions prompt students to consider whether commonly held beliefs are actually justified. If these views withstand scrutiny, then students have the conceptual resources to offer a proper defense. If not, then students can begin searching for ideas worth having. Such questions can also open up a larger conversation about related concepts (e.g., trust, intimacy, respect, jealousy, loyalty).  Because much of the course material was new to me, I had not always thought through the various permutations and implications of each philosophical position. I often found myself learning “on the fly” along with my students as I reflected on my own assumptions and preconceived ideas in “real time” while the discussion unfolded in front of me.

In an earlier post (Draeger 2015), I argued that “critical thinking involves an awareness of mode of thinking within a domain (e.g., question assumptions about gender, determine the appropriateness of a statistical method), while metacognition involves an awareness of the efficacy of particular strategies for completing that task.” As I reflect on my philosophy of love and sex course, I realize that my heightened awareness contained elements of both critical thinking and metacognition. Because the material was largely new to me, I was more aware of my own critical thinking processes as I engaged in them and more “tuned into” what my students were grappling with (e.g., assumptions about love and sex, related concepts, implications of the view we are considering). I also found myself metacognitively evaluating whether my students were critically engaged and whether my choices were moving the conversation in philosophically fruitful directions. I like to think that this sort of monitoring happens in all of my classes, but I was acutely aware of its importance given that the material was unfamiliar and my discussion prompts were untested. Moreover, I like to think that I never resort to autopilot and that I am always keenly aware of fluid learning environments. However, because the material was so fresh, I could not help but engage in self-regulation. I did not have a reliable stock of examples and responses at my fingertips. Even more than usual, I found myself making intentional changes to my approach based on “in-the-moment” feedback from students (Scharff 2015).

Teaching a new course always rejuvenates me because it reminds me how much I love to learn. As the teacher, however, I was responsible for more than my own learning. Effective teaching requires thinking about the critical thinking processes of all the learners in the room, including my own. It also requires monitoring fluid learning environment and making intentional changes (often in-the-moment changes) if students are to have careful conversations about ideas that matter (e.g., love, sex). While teaching with metacognition is generally a good idea, this semester taught me that teaching a new course requires metacognition.

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References

Draeger, John (2015). “Two forms of ‘thinking about thinking’: metacognition and critical thinking.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/two-forms-of-thinking-about-thinking-metacognition-and-critical-thinking

Draeger, John (2014). “Cultivating a habit of constructive discomfort.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/cultivating-a-habit-of-constructive-discomfort
Scharff, Lauren (2015). “What do we mean by ‘metacognitive instruction?” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-we-mean-by-metacognitive-instruction/


Forging connections with students through metacognitive assignments

by Diane K. Angell, St. Olaf College

We have all likely shared the experience, early in our teaching career, of a gaggle of students gathering at our office door after an exam. “I studied for so many hours!” “I came to class everyday.” “I always did well in high school.” Students also seemed to struggle ahead of exams as they tried to learn and master scientific material. “What should I study?” “Why can’t you just give us a study guide?” I was often perplexed by these frustrations. I wondered and tried to recall how I had learned material and strategized as a science student preparing for the inevitable exams in larger introductory college courses.

That same month, I found myself at a conference, the Accredited Colleges of the Midwest’s Teagle Collegium on Student Learning. The focus was very much on metacognition. Although as a biologist, I struggled to understand the details of several presentations, it all sounded very familiar. Perhaps this was what my students were missing? I appreciated the intellectual points and took copious notes, until my mind began to wander. I needed to prepare to host a large group for Thanksgiving in the coming days. How should I start? What did I need to purchase and where would I get it? What needed to be prepared and cooked when, so that all the different dishes were ready and warm when it was actually time to sit down and eat? I began to get anxious. I quickly realized two things. Focusing back on my students, I immediately appreciated the degree to which preparing a Thanksgiving meal, and preparing to take an exam are both complex metacognitive tasks. I could finally imagine what my students were feeling and understand the metacognitive challenges exams present to them. Students need to evaluate what they know, what they don’t know and how best to approach any material they are uncertain of. And unlike cooking and meal preparation, there are no clear simple sets of directions highlighting how to approach the task of taking a typical college classroom exam. Second, my own pre-Thanksgiving meal mental preparation check made me realize that I have likely been using such metacognitive skills since I was a student, but was just not aware I was using them. Perhaps I did have some wisdom to share and upon returning to campus I committed to using a metacognition approach to help students prepare for exams.

Introductory college biology courses are an excellent place to begin engaging students with a metacognitive approach to exam preparation. These classes will probably always have exams. Moreover, as students move on in biology they are likely to face even more challenging exams. In order to engage students in metacognitive practices I came up with a series of straightforward metacognitive prompts that I emailed to students before each exam. They included simple questions such as: How do you think you will start studying? What techniques will you use while studying? What was the most difficult topic in this section of the course and why was it difficult? How will you approach the material you do not yet understand?

I found their responses fascinating. Some clearly wrote as little as possible, but most wrote quite extensively sharing with me precise details of how they had studied (or not studied) to prepare for the exam. Many responses were surprisingly sincere and confessional. The assignments brought home to me two points that have left a lasting impression. First, I was reminded of the importance of establishing a connection with students as well as the importance of that connection to student learning. Their emailed responses helped me get to know them in a way that was very different than in the public arena of class or lab. They let me in on their personal narrative of test preparation. I sometimes felt as if I was reading a secret diary. They were honest with me in their emails about what their studying experiences had been, perhaps even more so than if they had come to see me in person. Perhaps the proliferation of email, texting and Facebook has made students more comfortable conversing through a keyboard with faculty than face to face. After responding to the emailed questions, many did eventually come in to chat and engage with me about study strategies and differences they were noticing between high school and college. They seemed to think they knew me better and that I knew them better. Upon arriving in my office, they would frequently refer back to their emailed responses, even though I sometimes struggled to remember exactly who had emailed me what details. The emails seemed to prompt a unique relationship and they saw me as someone who was interested in them as an individual, an attitude that likely helped them feel as if they were part of the learning community in the classroom.

I also came to understand that that the task of mastering material in order to prepare for an exam has become more complicated. In the past, we had a textbook and we had notes from class. That was it. Today this task really is fraught with complex decisions. Students in college classrooms are less likely to be taking notes in a traditional lecture format. They are more likely to be engaged during class in small group discussions and problem based learning activities. They have access to and are justly encouraged to use the online resources that come with texts and take advantage of other online resources. They are also frequently encouraged to form study groups to discuss their understanding of topics outside of class. These are great ways for students to engage with material, and prepare for exams. This diverse learning landscape can be a lifesaver for some students, but for others, when it comes time to prepare for an exam, the variety of options for studying can be overwhelming and paralyzing. As we have opened up new ways of teaching and learning, we may have left students with many different resources at their fingertips but failed to help them think metacognitively about what works for them as they master knowledge to prepare for a summative exam.

Both the stronger connections I made with my students and my better understanding of the diverse exam preparation choices they must make help me feel better prepared to mentor and advise students as they navigate their introductory biology course. By engaging students metacognitively in emails concerning their exam preparation I gained a deeper understanding about how students were learning in my class. Their sincere and thoughtful responses provided a window on their world and, in interesting ways, their metacognitive thoughts rounded out my efforts to metacognitively assess my course. As faculty, we are often reminded to step back and reflect on our goals for our class and for student learning. We need to consider what is working in our course and what is not working. It was finally clear to me that a full metacognitive consideration of my course required regular reflective feedback from my students and an understanding of what they were struggling with. Although I had always solicited such feedback, students seemed much more likely to be thinking about their learning and willing to share their assessment of that learning in an email just before an exam. Ultimately I now see their honest metacognitive feedback has meant that I have gained as much or more than the students I was initially trying to help.

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Fighting Imposter Syndrome Through Metacognition

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D.

Have you ever felt like an imposter at work? Taught a class that was not your expertise? Felt intimidated before giving a presentation? Nearly every faculty member experiences this imposter phenomenon at some point. After all, as faculty we work around incredibly smart and talented people who shine from being experts in their field. Additionally, people drawn to academia naturally feel compelled to be knowledgeable and often find themselves to be inadequate when they are not (Huston, 2009).

Imposter syndrome is “an overwhelming sense of being a fraud, a phony, of not being good enough for [a] job, despite much evidence to the contrary” (Kaplan, 2009). Apart from accomplishing significant professional milestones, people cannot seem to internally acknowledge their success or feel deserving. This sense of being an imposter is prevalent among women but is increasingly being revealed by men as well. Although the condition is often referred to as a syndrome, it is important to understand that it is NOT actually a diagnosable mental illness found in the DSM-V. Instead, it is an affliction, similar to test or performance anxiety, experienced by a variety of high-achieving individuals that can be treated successfully using metacognition and self-regulation.

Reactions to imposter syndrome vary widely and by individual. Typically, imposter phenomenon starts with a self-sabotaging internal dialogue, such as:

  • Who do I think I am? I’m not smart enough to teach this class or present on this topic.
  • What if my students ask me a question that I can’t answer?
  • What if someone finds out I don’t know what I’m talking about?
  • I’m not cut out for this. I really can’t do this.

A physical reaction similar to other stressful situations (fight, flight, or freeze) often follows:

  • Increased blood pressure
  • Blushing
  • Sweating
  • Shaking
  • Tonic immobility (i.e., mental block or “deer in headlights”)

Faculty in these situations tend to respond in one of two ways:

  • Undercompensating by becoming submissive, overly agreeable or even apologetic
  • Overcompensating with defensive, bossy and aggressive behaviors
  1. Recognize symptoms when they arise and recenter yourself through breathing:
  • Assume a comfortable posture
  • Close your eyes if possible
  • Focus on the sensations of your body
  • Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth
  • When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to your breath
  • Breathe in, breathe out
  • Repeat for at least 10 breaths and up to 5 minutes
  1. Reconstruct a new, positive internal dialogue. Talk to yourself as you would a good friend by being supportive and confidence-building.
  2. Posture yourself as confident. It turns out that “fake it till you make it” works with regard to physical posture. People who use Power Poses for 2 minutes demonstrate higher levels of confidence-building hormones (testosterone) as opposed to stress-inducing hormones (cortisol) (Carney, Cuddy & Yap, 2010; Cuddy, 2012).
  3. Acknowledge the limits of your knowledge. Instead of hiding your lack of expertise, build a repertoire of ways to deflect difficult questions, such as:
  • What do you think?
  • I don’t know. Does anyone want to look it up and tell us the answer?
  • Great question. Can we talk about that more after class (or meeting)?
  • Let’s not dive too deeply into that issue because it might distract us from today’s agenda.
  • Good thought. Does anyone want to collaborate to address that concern?
  • Here is what I know, and here is what I don’t know (Huston, 2009).
  1. Avoid “teaching as telling.” Rather than lecturing, which requires great preparation and pressure to be the expert in the room, move toward new pedagogical models of facilitation which turn the teaching burden over to the students, such as jigsaw and gallery walk.
  2. Know that you are not alone. It is plausible that nearly everyone in the room has felt this way at one point or another in their careers, even though they may not readily share these thoughts with others. Normalizing the feelings to yourself will start to defuse your anxiety.
  3. Share the issue with others you trust. A mentor or even a small community of colleagues can collaboratively strategize about how to address the issue.
  4. Recognize external factors that might contribute. Often people blame themselves for toxic situations which were created by outside circumstances. If the situation persists, consider declining future involvement to avoid setting yourself up for difficulties.

“Awareness is half the battle” really does apply to imposter syndrome. Through metacognition, you can conquer the self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that might prevent you from succeeding in your personal and professional life. Intentional self-monitoring of negative internal dialogue followed by practicing self-regulation through the simple strategies outlined above is the antidote to imposter syndrome. So next time you feel yourself break into a sweat (figuratively or literally), assume a Power Pose and leverage metacognition to triumph over your doubts!

Metacognition promotes success by helping us overcome self-defeating thoughts. Share on X
 Resources:

Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363-1368. doi: 10.1177/0956797610383437

Cuddy, A. (2012, October 1). Your body language shapes who you are [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en

Huston, T. (2009). Teaching What You Don’t Know. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kaplan, K. (2009). Unmasking the impostor. Nature, 459(21): 468-469. doi: 10.1038/nj7245-468a


A Minute a Day Keeps the Metacognitive Doctor Away!

Aaron S. Richmond

Metropolitan State University of Denver

First and foremost, what I am about to discuss with you all is not an educational or metacognitive teaching panacea (aka silver-bullet). But I would like introduce and discuss is the idea of using Classroom Assessment Techniques (affectionately known as CATs) as a form of a metacognitive instructional strategy.

CATs: A Very Brief Review

Described best by Angelo and Cross (1993), CATs are designed to serve two purposes. First, they are meant as a formative assessment tool for teachers to understand how much their students are learning in the course. Second, CATs are designed to provide you, the teacher, feedback on the efficacy of your teaching strategies/methods. CATs are typically very brief and take very little instructional time (a minute or two).  CATs are also created based on your assessment needs. For instance, if you are interested in assessing course-related knowledge and skills then you might want to use the one-minute paper, focused listening, background knowledge probe (see Cunningham & Moore, n.d.). Or, if you are interested in assessing skill in analysis and critical thinking, you may want to use pro and con grids, or analytic memos, or content, form, and function outlines (see Cunningham & Moore, n.d.). If you would like to assess your students’ skill in synthesis and creative thinking you may want to use one-sentence summary, or concept maps, or approximate analogies. The list of different types of CATs goes on and on (see Cunningham & Moore, n.d. for complete list and summary) so I would like to focus on previously established CATs that lend themselves to be quite quick, easy, and potentially effective metacognitive improvement tools. I like to call these the Metacognitive Cats or MCATs!

The MCATs

Cunningham and Moore (n.d.) recently categorized 50 of Angelo and Cross’ (1993) CATs based on the purpose of the assessment needed (some described previously in the blog). Among these categories, Cunningham and Moore posit that some CATs are meant for “Techniques for Assessing Learner Attitudes, Values, and Self-Awareness” (p. 4). Several of the CATs in this category lend themselves to be almost metacognitive awareness activities. Specifically, these include course-related self-confidence surveys, focused autobiographical sketches, muddiest point, productivity study time log, and diagnostic learning logs. Let me take a moment to describe these potential MCATs (Angelo & Cross, 1993).

  • Course-related self-confidence surveys: At the end of class you have students fill out an anonymous questionnaire that assesses their confidence in mastering the material discussed in class.  
  • Focused autobiographical sketches: At the end or beginning of class, have students write a brief statement on a “successful” study strategy or learning strategy that they used to learn the class material.
  • Muddiest point: At the conclusion of a lesson, ask students to write down the one concept that they are still struggling with in one or two sentences. You can use this to identify which concepts students are struggling with.
  • Productivity study time log: Have students keep a daily log and record both the amount of time spent studying and the quality of time spent studying for your course. Students can complete this before, or at the beginning or end of class.
  • Diagnostic learning logs: Have students write a log for assignments or assessments in which the student identifies what study methods and knowledge that they had correct and have them diagnose what they did not have correct and how to solve this error for the future. These can be done before, during or after class as well.

Now, these MCATs are just CATs unless you help students connect the CAT to the Metacognition. The trick is, how do you do this? One answer may be direct feedback and reflection to the learner. What I mean, is that if you employ a CAT (e.g., muddiest point), then you need to make it metacognitive by providing feedback directly to your student on their performance, have students elaborate and reflect on their answers, and provide constructive solutions/assistance in improving their metacognition.  Let me illustrate using the MCAT of a muddiest point. After your students turn in their muddiest point, take a few minutes to talk to the students about why they are confused about the content. You may ask your student about their note-taking strategies in class. Or you may ask your student about their reading strategies when they read the chapter before class. You may ask them about their attention to the lesson (i.e., the amount of cell phone or computer use). You may ask them about their use of other study strategies. Then, have your student reflect on why they didn’t understand the course material based on your conversation and have them come up with changing just one thing about how they studied. The next time, you repeat the MCAT muddiest point, the process can start over and you can revisit the same questions with your students. Incorporating direct feedback, reflection, and solution of CATs may just turn them into MCATs.

Concluding Questions

As, to my knowledge, educational and metacognitive researchers have not investigated the efficacy of these potential MCATs as metacognitive instructional tools. Therefore, I feel like I must wrap up this blog with a few questions/challenges/inspirational ideasJ

  1. Can the use of MCATs increase metacognitive awareness in students?
  2. Can the use of MCATs increase metacognitive knowledge in students?
  3. Can the use of MCATs increase academic performance of students?
  4. If the answer to any of the previous questions is yes, then the questions becomes are some MCATs better than others and can students transfer the use of these MCATs to other content domain?

References

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Cunningham, K., & Moore, D. (n.d.). 50 CATS by Angelo and Cross. Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/tep/resou


Using Metacognition to Make International Connections

by Lauren Scharff, PhD, U. S. Air Force Academy and John Draeger, PhD, SUNY Buffalo State

If you’re one of our longer-term followers, you’ll notice that this post is a bit different from others on our site. We just wrapped up a fantastic week in Melbourne, Australia working with six colleagues from around the globe, and we want to share some of our metacognition endeavors and reflections with you. This experience was part of the second International Collaborative Writing Groups  (ICWG) that is an affiliate effort for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL).

Eight groups were part of the ICWG. The groups formed in May and met virtually over the summer to focus their topics and develop an outline prior to the face-to-face meeting this past week. Our group’s topic was The Student Learning Process, and we focused our efforts on how metacognition would support the transfer of learning from one situation or context to another. We believe the transfer of learning is one of the ultimate goals of education because it supports lifelong learning and employability.

The group’s work on how metacognition supports the transfer of learning will be revealed when it’s published, but meanwhile, we will share some ways that metacognition was part of our experience of facilitating the group. We’ll start with some pictures to set the tone. The first shows our group working: from left to right, Lauren, Susan Smith (Leeds Beckett University, UK), Lucie S Dvorakova (Honors Student, University of Queensland, Australia), Marion Tower (University of Queensland), Dominic Verpoorten (IFRES-University of Liège, Belgium), Marie Devlin (Newcastle University, UK), and Jason M. Lodge (University of Melbourne, Australia), [John Draeger taking the pic]. The second gives you a sense of the overall setting, showing multiple groups all kept to task by savvy ICWG coordinators, Mick Healy (University of Gloucestershire, retired) and Kelly Matthews (University of Queensland). Fortunately, Mick and Kelly also built in some social time for community building. The third picture shows our group at the Victoria State Library, left to right: Dominique, Sam, Marion, Sue, Marion, John, Lauren and Jason.

ICWG_SLP_Working

ICWG_mult_groups

ICWG_SLP_Social

How Metacognition Found Its Way into Our Facilitating Experiences

If you read the home page of this site, you’ll notice that we loosely define metacognition as the intertwined awareness and self-regulation of a process/skill, specifically with the goal of developing that process or skill. Although the site is focused on metacognition as it relates to teaching and learning, it can refer to any skill or process. Facilitating a group can be much like teaching, but it involves some additional processes that might more traditionally be linked to leadership and communication.

We noticed ourselves using metacognition in the following aspects of our work:

Use of Language: Given the international character of the group, self-monitoring and self-regulation allowed us to navigate differences in language and underlying assumptions. For example, through our discussions we learned that academic faculty might be referred to as ‘staff,’ ‘tutor,’ ‘instructor’ or ‘professor.’ Individual courses might be referred to as ‘classes,’ ‘modules’ or ‘units’ of study.

Assumptions about education: Our discussion revealed differences in the structures of the university systems in different countries. When discussing how students might use their learning in one course to inform their learning in another, the two North Americans on the team (John and Lauren) tended to think about transfer learning between a diverse set of courses across a broad liberal arts core curriculum in addition to transfer across more closely related courses within a major. Because undergraduate education in Australia and the United Kingdom tend not to be structured around a broad core curriculum, members of the team from these countries tended to focus on transfer learning within a particular field of study.

As we drafted our text and created a survey that was to be used in four different countries, we each engaged in self-monitoring of the terms as the conversation was in progress and would regulate behavior accordingly. For example, someone would start by saying “I think that staff might…” but then quickly add “or perhaps you might say ‘professors.’” Similarly, we would use our newly developed awareness of the different educational structures to guide our discussion about how transfer of learning might be supported across all of our learning environments.

Management of Project Scope: Both transfer of learning and metacognition are vast areas of study. Given the wide variety of experiences and individual interests in our group, we explored a wide array of possible directions for our paper, some of which we decided we would table for follow-on papers (e.g. how student level of intellectual development might impact transfer of learning and the creation of a “toolkit” for instructors that would help them support transfer of learning). Moving the conversation in fruitful directions required that all of us remain mindful of the task at hand (i.e. working towards a 6000-word article). Self-monitoring allowed us to detect when an interesting discussion had gone beyond the scope of our current article and self-regulation more quickly brought us back to the task at hand.

In summary, the international character of the writing group added a depth and richness to the conversation, but it also increased the likelihood of misunderstanding and the challenge of group management. Self-monitoring and self-regulation allowed us to overcome those challenges.

Many thanks to our group members for a fantastic face-to-face experience, and we look forward to our continued exchanges as we finalize the paper and carry on with the follow-on papers.


Two forms of ‘thinking about thinking’: metacognition and critical thinking

by John Draeger (SUNY Buffalo State)

In previous posts, I have explored the conceptual nature of metacognition and shared my attempts to integrate metacognitive practices into my philosophy courses. I am also involved in a campuswide initiative that seeks to infuse critical thinking throughout undergraduate curricula. In my work on both metacognition and critical thinking, I often find myself using ‘thinking about thinking’ as a quick shorthand for both. And yet, I believe metacognition and critical thinking are distinct notions. This post will begin to sort out some differences.

My general view is that the phrase ‘thinking about thinking’ can be the opening move in a conversation about either metacognition or critical thinking. Lauren Scharff and I, for example, took this tack when we explored ways of unpacking what we mean by ‘metacognition’ (Scharff & Draeger, 2014). We considered forms of awareness, intentionality, and the importance of understanding of various processes. More specifically, metacognition encourages us to monitor the efficacy of our learning strategies (e.g., self-monitoring) and prompts us to use that understanding to guide our subsequent practice (e.g., self-regulation). It is a form of thinking about thinking. We need to think about how we think about our learning strategies and how to use our thinking about their efficacy to think through how we should proceed. In later posts, we have continued to refine a more robust conception of metacognition (e.g., Scharff 2015, Draeger 2015), but ‘thinking about thinking’ was a good place to start.

Likewise, the phrase ‘thinking about thinking’ can be the opening move in conversations about critical thinking. Given the wide range of program offerings on my campus, defining ‘critical thinking’ has been a challenge. Critical thinking is a collection of skills that can vary across academic settings and how these skills are utilized often requires disciplinary knowledge. For example, students capable of analyzing how factors such as gender, race, and sexuality influence governmental policy may have difficulty analyzing a theatrical performance or understanding the appropriateness of a statistical sampling method. Moreover, it isn’t obvious how the skills learned in one course will translate to the course down the hall. Consequently, students need to develop a variety of critical thinking skills in a variety of learning environments. As we began to consider how to infuse critical thinking across the curriculum, the phrase ‘thinking about thinking’ was something that most everyone on my campus could agree upon. It has been a place to start as we move on to discuss what critical thinking looks like in various domains of inquiry (e.g., what it means to think like an artist, biologist, chemist, dancer, engineer, historian, or psychologist).

‘Thinking about thinking’ captures the idea students need to think about the kind of thinking skills that they are trying to master, and teachers need to be explicit about those skills that if their students will have any hope of learning them. This applies to both metacognition and critical thinking. For example, many students are able to solve complex problems, craft meaningful prose, and create beautiful works of art without understanding precisely how they did it. Such students might be excellent thinkers, but unless they are aware of how they did what they did, it is also possible that they got just lucky. Both critical thinking and metacognition help ensure that students can reliably achieve desired learning outcomes. Both require practice and both require the explicit awareness of the relevant processes. More specifically, however, critical thinkers are aware of what they are trying to do (e.g., what it means to think like an artist, biologist, chemist, dancer, engineer, historian, psychologist), while metacognitive thinkers are aware of whether their particular strategies are effective (e.g., whether someone is an effective artist, biologist, chemist, dancer, engineer, historian, psychologist). Critical thinking and metacognition, therefore, differ in the object of awareness. Critical thinking involves an awareness of mode of thinking within a domain (e.g., question assumptions about gender, determine the appropriateness of a statistical method), while metacognition involves an awareness of the efficacy of particular strategies for completing that task.

‘Thinking about thinking’ is a good way to spark conversation with our colleagues and our students about a number of important skills, including metacognition and critical thinking. In particular, it is worth asking ourselves (and relaying to our students) what it might mean for someone to think like an artist or a zoologist (critical thinking) and how we would know whether that artist or zoologist was thinking effectively (metacognition). As these conversations move forward, we should also think through the implications for our courses and programs of study. How might this ongoing conversation change course design or methods of instruction? What might it tell us about the connections between courses across our campuses? ‘Thinking about thinking’ is a great place to start such conversations, but we must remember that it is only the beginning.

References

Draeger, John (2015). “Exploring the relationship between awareness, self-regulation, and metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/exploring-the-relationship-between-awareness-self-regulation-and-metacognition/

Scharff, Lauren & Draeger, John (2014). “What do we mean when we say “Improve with metacognition”? (Part One) Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-mean-when-we-say-improve-with-metacognition/

Scharff, Lauren (2015). “What do we mean by ‘metacognitive instruction?” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-we-mean-by-metacognitive-instruction/Thinking about two forms of thinking about thinking: Metacognition and critical thinking Share on X


Metacognitive Judgments of Knowing

Roman Taraban, Ph.D., Dmitrii Paniukov, John Schumacher, Michelle Kiser, at Texas Tech University

“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Aristotle

Students often make judgments of learning (JOLs) when studying. Essentially, they make a judgment about future performance (e.g., a test) based on a self-assessment of their knowledge of studied items. Therefore, JOLs are considered metacognitive judgments. They are judgments about what the person knows, often related to some future purpose. Students’ accuracy in making these metacognitive judgments is academically important. If students make accurate JOLs, they will apply just the right amount of time to mastering academic materials. If students do not devote enough time to study, they will underperform on course assessments. If students spend more time than necessary, they are being inefficient.

As instructors, it would be helpful to know how accurate students are in making these decisions. There are several ways to measure the accuracy of JOLs. Here we will focus on one of these measures, termed calibration. Calibration is the difference between a student’s JOL related to some future assessment and his actual performance on that assessment. In the study we describe here, college students made JOLs (“On a scale of 0 to 100, what percent of the material do you think you can recall?”) after they read a brief expository text. Actual recall was measured in idea units (IUs) (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Idea units are the chunks of meaningful information in the text.   Calibration is here defined as JOL – Recalled IUs, or simply, predicted recall minus actual recall. If the calibration calculation leads to a positive number, you are overconfident to some degree; if the calculation result is negative, then you are underconfident to some degree. If the result is zero, then you are perfectly calibrated in your judgment.

The suggestion from Aristotle (see quote above) is that gains in how much we know lead us to underestimate how much we know, that is, we will be underconfident. Conversely, when we know little, we may overestimate how much we know, that is, we will be overconfident. Studies using JOLs have found that children are overconfident (predicted recall minus actual recall is positive) (Lipko, Dunlosky, & Merriman, 2009; Was, 2015). Children think they know more than they know, even after several learning trials with the material. Studies with adults have found an underconfidence with practice (UWP) effect (Koriat et al., 2002), that is, the more individuals learn, the more they underestimate their knowledge. The UWP effect is consistent with Aristotle’s suggestion. The question we ask here is ‘which is it’: If you lack knowledge, do your metacognitive judgments reflect overconfidence or underconfidence, and vice versa? Practically, as instructors, if students are poorly calibrated, what can we do to improve their calibration, that is, to recalibrate this metacognitive judgment.

We addressed this question with two groups of undergraduate students, as follows. Forty-three developmental-reading participants were recruited from developmental integrated reading and writing courses offered by the university, including Basic Literacy (n = 3), Developmental Literacy II (n = 29), and Developmental Literacy for Second Language Learners (n = 11). Fifty-two non-developmental participants were recruited from the Psychology Department subject pool. The non-developmental and developmental readers were comparable in mean age (18.3 and 19.8 years, respectively) and the number of completed college credits (11.8 and 16.7, respectively), and each sample represented roughly fifteen academic majors. All participants participated for course credit. The students were asked to read one of two expository passages and to recall as much as they could immediately. 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.

To answer our question, we first calculated calibration (predicted recall – actual recall) for each participant. Then we divided the total sample of 95 participants into quartiles, based on the number of idea units each participant recalled. The mean proportion of correct recalled idea units, out of 30 possible, and standard deviation in each quartile for the total sample were as follows:

Q1: .13 (.07); Q2: .33 (.05); Q3: .51 (.06); Q4: .73 (.09). Using quartile as the independent variable and calibration as the dependent variable, we found that participants were overconfident (predicted recall > actual recall) in all four quartiles. However, there was also a significant decline in overconfidence from Quartile 1 to Quartile 4 as follows: Q1: .51; Q2: .39; Q3: .29; Q4: .08. Very clearly, the participants in the highest quartile were nearly perfectly calibrated, that is, they were over-predicting their actual performance by only about 8%, compared to the lowest quartile, who were over-predicting by about 51%. This monotonic trend of reducing overconfidence and improving calibration was also true when we analyzed the two samples separately:

NON-DEVELOPMENTAL: Q1: .46; Q2: .39; Q3: .16; Q4: .10;

DEVELOPMENTAL: Q1: .57; Q2: .43; Q3: .39; Q4: .13.

The findings here suggest that Aristotle may have been wrong when he stated that “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Our findings would suggest that the more you know, the more you know you know. That is, calibration gets better the more you know. What is striking here is the vulnerability of weaker learners to overconfidence. It is the learners who have not encoded a lot of information from reading that have an inflated notion of how much they can recall. This is not unlike the children in the Lipko et al. (2009) research mentioned earlier. It is also clear in our analyses that typical college students as well as developmental college students are susceptible to overestimating how much they know.

It is not clear from this study what variables underlie low recall performance. Low background knowledge, limited vocabulary, and difficulty with syntax, could all contribute to poor encoding of the information in the text and low subsequent recall. Nonetheless, our data do indicate that care should be taken in assisting students who fall into the lower performance quartiles to make better calibrated metacognitive judgments. One way to do this might be by asking students to explicitly make judgments about future performance and then encouraging them to reflect on the accuracy of those judgments after they complete the target task (e.g., a class test). Koriat et al. (1980) asked participants to give reasons for and against choosing responses to questions before the participants predicted the probability that they had chosen the correct answer. Prompting students to consider the amount and strength of the evidence for their responses reduced overconfidence. Metacognitive exercises like these may lead to better calibration.

References

Koriat, A., Lichtenstein, S., Fischoff, B. (1980). Reasons for confidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6(2), 107-118.

Koriat, A., Sheffer, L., & Ma’ayan, H. (2002). Comparing objective and subjective learning curves: Judgments of learning exhibit increased underconfidence with practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131, 147–162.

Lipko, A. R., Dunlosky, J., & Merriman, W. E. (2009). Persistent overconfidence despite practice: The role of task experience in preschoolers’ recall predictions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102(2), 152-166.

Roediger, H., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.

Was, C. (2015). Some developmental trends in metacognition. Retrieved from

https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/some-developmental-trends-in-metacognition/.

 


Pausing Mid-Stride: Mining Metacognitive Interruptions In the Classroom

By Amy Ratto Parks, Ph.d., University of Montana

Metacognitive interventions are often the subject of research in educational psychology because researchers are curious about how these planned, curricular changes might impact the development of metacognitive skills over time. However, as a researcher in the fields of metacognition and rhetoric and composition, I am sometimes struck by the fact that the planned nature of empirical research makes it difficult for us to take advantage of important kairic moments in learning.

The rhetorical term kairic, taken from the Greek concept of kairos, generally represents a fortuitous window in time in which to take action toward a purpose. In terms of learning, kairic moments are those perfect little slivers in which we might suddenly gain insight into our own or our students’ learning. In the classroom, I like to think of these kairic moments as metacognitive interruptions rather than interventions because they aren’t planned ahead of time. Instead, the “interruptions” arise out of the authentic context of learning. Metacognitive interruptions are kairic moments in which we, as teachers, might be able to briefly access a point in which the student’s metacognitive strategies have either served or not served them well.

A few days ago I experienced a very typical teaching moment that turned out to be an excellent example of a fruitful metacognitive interruption: I asked the students to take out their homework and the moment I began asking discussion questions rooted in the assignment, I sensed that something was off. I saw them looking at each other’s papers and whispering across the tables, so I asked what was going on. One brave student said, “I think a bunch of us did the homework wrong.”

They were supposed to have completed a short analysis of a peer-reviewed article titled, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth” (Baumgartner & Morris, 2014). I got out the assignment sheet and asked the brave student, Rasa*, to read it aloud. She said, “For Tuesday, September 15. Read The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations…. oh wait. I see what happened. I read the other Jon Stewart piece in the book.” Another student jumped in and said, “I just analyzed the whole show” and a third said, “I analyzed Jon Stewart.”

In that moment, I experienced two conflicting internal reactions. The teacher in me was annoyed. How could this simple set of directions have caused confusion? And how far was this confusion going to set us back? If only half of the class had done the work, the rest of my class plan was unlikely to go well. However, the researcher in me was fascinated. How, indeed, had this simple set of instructions caused confusion? All of these students had completed a homework assignment, so they weren’t just trying to “get out of work.” Plus, they also seemed earnestly unsure about what had gone wrong.

The researcher in me won out. I decided to let the class plan go and I began to dig into the situation. By a show of hands I saw that 12 of the 22 students had done the correct assignment and 10 had completed some customized, new version of the homework. I asked them all to pause for a moment and engage in a metacognitive activity: they were to think back to moment they read the assignment and ask themselves, where did I get mixed up?

Rasa said that she just remembered me saying something about The Daily Show in class, and when she looked in the table of contents, she saw a different article, “Political Satire and Postmodern Irony in the Age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart” (Colletta, 2014), and read it instead. Other students said that they must not have read closely enough, but then another student said something interesting. She said, “I did read the correct essay, but it sounded like it was going to be too hard to analyze and I figured that you hadn’t meant for this to be so hard, so I just analyzed the show.” Other students nodded in agreement. I asked the group to raise their hands if had read the correct essay. Many hands went up. Then I asked if they thought that the analysis they chose to do was easier than the one I assigned. All of them raised their hands.

Again, I was fascinated. In this very short conversation I had just watched rich, theoretical research play out before me. First, here was an example of the direct effect of power browsing (Kandra, Harden, & Babbra, 2012) mistakenly employed in the academic classroom. Power browsing is a relatively recently coined term that describes “skimming and scanning through text, looking for key words, and jumping from source to source” (Kandra et al., 2012).  Power browsing can be a powerful overviewing strategy (Afflerbach & Cho, 2010) in an online reading environment where a wide variety of stimuli compete for the reader’s attention. Research shows that strong readers of non-electronic texts also employ pre-reading or skimming strategies (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009), however, when readers mistakenly power browse in academic settings, it may result in “in missed opportunities or incomplete knowledge” (Kandra et al., 2012, par. 18). About metacognition and reading strategies, Afflerbach and Cho (2010) write, “the good strategy user is always aware of the context of reading” (p. 206); clearly, some of my students had forgotten their reading context. Some of the students knew immediately that they hadn’t thoroughly read the assignment. As soon as I described the term “power browse” their faces lit up. “Yes!” said, Rasa, “that’s exactly what I did!” Here was metacognition in action.

Second, as students described the reasoning behind choosing to read the assigned essay, but analyze something unassigned, I heard them offering a practical example of Flower and Hayes’ (1981/2011) discussion of goal-setting in the writing process. Flower and Hayes (1981/2011) said that writing includes, “not only the rhetorical situation and audience which prompts one to write, it also includes the writer’s own goals in writing” (p. 259). They went on to say that although some writers are able to “juggle all of these demands” others “frequently reduce this large set of restraints to a radically simplified problem” (p. 259). Flower and Hayes allow that this can sometimes cause problems, but they emphasize that “people only solve the problems they set for themselves” (p. 259).

Although I had previously seen many instances of students “simplifying” larger writing assignments in my classroom, I had never before had a chance to talk with students about what had happened in the moment when they realized something hadn’t worked. But here, they had just openly explained to me that the assignment had seemed too difficult, so they had recalibrated, or “simplified” it into something they thought they could do well and/or accomplish during their given timeframe.

This metacognitive interruption provided an opportunity to “catch” students in the moment when their learning strategies had gone awry, but my alertness to the kairic moment only came as a result of my own metacognitive skills: when it became clear that the students had not completed the work correctly, I paused before reacting and that pause allowed me to be alert to a possible metacognitive learning opportunity. When I began to reflect on this class period, I realized that my own alertness came as a result of my belief in the importance of teachers being metacognitive professionals so that we can interject learning into the moment of processing.

There is yet one more reason to mine these metacognitive interruptions: they provide authentic opportunities to teach students about metacognition and learning. The scene I described here could have had a very different outcome. It can be easy to see student behavior in a negative light. When students misunderstand something we thought we’d made clear, we sometimes make judgments about them being “lazy” or “careless” or “belligerent.” In this scenario it seems like it would have been justifiable to have gotten frustrated and lectured the students about slowing down, paying attention to details, and doing their homework correctly.

Instead, I was able to model the kind of cognitive work I would actually want to teach them: we slowed down and studied the mistake in a way that led the class to a conversation about how our minds work when we learn. Rather than including a seemingly-unrelated lecture on “metacognition in learning” I had a chance to teach them in response to a real moment of misplaced metacognitive strategy. Our 15-minute metacognitive interruption did not turn out to be a “delay” in the class plan, but an opening into a kind of learning that might sometimes just have to happen when the moment presents itself.

References

Baumgartner, J., & Morris, J., (2014). The Daily Show effect: Candidate evaluations, efficacy, and American youth. In C. Cucinella (Ed.), Funny. Southlake, Fountainhead Press. (Reprinted from American Politics Journal, 34(3), (2006), pp.341-67).

Colletta, L. (2014). Political satire and postmodern irony in the age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. In C. Cucinella (Ed.), Funny. Southlake, Fountainhead Press. (Reprinted from The Journal of Popular Culture, 42(5), (2009), pp. 856-74).

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

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. (2011). A cognitive process theory of writing. In V. Villanueva & K. Arola (Eds.), Cross-talk in comp theory: A reader, (3rd ed.), (pp. 253-277). Urbana, IL: NCTE. (Reprinted from College Composition and Communication, 32(4), (Dec., 1981), pp. 365-387).

Kandra, K. L., Harden, M., & Babbra, A. (2012). Power browsing: Empirical evidence at the college level. National Social Science Journal, 2, article 4. Retrieved from http://www.nssa.us/tech_journal/volume_2-2/vol2-2_article4.htm

Waters, H. S., & Schneider, W., (Eds.). (2010). Metacognition, strategy use, and instruction. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

* Names have been changed to protect the students’ privacy.


Exploring the potential impact of reciprocal peer tutoring on higher education students’ metacognitive knowledge and regulation

Backer, Keer and Valcke’s study “explores the potential of reciprocal peer tutoring to promote both university students’ metacognitive knowledge and their metacognitive regulation skills. The study was conducted in a naturalistic higher education setting, involving 67 students tutoring each other during a complete semester.”

Backer, Liesje De. (May 2012) . Exploring the potential impact of reciprocal peer tutoring on higher education students’ metacognitive knowledge and regulation. Instructional Science, Volume 40, issue 3, pp 559-588. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11251-011-9190-5

Exploring the potential impact of reciprocal peer tutoring on higher education students’ metacognitive knowledge and regulation


5 Things Every Student Should Know Before Starting College

This article is about Geddes’ five tips to students who are entering college. Once you read the subtitles, I’m sure you will be intrigued to read this brief article.

Five Tips

  1. Your Professors Hate Your Favorite High School Teachers!
  2. Understand the 80/20 Rule / 20/80 Rule Shift
  3. Read Material Before Class
  4. Know the Difference Between Memorizing and Learning
  5. Be Confident. You are not broken

Geddes, Leonard. (2015) . 5 Things Every Student Should Know Before Starting College. The Learnwell Projects. Retrieved from http://www.thelearnwellprojects.com/thewell/5-things-every-student-should-know-before-starting-college/

5 Things Every Student Should Know Before Starting College

 


Assessing Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning

This article “provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological issues involved in developing and evaluating measures of metacognition and self-regulated learning.” Sections in this article discuss the components of metacognition and self-regulated learning as well as the assessment of metacognition.

Pintrich, Paul R.; Wolters, Christopher A.; and Baxter, Gail P., “2. Assessing Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning” (2000). Issues in the Measurement of Metacognition. Paper 3.

Assessing Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning


A Metacognitive Learning Cycle: A Better Warranty for Student Understanding?

Blank’s study “proposes a revised learning cycle model, termed the Metacognitive Learning Cycle, which emphasizes formal opportunities for teachers and students to talk about their science ideas. Working collaboratively, the researcher and a seventh-grade science teacher developed a 3-month ecology unit based on the revised model.” Results showed that even though students that were in the metacognitive classroom didn’t gain more content knowledge of ecology, they did however have more “permanent restructuring of their ecology. “

Blank, M. Lisa. (2000). A Metacognitive Learning Cycle: A Better Warranty for Student Understanding? Science Education, Volume 84, Issue 4, pages 486-506, July 2000.

A Metacognitive Learning Cycle: A Better Warranty for Student Understanding?

 


Metacognitive Development as a Shift in Approach to Learning: An in-depth study

Case and Gunstone conducted a study on students who were enrolled in an engineering course and after conducting series of interviews, they were able to provide detailed information about students’ metacognitive development or “lack thereof.”

Jennifer Case & Richard Gunstone (2002) Metacognitive Development

as a Shift in Approach to Learning: An in-depth study, Studies in Higher Education, 27:4,

459-470, DOI: 10.1080/0307507022000011561

Metacognitive Development as a Shift in Approach to Learning: An in-depth study

 


Metacognitive Awareness and Academic Achievement in College Students

“Schraw and Dennison (1994) developed the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) to assess metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation which they referred to as the knowledge of cognition factor and the regulation of cognition factor.” Young and Fry’s article discusses the correlations between the final course grades, GPS and MAI. (Metacognitive Awareness Inventory) Findings show that the scores on the MAI greatly differ between undergraduate and graduate students.

Young, A., & Fry, J. (2012). Metacognitive awareness and academic achievement in college students. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8(2), 1-10.

Metacognitive Awareness and Academic Achievement in College Students

 


Metacognition and Learning: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations

This is the first issue of the new international journal Metacognition and Learning. Journal provides “A kaleidoscopic view on research into metacognition.” It is a great introduction to metacognition and includes ten issues “Which are by no means exhaustive.”

Metacognition and Learning, 2006, Volume 1, Number 1, Page 3. Marcel V. J. Veenman, Bernadette H. A. M. Hout-Wolters, Peter Afflerbach

Metacognition and Learning: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations


The Role of Metacognitive Knowledge in Learning, Teaching, and Assessing

“Metacognitive knowledge is a new category of knowledge in the revised Taxonomy.” According to Pintrich, strategic knowledge, self-knowledge and the knowledge of tasks and their contexts are the three important types of metacognitive knowledge.

Paul R. Pintrich (2002) The Role of Metacognitive Knowledge in Learning, Teaching, and

Assessing, Theory Into Practice, 41:4, 219-225, DOI: 10.1207/s15430421tip4104_3

The Role of Metacognitive Knowledge in Learning, Teaching, and Assessing

You may also read one of the blog entries that relates to this article by clicking here


Metacognition as Part of a Broader Perspective on Learning

This article includes six instructional strategies that promote self-regulation and ways that motivational cognitive and metacognitive skills can be enhanced using these strategies.

Research in Science Education, 2006, Volume 36, Number 1-2, Page 111. Gregory Schraw, Kent J. Crippen, Kendall Hartley

 

Promoting Self-Regulation in Science Education: Metacognition as Part of a Broader Perspective on Learning