Month: September 2015

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


Student Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning in the College Classroom

This chapter talks about the problems in students’ motivation to learn and how self-regulated learning can provide some insights to issues such as, how come students care more about their grades than learning the disciplinary content of their courses?, why do students wait until the last minute to fulfill the obligations of their courses such as studying for an exam or writing a paper?

R.P. Perry and J.C. Smart (eds.), The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Evidence-Based Perspective, 731–810. Pintrich and Zusho: Student Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning in the Classroom

Student Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning in the College Classroom


Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Constructs

This article contains findings from several different studies, and the “Findings indicated convergence of self-report measures of metacognition, significant correlations between metacognition and academic monitoring, negative correlations between self-reported metacognition and accuracy ratings, and positive correlations between metacognition and strategy use and metacognition and motivation.”

Rayne A. Sperling, Bruce C. Howard, Richard Staley & Nelson DuBois

(2004) Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Constructs, Educational Research and

Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 10:2, 117-139

Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Constructs


Some Developmental Trends in Metacognition

By Chris Was, PhD; Kent State University

Recently, I have conducted some experiments with K – 6 grade students related to children’s ability to predict their ability to recall simple items. Although a simple measure, this form of calibration is a measure of a child’s knowledge of the own memory abilities. This is, at its most basic level, metacognition.

The work in which my collaborators and I are currently engaged builds on the work of Amanda Lipko and colleagues (e.g., Lipko, Dunlosky, & Merriman, 2009). What was most striking about Lipko’s work was the robust overconfidence displayed by preschool children. Granted, there is a large body of literature that demonstrates young children are overconfident in both their physical abilities (e.g., Plumert, 1995) as well as their cognitive abilities (e.g., Cunningham & Weaver, 1989; Flavell, Friedrichs, & Hoyt, 1970). Much of this work indicates that with preschool children this overconfidence is quite persistent. But Lipko et al.’s (2009) work found that even following repeated practice and feedback, specifically salient feedback when children recalled their own previous performance, this overconfidence remained.

There are several hypotheses, both tested and untested, as to why this overconfidence exists and why it is robust against correction. Perhaps it is wishful thinking (a hypothesis test by Lipko et al.), perhaps it is a developmental issue, or perhaps it serves as a learning mechanism (children who give up the first time they fail may not learn to do succeed at much). In any case, I became interested in circumstances in which young children are capable of making accurate predictions of their cognitive abilities.

A review of the experimental methodology used by Lipko et al. is warranted. In their 2009 study Lipko et al. presented young children (mean age of approximately 5 years 0 months) with pictures of common items. As children were presented with pictures they were asked to name them. If correctly named the picture was placed on a board until 10 pictures were on the board. The experimenter then said to the children, “I am going to cover up the pictures,“ and asked, “how many do you think you will remember after I cover them?” The children then made a prediction of how many pictures they would remember. Finally, the children attempted to recall the pictures. In a series of experiments, children were overconfident in their ability even after repeated trials and even after correctly recalling their poor performance on previous trials.

Are there circumstances when children are more accurate? The simple answer is, “yes.” In a recent experiment (Was & Al-Harthy, 2015) we found that when children complete the Lipko task with unfamiliar items, their predictions of how many items they might remember are significantly lower than for familiar items. This familiarity overconfidence bias is likely due something similar to the fluency effect. That is, when the pictures are familiar to children, they seem easy to remember, but when the pictures are unfamiliar, children understand that they might be hard to recall later.

We are also investigating the developmental trends of the ability to predict recall. Our most interesting finding to date, is calibration (accuracy of recall predictions) is strongly related to the increase in working memory capacity. Put differently, as the number of items children are able to recall increases, so does their ability to accurately predict the number of items they will recall. Some will argue that this is not an unsuspected finding. The argument being that as working memory capacity increases, the ability to think about one’s own memory should also increase. My response is that it is not clear if metacognition is directly related to working memory or executive functions. Perhaps a mediating relationship exists. Recent investigations have suggested that performance on many measures of working memory are more dependent on strategy than they are on cognitive ability. Perhaps, metacognition is just good strategy use, or perhaps it is a cognitive ability.

The finding of the relationship between recall performance and calibration (the difference between predicted performance and actual performance) supports the hypothesis that metacognition is not a single skill that children have or not, but rather it is a complex of many skills and processes the children acquire through experiences and maturation. I suggest that developmental research in metacognition need focus on aptitude-by-treatment interactions. Questions such as, “What variety of academic activities contribute to the development of metacognition at different stages or levels of cognitive development?” will not only forward our understanding of metacognition, but perhaps also how to help young students develop metacognitive strategies and perhaps metacognitive performance.

Cunningham, J. G., & Weaver, S. L. (1989). Young children’s knowledge of their memory             span: Effects of task and experience. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48,   32–44.

Flavell, J. H., Friedrichs, A. G., & Hoyt, J. D. (1970). Developmental changes in memorization    processes. Cognitive Psychology, 1,324–340.

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, 103(2), 152-166.

Plumert, J. M. (1995). Relations between children’s overestimation of their physical abilities and accident proneness. Developmental Psychology, 31(5), 866-876. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.31.5.866

Was, C. A., & Al-Harthy, I. (2015). Developmental differences in overconfidence: When do children understand that attempting to recall predicts memory performance? The Researcher, 27(1), 1-5, Conference Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Northern Rocky Mountain Education Research Association.


Making sense of how I learn: Metacognitive capital and the first year university student

By Lodge and Larmar, This article focuses on how significant it is to encourage metacognitive processing as a means of increasing student retention, enhancing university engagement and lifelong learning.

Larmar, S. & Lodge, J. (2014). Making sense of how I learn: Metacognitive capital and the first year

university student. The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 5(1). 93-105. doi:

10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i1.193

Lodge and Larmar article


Meta-Studying: Teaching Metacognitive Strategies to Enhance Student Success

“Elizabeth Yost Hammer, PhD, of Xavier University of Louisiana, discusses why psychology teachers are uniquely positioned not only to teach the content of psychology but also to teach students how to learn. Hammer presents some strategies to teach metacognitive skills in the classroom to enhance learning and improve study skills and encourages teachers to present students with information about Carol Dweck’s model of the “Fixed Intelligence Mindset.””

Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer’s Presentation (45 Minutes)


Dr. Derek Cabrera – How Thinking Works

“Dr. Derek Cabrera is an internationally recognized expert in metacognition (thinking about thinking), epistemology (the study of knowledge), human and organizational learning, and education. He completed his PhD and post-doctoral studies at Cornell University and served as faculty at Cornell and researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. He leads the Cabrera Research Lab, is the author of five books, numerous journal articles, and a US patent. Derek discovered DSRP Theory and in this talk he explains its benefits and the imperative for making it part of every students’ life.”

DSRP consists of four interrelated structures (or patterns), each structure has two opposing elements. The structures and their elements are:

  • Making Distinctions – which consist of an identity and an other
  • Organizing Systems – which consist of part and whole
  • Recognizing Relationships – which consist of action and reaction
  • Taking Perspectives – which consist of point and view

https://youtu.be/dUqRTWCdXt4  (15 minutes)


Metacognition About Course Design: Creating a Paradigm Shift

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy

Recent studies have sparked a national conversation about the lack of accountability for student learning in higher education. Our Underachieving Colleges (Bok, 2006) and Academically Adrift (Arum & Roksa, 2011) are just two examples of scathing reviews of how colleges are falling short. Increasingly, colleges and universities are being asked to demonstrate their value, particularly during a recession.

The core reason for not achieving greater success is a lack of focus on student learning. Despite all that we know today, institutions continue to concentrate on belongingness, construction, and the almighty research dollar rather than on whether students are graduating with substantial learning gains. Additionally, most faculty believe they are supporting student learning. They can even recite many of the basic learning principles that are foundational to teaching, such as the value of relevance. However, many faculty are unsure about how to apply these principles to their own classes. Like our students, they need sufficient practice and feedback in order to be able to create well-designed courses that improve student learning.

One way to attack this issue is to provide opportunities for metacognition about course design, not merely lesson planning. If metacognition includes thinking about how one performs a skill (Schraw, 1998), then awareness and knowledge about how to design a course are critical for enhancing student learning. Are there clearly articulated learning goals for the course? Do the assessments align with those learning goals? What learning experiences will support student success on those assessments by providing ample practice and feedback?

Jones, Noyd, and Sagendorf (2014) propose institutional course design retreats as a method for creating metacognition about student learning. Through a series of steps and collaboration with peers, faculty might simply set out to design their courses, but often become transformed by the experience. For many years, the authors have facilitated this six-step process for course design, but it is now available for others to use in Building a Pathway for Student Learning: A How-To Guide to Course Design. The book offers a research-based course design process that can be applied to all disciplines and a variety of settings. Step-by-step, faculty walk through designing a course using a series of self-paced workboxes:

  1. Student Learning Factors – How do your students’ characteristics impact their learning?
  2. Learning Goals – What do you want students to know and be able to do as a result of taking your course?
  3. Assessment – How will you know the extent to which students accomplished your learning goals?
  4. Proficiencies – What knowledge, skills, and attitudes will students need to accomplish the learning goals?
  5. Learning Experiences – Which learning experiences (outside and inside class time) support the development of proficiencies and accomplishment of your goals?
  6. Feedback & Improvement – How will students receive useful feedback on their work so they can make the necessary adjustments to accomplish your goals?

The culmination of work is a one-page flow chart of the course – a map to student learning. This flow chart offers a metacognitive pathway through the course for students as well as faculty teaching the course. As with all learning, and perhaps most importantly, faculty gain a new awareness of who should be at the center of their course – the learner! Through metacognition about student learning, faculty are able to intentionally design college experiences that matter rather than passive lectures or fun-but-tangential activities that do not achieve the learning gains we most need in higher education.

Without appropriate support and metacognition, faculty will continue to design courses focused on content rather than learning. While the approach that Jones, Noyd and Sagendorf (2014) use seemingly addresses an instructor’s main goal in preparation of a new semester – finishing the syllabus – faculty become transformed by how to operationalize a learning-centered philosophy, which they will carry with them into all of their lessons. Through a process of metacognition about student learning, faculty begin to experience the paradigm shift about which Barr and Tagg (1995) dreamed twenty years ago.

References:

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (Nov-Dec 1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27(6), 12-26.

Bok, D. (2006). Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jones, S. K., Noyd, R. K., & Sagendorf, K. S. (2014). Building a pathway to student learning: A how-to guide to course design. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26, 113-125.


Metacognition in Psychomotor Development and Positive Error Cultures

Ed Nuhfer, Retired Professor of Geology and Director of Faculty Development and Director of Educational Assessment, enuhfer@earthlink.net, 208-241-5029

All of us experience the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. This state occurs when we truly do know something, such as the name of a person, but we cannot remember the person’s name at a given moment. The feeling that we do know is a form of metacognitive awareness that confirms the existence of a real neural network appropriate to the challenge. It is also an accurate knowing that carries confidence that we can indeed retrieve the name given the right memory trigger.

In “thinking about thinking” some awareness of the connection between our psychomotor domain and our efforts to learn can be useful. The next time you encounter a tip-of-the-tongue moment, try clenching your left hand. Ruth Propper and colleagues confirmed that left hand clenching activates the right hemisphere of the brain and can enhance recall. When learning names, clenching of the right hand activates the left hemisphere and can enhance encoding (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062474). Not all connections between the psychomotor domain and intellectual development are this direct, but it is very useful to connect efforts to develop intellectually with established ways that promote psychomotor development.

Young people are active, so many things that excite them to initiate their learning have a heavy emphasis on psychomotor development. Examples are surfing, snowboarding, dance, tennis, martial arts, yoga, or a team sport. We can also include the hand-eye coordination and learning patterns involved in many addictive video games as heavy on kinesthetic learning, even though these do not offer health benefits of endurance, strength, flexibility, balance, etc. It is rare that anyone who commits to learning any of these fails to achieve measurably increased proficiency.

K-12 teacher Larry Ferlazzo uses the act of missing a wastebasket with a paper wad to help students understand how to value error and use it to inform strategies for intellectual development (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/10/31/an-effective-five-minute-lesson-on-metacognition). His students begin to recognize how the transfer of practices that they already accept as valid from their experiences may likely improve their mastery in less familiar challenges during intellectual development.

College teachers also know that the most powerful paths to high-level thinking engage the psychomotor domain. Visualization that involves explaining to self by diagram and developing images of the knowledge engages psychomotor skills. Likewise, writing engages the psychomotor in developing text, tracking and explaining reasoning and in revising the work (Nuhfer, 2009, 2010 a, b).

Students already “get” that many trips down the ski trail are needed to master snowboarding; they may not “get” that writing many evaluative argument papers is necessary to master critical thinking. In the former, they learn from their most serious error and focus on correcting it first. They correctly surmise that the focused effort to correct one troublesome issue will be beneficial. In efforts to develop intellectually, students deprived of metacognitive training may not be able to recognize or prioritize their most serious errors. This state deprives them of awareness needed to do better on subsequent challenges.

It is important for educators to recognize how particular cultures engage with error. Author and neuroscientist Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and  the Harding Center for Risk Literacy (2014) contrasts positive and negative error cultures. A positive error culture promotes recognition and understanding of error. They discuss error openly, and sharing of experienced error is valued as a way to learn. This culture nurtures a growth mindset in which participants speak metacognitively to self in terms of: “Not yet… change this …better next time.” Gigerenzer cites aviation as a positive error culture of learning that has managed to reduce plane crashes to one in ten million flights. Interestingly, the cultures of surfing, snowboarding, dance, tennis, martial arts and yoga all promote development through positive error cultures. Positive error cultures make development through practice productive and emotionally safe.

Gigerenzer cites the American system of medical practice as one example of a negative error culture, wherein systems of reporting, discussing and learning from serious errors are nearly nonexistent. Contrast aviation safety with the World Heath Organization report that technologically advanced hospitals harm about 10% of their patients. James (2013) deduced that hospital error likely causes over 400,000 deaths annually (http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx). Negative error cultures make it unsafe to discuss or to admit to error and therefore, they are ineffective learning organizations. In negative error cultures, error discovery results in punishment. Negative error cultures nurture fear and humiliation and thereby make learning unsafe. Error there delivers the metacognitive declaration, “I failed.”

We should think in what ways our actions in higher education support positive or negative error cultures and what kinds of metacognitive conversations we nurture in participants (colleagues, students) of the culture. We can often improve intellectual development through understanding how the positive error cultures promote psychomotor development.

 

References

Gigerenzer, G. (2014) Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. New York New York: Penguin.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2009) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Learning through Languaging. Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 2.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 8-11.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2010a) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Acts of Writing as “Gully Washers”- Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 3.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 8-11.

Nuhfer, E.B. (2010b) “A Fractal Thinker Designs Deep Learning Exercises: Metacognitive Reflection with a Rubric Wrap Up – Educating in Fractal Patterns XXVIII, Part 4.” The National Teaching & Learning Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 8-11.