Bringing a Small Gift – The Metacognitive Experience

by Roman Taraban, Ph.D., Texas Tech University

In the Christmas song, “The Little Drummer Boy,” the young boy brings his humble gift to the “mighty king,” which he presents from the heart. This is an apt situation to bring up at this time of year, for you too, might have received a small gift. For ‘tis the season for metacognition.

John Flavell and others generally describe metacognition as thinking about thinking. More specifically, “Metacognitive knowledge is one’s stored knowledge or beliefs about oneself and others as cognitive agents, about tasks, about actions or strategies, and about how all these interact to affect the outcomes of any sort of intellectual enterprise” (Flavell, 1999, p. 906). Flavell (1999) broadened metacognitive theory to include affect: “Metacognitive experiences are conscious cognitive or affective experiences that occur during the enterprise and concern any aspect of it—often, how well it is going” (p. 906). Affect, as part of metacognitive experiences, is important because if you have the feeling that something is difficult to comprehend, remember, or solve, those feelings may trigger careful metacognitive reflection and changes in goals or strategies (Papaleontiou-Louca, 2008). Nuhfer (2014), in a related vein, affirms the crucial role of affect to metacognition in developing students’ metacognitive skills: “[A]ttempts to develop students’ metacognitive proficiency without recognizing metacognition’s affective qualities are likely to be minimally effective.”

So what is that gift I mentioned earlier? It’s your end-of-semester evaluations, of course. There we ask students to evaluate and comment on whether the course objectives were specified and followed by the instructor, whether the instructor was an effective teacher, and whether the course was a valuable learning experience. These questions prompt students to think about their thinking in the course. Without prompting, students spontaneously also comment on their affect. And here come the gifts, some of them encouraging, pleasant, and precious as gold. Here are a few examples: I very much enjoyed the discussions and deeper exploration of the material. I felt that the papers pushed me to genuinely consider and critically evaluate the material in a way I may not have otherwise. Thank you for an enjoyable and thought-provoking seminar. This has been my favorite psychology class. The work assignments were challenging and (dare I say) fun.

But sometimes the gift can be a bit disconcerting. There was one unfortunate December when I unluckily received my course evaluations just before leaving on a family vacation to Las Vegas. I had gone through the semester thinking how wise I was and how well things were going. The students told me otherwise. Yes, they explained why I deserved those low ratings, so they had to think about their metacognitive experience – i.e., what it was like learning the material in my course and how they felt about the process. For a week, I was inconsolable. But the students had got my attention. I realized I had become too complacent. I had to think deeply about my thinking about how to organize and deliver the course. I had to engage in metacognitions about teaching. And it wasn’t just about thinking about the knowledge I had and they had (or had not). It was also about the affect – how I felt about the course, myself, and the students, in the context of those metacognitions.

That semester was a gift. Every semester is a gift. But we have to accept the gift for it to be meaningful and make a difference. So…all good tidings for the season – I mean, end of the semester.

References

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906

Nuhfer, E. (2014). Self-assessment and the affective quality of metacognition: Part 1 of 2. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/self-assessment-and-the-affective-quality-of-metacognition-part-1-of-2/

Papaleontiou-Louca, E. (2008). Metacognition and theory of mind. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Can Reciprocal Peer Tutoring Increase Metacognition in Your Students?

Aaron S. Richmond, Ph. D.

How many of you use collaborative learning in your classroom? If you do, do you specifically use it to increase metacognition in your students? If the answer is yes, you are likely building on the work of Hadwin, Jarvela, and Miller (2011) and Schraw, Crippen, and Hartley (2006). For those of you unfamiliar with collaborative learning, I tend to agree with Slavich and Zimbardo’s (2012) definition, in collaborative learning students “…tackle problems and question with peers—especially more knowledgeable peers—insofar as such experiences provide students with opportunities to learn new problem-solving strategies and to debate ideas in a way that challenges their understanding of concepts” (p. 572). There are many ways to use collaborative learning in the classroom, jigsaw classroom, paired annotations, send-a-problem, think-pair-share, three-step interview, peer tutoring, number heads, etc. Of particular interest, recent research on collaborative learning suggests that reciprocal peer tutoring may be particularly useful when your goal is to not only learn course material, but to increase your student’s metacognition (De Backer, Van Keer, Moerkerke, & Valcke, 2016).

In their innovative study, De Backer and colleagues (2016) investigated the effects of using reciprocal peer tutoring (RPT) to support and increase metacognitive regulation in higher education. De Backer and colleagues defined RPT as “the structured exchange of the tutor role among peers in groups/pairs…and enables each student to experience the specific benefits derived from providing and receiving academic guidance.” (p. 191) De Backer et al. had students, over a course of the semester, complete eight peer tutoring sessions. All students were trained to be a tutor, experienced being a tutor, and tutored their peers at least twice. Tutoring sessions were 120 minutes in length and occurred outside of class. The tutor’s role was to manage the tutees and promote collaborative learning. During each tutoring session, the tutees were asked to solve a problem related to the class content. Each problem had three specific components:

(1) An outline of learning objectives to guide peers’ discussion to central course-related topics; (2) a subtask aimed at getting familiar with the theme-specific terminology; and (3) a subtask in which students were instructed to apply theoretical notions to realistic instructional cases. (De Backer et al., 2016, p. 193)

The problems presented, often did not have clear-cut answers and required considerable cognitive effort. De Backer et al. video recorded all the tutoring sessions and then scored each session on the amount and type of metacognitive regulation that occurred by both tutors and tutees. For example, they looked at the student’s ability to orient, plan, monitor, and evaluate. They also measured the level of processing (whether it was shallow or deep processing of metacognitive strategies). Appendix D of De Backer et al.’s article provided examples of how to code metacognitive data. See Table 1 for an example of the scoring (De Backer et al., 2016, p. 41). They then scored the frequency of metacognitive regulations that occurred per session.

Table 1. Examples of Lower and Deep Level Metacognitive Regulation in Reciprocal Peer Tutoring by De Backer et al. (2016, pp. 41-42)
Metacognition–Monitoring
Comprehension Monitoring	Noting lack of comprehension	T: “Does everyone understand the outlines of instructional behaviorism?”
		t1: “I still don’t understand the concept of aptitude.”
	Checking comprehension by repeating (LL)	T: “Does everyone agree now that instructional behaviorism and instructional constructivism are opposites?”
		t1: “I think (…) because in behaviorism the instructor decides on everything but constructivism is about learners being free to construct their own knowledge.:
		t2: “Yes constructivist learners are much more independent and active, not so?”
	Checking comprehension by elaborating (DL)	T: “The behavioristic instructor permanently provides feedback. Who knows why?”
		t1: “Is it not to make sure that learners don’t make mistakes?”
		t2: “Could that also be the reason why they structure the learning materials extensively? And why they don’t like collaborative learning? Because collaborative learning requires spontaneous discussions between students. You cannot really structure it in advance, not so?”
Note. DL = Deep learning, LL = low or shallow learning, T = tutor, t1 and t2 = tutees.

De Backer and colleagues (2016) found that as the semester progressed, students engaged in more and more metacognitive regulatory processes. Specifically, their orientation increased, their monitoring increased and their evaluation increased (in general the frequency was 3 times greater at the end of the semester than at the beginning of the semester). However, planning stayed stagnant over the course of the semester. Specifically, the frequency of planning use continued to be low throughout the semester. Far more interesting was that students (over the course of the semester) decreased their use of shallow or low-level metacognitive strategies and increased their use of deep-level metacognitive strategies as result. Increases in metacognitive regulation occurred across most types of metacognitive strategies (e.g., regulation, orientation, activating prior knowledge, task analysis, monitoring, and evaluation).

As demonstrated by De Backer and colleagues study and the work of other researchers (e.g., King, 1997; De Backer, Van Keer, & Valcke, 2012), RPT and other collaborative learning instructional methods may be a useful in increasing metacognitive processes of students.

Concluding Thoughts and Questions for You

After reading De Backer et al. (2016), I was fascinated by the possible use of RPT in my own classroom. So, I started to think about how to implement it myself. Some questions arose that I thought you might help me with:

How do I specifically scaffold the use of RPT in my classroom? More so, what does a successful RPT session resemble? Fortunately, De Backer and colleagues did provide an appendix to their study (Appendix C) that gives an example of what a tutoring session may look like.
How many tutoring sessions is enough to increase the metacognition in my students? De Backer et al. had 8 sessions. This would be difficult for me to squeeze into my course planning. Would 3-4 be enough? What do you think? But then not all students could be a tutor. Do they get more (metacognitively) out of being a tutor vs. a tutee? This is something that De Backer and colleagues did not analyze. (Hint, hint all you folks—SoTL project in the making;)
De Backer et al. briefly described that the tutors had a 10-page manual on how to be a tutor. Hmm…I don’t know if my students would be able to effectively learn from this. What other simple ways might we use to teach students how to be effective tutors in the context of RPT?
Finally, are you do anything like De Backer et al.? And if so, do you think it is improving your student’s metacognitive regulation?

References

De Backer, L., Van Keer, H., Moerkerke, B., & Valcke, M. (2016). Examining evolutions in the adoption of metacognitive regulation in reciprocal peer tutoring groups. Metacognition and Learning, 11, 187-213. doi:10.1007/s11409-015-9141-7

De Backer, L., Van Keer, H., & Valcke, M. (2012). Exploring the potential impact of reciprocal peer tutoring on higher education students’ metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation. Instructional Science, 40, 559–588.

Hadwin, A. F., Järvelä, S., & Miller, M. (2011). Self-regulated, co-regulated, and socially shared regulation of learning. In B. J. Zimmerman & D. H. Schunk (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance (pp. 65–84). New York: Routledge.

King, A. (1997). Ask to think-tell why©: A model to transactive peer tutoring for scaffolding higher level complex learning. Educational Psychologist, 32, 221–235.

Schraw, G., Crippen, K. J., & Hartley, K. (2006). Promoting self-regulation in science education: metacognition as part of a broader perspective on learning. Research in Science Education, 36, 111–139.

Slavich, G. M., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2012). Transformational teaching: Theoretical underpinnings, basic principles, and core methods. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 569-608. doi:10.1007/s10648-012-9199-6

The GAMES Survey: A Tool to Scaffold Metacognitive Practices

by Lauren Scharff, U. S. Air Force Academy

As many of us educators know, an unfortunately large number of students, both at the K-12 and college-levels, do not give much thought to how and why they try to learn the way they do, much less demonstrate strong habits of metacognition. Talking in general about metacognition might garner some students’ interest, but without some concrete guidance on how to engage in behaviors that support metacognition, students are less likely to develop such practices.

Thus, I was pleased to rediscover the GAMES survey / self-assessment tool created by Marilla Svinicki when I was re-reading her excellent book, Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom, as part of a book group at my institution. GAMES stands for:

Goal-oriented studying
Active studying
Meaningful and memorable studying
Explain to understand
Self-monitor

For each component of the survey, there are five to ten behaviors for which students indicate their likelihood to perform using a 5-point scale ranging from “Never” to “Always.” These behaviors are distinct, tangible actions such as:

Analyze what I have to do before beginning to study. (Goal-oriented studying)
Ask myself questions before, during, and after studying. (Active studying)
Make connections between what I am studying and past classes or units. (Meaningful and memorable studying)
Discuss the course content with anyone willing to listen. (Explain to understand)
Keep track of things I don’t understand and note when they finally become clear and what made that happen. (Self-monitor)

Marilla suggests that the use of such an instrument can help students become more aware of the possibility of self-regulating their learning behaviors. This combination of awareness and self-regulation is key to metacognition, and is what is prompting this blog post.

Through the process of completing the GAMES survey, students are introduced to more than 30 specific behaviors that holistically will support metacognition about learning. Students can easily observe areas where they might show stronger or weaker engagement, and they can focus their efforts where they are weaker, using the list of specific, tangible behaviors as a scaffold to help them target their activity.

At my institution, the U. S. Air Force Academy, we plan to use the GAMES survey in a current Science of Learning workshop series for our students led by students. Most of the seminar attendees are students who are struggling academically, but we are advertising that, by “studying smarter, not only harder” students of all levels of academic achievement can improve their learning. We believe that the GAMES survey will help students target specific behaviors that have been shown to support deeper learning.

We are not the only institution that has seen value in disseminating the GAMES survey to students. For example, several years ago, Georgia Tech encouraged its use across all sections of their first-year seminar. Importantly, they didn’t simply ask students to complete the survey and that was it. They encouraged instructors to help students use the results in a meaningful way, such as by picking a weak behavior and striving to improve it over a 2-week time period, or by having students journal about changes they made and how those changes seemed to impact their academic performance.

This survey tool is appropriate across the disciplines and only takes a few minutes for students to complete. Its use and a short follow-on activity to encourage meaningful application would not add great burden to a faculty member or take much time from normal course activities. But, the pay-off could be large for individual students, both in that course as well as others if they transfer the principles into new contexts. It’s definitely worth a try!

——————

Svinicki, M. D. (2004). Learning and motivation in the postsecondary classroom. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Co.

If you do not have access to Marilla Svinicki’s book, you can read a short online overview of GAMES on the Association for Psychological Science website (2006), and obtain a pdf copy of the survey online.

Promoting metacognitive reading through Just-in-Time Teaching

by John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

In a series of previous posts, I have discussed some of the ways that Just-in-Time Teaching techniques can promote metacognition (Draeger, 2014, 2015, 2016). Just-in-Time assignments require that students complete short assignments prior to class and instructors review those assignments before class begins so that they can tailor their lesson based on those responses (Novak, 1999). My introductory philosophy courses typically have 40 students and my Just-in-Time assignments each involve three short essay questions prior to each class session. The questions have a predictable structure — one asks students to explicate a central idea in the reading, one asks them to engage in critical thinking about the reading (e.g., how might the author respond to an issue raised earlier in the semester), and one encourages metacognition (e.g., whether their reading strategy was effective). This post shares my attempts to promote metacognition through Just-in-Time techniques to a larger section of introductory ethics (175 students), and, it further explores how Just-in-Time assignments can promote metacognitive reading.

All of the students in my larger introductory ethics course are required to answer the Just-in-Time questions prior to each class via my institution’s learning management system. Because of the large number of students and short turn-around time, I have adapted the format of these assignments. I typically ask two multiple-choice questions related to the central ideas in the reading. I ask one short essay question encouraging critical thinking about the reading (e.g., how is the current reading related to the previous one?). I also ask one Likert-style question to gauge how confident they are in their understanding of the reading, and one short answer question to encourage them to be metacognitive about their learning process (e.g., what was your reading strategy for this reading?, what was your annotation strategy?, or what was your strategy for relating the current reading to the previous?).

Before each class, I review a computer generated summary of the multiple-choice questions to gauge broad understanding of the material and look for trends. For example, their responses to the Likert-style question gauging their confidence in their understanding of the material often overestimate their actual understanding as determined by the multiple-choice questions, critical thinking essay, and overall course performance. However, this difference can serve as a conversation starter about their performance in the course. In some cases, I also ask Likert-style questions related to the author’s central thesis. So, for example, when we read an essay on sexual harassment, I asked them how often they believed sexual harassment occurred, with response options of daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and never. This Likert question became the opening move in our conversation during the next lesson. I shared that 87% reported that sexual harassment occurs at least daily or weekly. This led to an open-ended discussion about the sorts of behaviors that counted as harassment. In this way, Just-in-Time assignments can both inform and facilitate class conversation about the material.

Just-in-time assignments can also inform and facilitate conversations about how to become more metacognitive about learning; in this class I focus on their reading skills. For example, I recently asked students a Likert-style question about whether they have changed their reading practices since the beginning of the semester and a follow-up short answer question regarding how their practices have changed. 74% of students reported that their reading practices have changed. A number of interesting themes emerged in their description of those changes. First, many students reported moving to the “next stage” of their reading practice. Students moved (a) from not doing the reading to at least skimming, (b) from skimming until they got bored to finishing the reading, (c) from reading to re-reading, and (d) from re-reading to re-reading with an aim to synthesize the large themes. These responses also highlight to me the fact that not all students are in the same place with respect to their learning practices, so I should not make generalized assumptions, nor assume that one recommendation from me will accurately match all students’ developmental needs. Second, students reported changes in their annotation strategies. They moved from no highlighting to highlighting and from highlighting to more intentional annotation strategies (e.g., outlining in the margins, summarizing important thesis, adding critical questions in the margins). Third, students reported using strategies that we’d previously discussed in class (e.g., reading with different speeds, developing intentional annotations, reading the conclusion first and then reconstructing how the author gets there). Fourth, some students transformed their view of what reading philosophy is really about (e.g., they moved from reading for “information” to looking for the conceptual connections between big ideas). Finally, students reflected on the importance of time-management (e.g., devoting more time to the reading task, finding better physical reading environments, finding times in the day when they are more like to be able to process philosophy). Responses from the 26% of students who had not changed their reading practices were similarly illuminating. For example, most reported that they recognized a change was in order even if they had not yet managed to change. They also identified problems with their current reading practices. For example, they said that they waited until the last minute and rushed through Just-in-Time assignments. They recognized the value of intentional annotation and expressed the hope that they would eventually adopt those practices. And some students were able to diagnose why they were struggling (e.g., they quickly lose patience with authors who do not share their point of view). In short, Just-in-Time assignments can promote metacognitive reading by encouraging students to intentionally consider and evaluate their reading techniques as well as facilitate conversations about alternative reading strategies.

It should come as no surprise that teaching introductory ethics to a section of 175 students differs from teaching to a section of 40 students. However, it is clear that the Just-in-Time teaching technique is not only viable in a large class, but it can promote metacognition about learning as well as inform me about their level of content understanding. Indeed, teaching a larger section has led me to better ways of encouraging conversations with students about their learning process.

References

Draeger, J. (2014). “Just-in-Time for Metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/just-in-time-for-metacognition.

Draeger, J. (2015). “Using Just-in-Time assignments to promote metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/using-just-in-time-assignments-to-promote-metacognition.

Draeger, J. (2016). “Fine-tuning Just-in-Time assignments to encourage metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/fine-tuning-just-time-assignments-encourage-metacognition/

Novak, G., Patterson, E., Gavrin, A., & Christian, W. (1999). Just-in-time teaching: Blending active learning with web technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Metacogntion: Daring Your Students to Take Responsibility for Their Own Successes and Failures.

by Harrison Fisher

The Education Endowment Foundation in Britain claims that metacognitive styles of learning ‘have consistently high levels of impact, with pupils making an average of eight months’ additional progress’ (Education Endowment Foundation, 2016). This seems to be particularly the case with older pupils, e.g. those of university level, and particularly when used in a group setting, so learners can support each other. Metacognition refers to the process of reflecting on learning itself, as opposed to merely learning by rote or memorizing. Think about it, if you knew exactly what was hindering your learning, your learning experience would be more profound. Put simply, you would learn more!

It is so important in metacognitive learning that students take responsibility for their own progress. However, to students, there can sometimes be a perception that the professor is solely responsible for their learning. Metacognition can help to shift this perception and empower students to take more responsibility by encouraging them to reflect on the learning process while making necessary adjustments to their learning methods.

Metacognition for students is about reflecting on the most appropriate methods of learning, using different methods as needed, and subsequently revising their learning process. If we are realistic, students’ performance and learning is measured by their final course mark. So, students are on a continuous path to decipher how different learning methods work for them, and which to apply given the expected assessment. The question that arises at this point is whether the traditional forms of assessment used in higher education allow students to improve their metacognition, and whether they are representative of the challenges that will arise for students once they enter the workforce. There has been a lot of research on the relative benefits of various forms of assessment, but to a certain extent they miss the point that this itself will depend on students’ metacognitive engagement, and effective strategies will depend on students reflecting on what works for them.

One of the key goals of education is preparing students for employment. It follows that professors should be exposing students to the broadest range of assessments, ones that are more indicative of the challenges that they will encounter in their chosen fields. This will lead to students who are more dynamic in how they approach given problems and tasks. For example, take the multiple-choice exam. Is this type of assessment representative of the metacognitive skills required to handle customer complaints? Are the metacognitive skills needed to answer short answer questions similar to the leadership and teamwork skills sought by top employers? The short answer is no! What employers do not want is a worker who can merely remember facts, or who can ace an exam. What they do want is a flexible employee who can solve problems, who can be proactive, who can realize what their weaknesses are through reflection and respond to them.

One strategy to broaden students’ learning and development could be to allow students to reflect on their own learning. This could include asking students to keep a reflective log of their progress, keeping track of what they found difficult, and, more importantly, why they found it difficult. In this way, students are not focused on the content, but on the process of learning. Students can as a result change this in future. For example, if students are given a choice of assessment task or methods, they can ask themselves ‘What works for me?’ and ‘Why is it that this works?’ Each student is an individual with very different strengths and weaknesses, and assessment methods should reflect this. In a global affairs class for example, you could ask your students ‘How will the British decision to leave the European Union impact North America, and how could this impact be minimized?’ To assess this question, you could allow your students freedom in the way in which they present their answers. Some of these might include recorded video oral presentations, essays, creative infographics, recorded Mp3’s, slide decks and so on. This will allow your students to play to their strengths, and to make progress more quickly.

In giving freedom to students as far as which medium they submit their work, you can empower the student to discover what works for them. In other words, if you as a tutor let them present their work in a format they choose (for example: an essay, a vlog, a newspaper report etc.) this will surely allow them to reflect on how they learn and how they wish to present their work, which will then enrich their understanding. For example, in the case of assessing through Vlog, students may have what Gardner (1983) in his theory of Multiple Intelligences called linguistic intelligence, in that they are good with words and verbalizing their thoughts. As a result, they may feel that a Vlog, which involves recording a video presentation, is a perfect way to present their learning, rather than the more traditional exam or essay.

Likewise, another useful strategy could be to allow students to talk to each other about how they learn best. What strategies do they use, and which is most effective for them? Why is this? How would they advise each other to proceed in order to be more successful? One of the most valuable ways to learn is from others, and this will allow your more successful or confident students to have a positive effect on others. This allows students to both take responsibility for their learning, but also will allow students to reflect upon methods that they never would have thought of without the help of their peers.

These are by no means the only strategies that could sharpen students’ metacognition, but they are effective, tried and tested methods. Too often, independent learning comes off as a gimmick, something that is said without having any real meaningful outcome. Metacognitive strategies can change this. In fact, one of the most influential names in the field of metacognition, John Flavell (1987), believed, being influenced by the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, that metacognition is the process that drives all learning and development. As a result, we as professionals would definitely be missing out by not using this knowledge in our practice.

This is why the responsibility for learning needs to rest on the shoulders of the student. Learning will be more profound and more lasting, and, though it is hard work, the pay-off will be huge. Go on, dare your students to take responsibility for their own learning by using metacognition to monitor their successes and failures.

References

Flavell, J. H. (1987) Speculation about the nature and development of metacognition. In F. Weinert & R. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp.21 – 29). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Education Endownment Foundation. (2016). Meta-cognition and self-regulation. Education Endowment Foundation.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

Selecting a quantitative measure of metacognition

by Dr. Jessica Santangelo, Hofstra University

If you are interested in metacognition and promoting the development of metacognitive skills, you may also be interested in measuring metacognition. But how does one assess a person’s metacognitive development?

Metacognitive development can be assessed via quantitative or qualitative measures. Quantitative measures include self-report measures, often using Likert-style survey instruments, while qualitative measures use coding of responses to open-ended prompts (e.g., Stanton 2015). While quantitative measures are generally easier and faster to score, a drawback is that self-report measures are not always accurate (Schunk 2008). Qualitative data can be more rich, providing deeper and more nuanced information, but is much more labor intensive and time consuming to analyze. Ideally, one uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to develop as complete a picture of metacognitive development as possible.

When I set out to assess the metacognitive development of 484 (!) students, I was overwhelmed by the number of quantitative tools available. The focus of the tools varies. Some tools attempt to assess metacognition directly while others assess factors or attributes associated with metacognition (e.g., study skills, self-regulated learning). Some are not explicitly intended to assess metacognition (e.g., LASSI), but are used by some authors as an indicator of metacognitive development (e.g., Downing et al 2007, 2011). Some have been through many iterations over the years (e.g., ASI, RASI, and ASSIST) while others remain relatively unchanged (e.g., MAI, MSLQ). Some are free while others have a per student fee. Some are longer (120 items, ILS) and others are shorter (18, RASI).

How does one choose the “best” quantitative tool? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. It depends on the specific question being addressed and the amount of time and money available to administer the tool. I compiled a (non-comprehensive) list of tools I encountered in my search along with some information about each one to assist anyone looking for a quantitative measure of metacognitive development.

For my 484-student project, I chose to use the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI; Schraw and Dennison 1994) in combination with coding responses to open-ended prompts I created. I chose the MAI because it purports to measure metacognition directly (rather than being a study or learning skills inventory), is free, and is of moderate length (52 items). Others have found correlations between MAI results and other quantitative measures of student success (e.g., GPA and end of course grades), even suggesting using the MAI as a screening tool to identify students who could benefit from metacognition training (Young and Fry 2008). These characteristics fit with the questions I was asking: Can we rapidly (and accurately) assess metacognitive development at the beginning of an introductory course? Does including explicit instruction and implicit practice with metacognitive skills in a course increase student metacognitive development?

While coding the open-ended responses is taking months to complete, it has revealed some clear and interesting patterns. In contrast, the quantitative data from the MAI, though gathered in about 5 minutes running scantron sheets through a machine, show no patterns at all. There does not appear to be any relationship between the quantitative MAI data and the qualitative data or any other measure of student success (GPA, exam and course grades, etc.). I’m not entirely surprised – metacognitive skills are unlikely to be wholly captured by a number generated by a 52-item self-report questionnaire. However, given the results of others (e.g., Sperling et al 2004, Young and Fry 2008) I was hopeful there would be at least some relationship between the quantitative and qualitative results.

This is not to say that rapid assessments via self-report questionnaires are worthless. It is simply a caution to not rely on these quantitative tools as one’s sole measure of metacognitive development. Indeed, I have colleagues who have had more “success” with tools other than the MAI (e.g, with the MSLQ), where success is defined as the quantitative tool reflecting similar patterns or trends as other, more time-consuming qualitative measures.

As with many things in science, there is no easy answer. My hope is that this compilation of available tools makes the choice of which one to use a little easier.

For more in-depth reading on measuring metacognition, I recommend:

Mogashana, D., J. M. Case, and D. Marshall. 2012. What do student learning inventories really measure? A critical analysis of students’ responses to the approaches to learning and studying inventory. Studies in Higher Education 37:783–792.

Schraw, G., and J. Impara, eds. 2000. Issues in the Measurement of Metacognition. Buros Institute of Mental Measurements, Lincoln, NE.

References

Downing, K., F. Ning, and K. Shin. 2011. Impact of problem‐based learning on student experience and metacognitive development. Multicultural Education & Technology Journal 5:55–69.

Downing, K., R. Ho, K. Shin, L. Vrijmoed, and E. Wong. 2007. Metacognitive development and moving away. Educational Studies 33:1–13.

Schraw, G., and R. S. Dennison. 1994. Assessing metacognitive awareness. Contemporary educational psychology 19:460–475.

Schunk, D. H. 2008. Metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning: research recommendations. Educational Psychology Review 20:463–467.

Sperling, R. A., B. C. Howard, R. Staley, and N. DuBois. 2004. Metacognition and self-regulated learning constructs. Educational Research and Evaluation 10:117–139.

Stanton, J. D., X. N. Neider, I. J. Gallegos, and N. C. Clark. 2015. Differences in metacognitive regulation in introductory biology students: when prompts are not enough. CBE-Life Sciences Education 14:ar15.

Young, A., and J. Fry. 2008. Metacognitive awareness and academic achievement in college students. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 8:1–10.

Do Your Questions Invite Metacognition?

By Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, Co-founders, International Institute for Habits of Mind

Our ‘inner voice’ is what we use to reflect on what we do, how and why we behave in the way we do, how we critique ourselves and how we connect the knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks developed using each of our four learning systems. It is the voice that challenges us to strive further and the voice that condemns our foolishness.

Mark Treadwell, Learning: How the Brain Learns (2014)

One of a teacher’s most important practices is designing and posing questions. Wise teachers pose questions consciously with deliberate intentions. They know that questions engage sometimes subtle and overt responses from students. Questions are the powerful stimuli that evoke cognitive, behavioral and emotional responses in students. They initiate a journey in the mind. Indeed questions are the backbone of instruction. They must be employed with care (Costa & Kallick, 2008).

Building a Thinking Vocabulary

Because thinking words may not be used in students’ homes or in previous classrooms, thinking vocabulary may be a “foreign language” to them. They may not know how to perform the specific thinking skills that a given term implies. It is imperative, therefore, that students develop a vocabulary with which to express their metacognitive processes.

When adults speak usiing mindful language, using specific, cognitive terminology and instructing students in ways to perform certain skills, students are more inclined to be able to both name and use those skills. For example,

Instead of saying:	Use Metacognitive language by saying:
“Let’s look at these two pictures.”	“As you COMPARE these two pictures…”
“What do you think will happen when . . . ?”	“What do you PREDICT will happen when . . . ?”
“How can you put those into groups?”	“How might you CLASSIFY . . . ?”
“Let’s work this problem.”	“Let’s ANALYZE this problem.”
“What do you think would have happened if… ?”	“What do you SPECULATE would have happened if… ?”
“What did you think of this story?”	“What CONCLUSIONS can you draw about this story?”
“How can you explain . . . ?”	“What HYPOTHESES do you have that might explain . . . ?”
“How do you know that’s true?”	“What EVIDENCE do you have to sup-port . . . ?”
“How else could you use this . . . ?”	“How could you APPLY this . . . ?”
“Do you think that is the best alternative?	“As you EVALUATE these alternatives….”

As students hear these cognitive terms in everyday use and experience the cognitive processes that accompany these labels, they internalize the words and use them as part of their own metacognitive vocabulary. Teachers will also want to give specific instruction and provide awareness of experiences so that students recognize and know the meaning of the terminology.

Invite metacognitive responses.

Teachers can deliberately invite students to become spectators of their own thinking by posing questions that invite a metacognitive response. Some questions invite a behavioral response, others can invite a thought-full response. Notice how behavioral questions can be transformed into questions that invite thinking:

Questions That Invite a Behavioral Response	Questions That Invite Metacognitive Responses
“Why did you do that?”	“What were you thinking when you did that?”
“What did the author mean when . . . ?”	“What cues were you aware of?”
“What are your plans for . . . ?”	“As you envision . . . what might be…..”
“When will you start . . . ?”	“How will you decide when to start . . ?”
“Was that a good choice?”	“What criteria did you have in mind to make that choice?”

If teachers pose questions that deliberately engage students’ cognitive processing, and let students know why the questions are being posed in this way, it is more likely that students will become aware of and engage their own metacognitive processes.

Making Internal Dialogue External

Students can become spectators of their own thinking when they are invited to monitor and make explicit the internal dialogue that accompanies their thinking.

They reveal their own thinking as they consider questions such as:

“What was going on in your head when……?”
“What were the benefits of……?”
“As you evaluate the effects of . . . ?”
“By what criteria are you judging…..?”
“What will you be aware of next time?”
“What did you hear yourself saying inside your brain when you were tempted talk but your job was to listen?”

Keep Students Thinking About Their Thinking

While such questions will initiate students’ metacognitive journey, you will also want to sustain that momentum by:

Causing Students to Monitor their Accuracy

“How do you know you are right?”
“What other ways can you prove that you are correct?

Pausing and Clarifying but not Interrupting

“Explain what you mean when you said you ‘just figured it out'”.
“When you said you started at the beginning, how did you know where to begin?”

Providing Data, Not Answers (As soon as you confirm that an answer is correct, there is no need to think further about it!)

“I think you heard it wrong; let me repeat the question………………”
“You need to check your addition.”

Resisting Making Value Judgments Or Agreeing With Students’ Answers.

“So, your answer is 48. Who came up with a different answer?”
“That’s one possibility. Who solved it another way?”

Remaining Focused On Thinking Processes

“Tell us what strategies you used to solve the problem”
“What steps did you take in your solution?”
“What was going on inside your head as you solved the problem?”

Encouraging Persistence

“Success! You completed step one. Now you’re ready to forge ahead.”
“C’mon, you can do it” Try it again!”

Ultimately, the intent of all this is to have students monitor and pose their own questions that promote thinking in themselves and others. Questioning, monitoring and reflecting on our experiences are requisites for becoming a continuous, lifelong learner. When we teach students to think about their thinking, we help make the world a more thought-full place.

References

Costa, A & Kallick, B. (2008) Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Characteristics for Success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Treadwell, M (2014) Learning: How the brain learns. www.MarkTreadwell.com/products

A Whole New Engineer: A Whole New Challenge

by Roman Taraban, Ph.D., Texas Tech University

In 1973, cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky (1973) wanted to present their study participants with a stereotypical description of engineers:

Jack is a 45-year old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies, which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematical puzzles. (p. 241)

When asked if they thought Jack was an engineer, 90% of the participants thought he was.

Whatever stereotypes of engineers may persist to the present day (e.g., geek, introvert, asocial: http://www.thecreativeengineer.com/2008/12/16/a-few-engineering-myths/ ), various parts of the engineering community are trying to create “a whole new engineer” (Goldberg & Somerville, 2014). Cross-disciplinary centers have been established at universities, like iFoundry which was launched in 2008 at the University of Illinois, in order to prepare engineering students for working in the 21^st century. One mandate was to promote “deep reflection and attention to the complex system in which engineering education is embedded” (https://ifoundry.illinois.edu/who-we-are/what-ifoundry ).

On a larger scale, the Franlin W. Olin College of Engineering admitted its first class in 2002 in order to implement a full-scale hands-on, project-based and design curriculum. Olin College provides students with funding for “passionate pursuits,” which are personal projects of academic value proposed by students https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Engineering. STEM is being transformed to STEAM, where the addition of A represents Artful Thinking in the context of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Radziwell et al., 2015). To develop artful thinking a facilitator might present a painting and ask students: What do you see? What does it make you think? What is happening? Why do you think so? These questions help learners develop dispositions to observe, describe, question, reason, and reflect. The whole new engineer is becoming a whole lots of things, but is the new engineer becoming more metacognitive?

We know that engineering students can be metacognitive when solving textbook problems (Taraban, 2015). Indeed, by now there is an extensive corpus of research on students’ textbook problem-solving in introductory physics and other areas of STEM. Explaining the material to oneself with the knowledge that this will help one better understand it, or testing oneself with the knowledge that this will help one more reliably retrieve the information later, are examples of metacognitive processes and knowledge. Case and Marshall (1995) described a developmental pathway by which students transition towards deeper understanding of domain concepts and principles, which they labeled the conceptual deep approach to learning, and which is: “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 over the course of development students recognize that a goal of learning is to understand the material more deeply, and that this recognition guides how they learn. Draeger (2015), and others, have suggested that this kind of monitoring of the effectiveness of learning strategies and regulating one’s behavior are characteristic of metacognitive thinking.

The current re-design of the traditional engineer involves sweeping changes, in the classroom, in the university, and in professional practice, and it aims to do this, in part, by infusing more reflection into engineering training and practice. So, what is a reflective practitioner, and are reflective practitioners metacognitive thinkers?

Schön (1987) suggested that reflective practitioners think carefully about what they are doing as they are doing it. Reflective practitioners assess and revise their existing practices and strive to develop more effective behaviors. They critically assess their behavior as a means to improving it. As Schön (1987) puts it, reflective practice is a “dialogue of thinking and doing through which I become more skillful” (p. 31). Schön maintained “that there is a core of artistry, an exercise of intelligence, and a kind of knowing inherent in professional practice, which we can only learn about by carefully studying the performance of extremely competent professionals” (Osterman, 1990, p. 133).

Through reflective practice we submit our behaviors to critical analysis, asking questions like these: What am I doing? What effect is it having? (Osterman, 1990). This very much reminds one of the distinction that Draeger (2015) made between metacognition and critical thinking. Specifically, one can be a critical thinker without being metacognitive. The two processes can overlap but are not identical. Simply, to be metacognitive, one would need to think about the reflective processing itself. Metacognitions would involve knowledge of the benefits of reflective practice, how it relates to self, and metacognitive processes related to monitoring and controlling the reflective practices. Imagine observing any expert – an expert teacher, an expert golfer, an expert acrobat – and striving to mimic that expertise through carefully observing and critiquing one’s own performance. That’s reflective practice. It’s about trying to get a job done in the best possible way. In a complementary fashion, metacognitive knowledge and processing involve intentionally and consciously monitoring and regulating those reflective practices.

In A Whole New Engineer (Goldberg & Somerville, 2014) the authors assert that

Here we are calling attention to the importance of the Whole New Engineer’s ability to do three things:

Notice and be aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Reflect and learn from experience.
Seek deeper peace, meaning, and purpose from noticing and reflection. (p. 114)

Goldberg and Somerville (2014) make a call to be more attentive and sensitive to surroundings, to notice and reflect, but not necessarily to be metacognitive in those contexts – they are not clear about the latter point. Thus, it may be safe to say that being metacognitive doesn’t automatically come through reflective practice, critical thinking, mindfulness, or artful thinking strategies. Metacognition represents a distinct type of knowledge and process that can potentially enhance the effects of the aforementioned. The whole new engineer can be a whole lot of things, but is not automatically a metacognitive engineer. Simply, an engineering student, or even a practicing engineer, can be good at certain design projects, for instance, and develop a critical eye for that work, but without necessarily developing metacognitive awareness around when to shift strategies or techniques in order to be more effective.

References

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/ .

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80(4), 237-251. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0034747

Osterman, K. F. (1990). Reflective practice: A new agenda for education. Education and Urban Society, 22(2), 133-152.

Radziwill, N. M., Benton, M. C., & Moellers, C. (2015). From STEM to STEAM: Reframing what it means to learn. The STEAM Journal, 2(1), Article 3.

Schön, D. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith.

Taraban, R. (2015). Metacognition in STEM courses: A developmental path. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-in-stem-courses-a-developmental-path/

Fine-tuning Just-in-Time assignments to encourage metacognition

By John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

In two previous posts, I’ve argued that instructors can improve metacognition through Just-in-Time teaching (JiTT) assignments (Draeger, 2014; Draeger, 2015). Just-in-Time assignments require that students complete short assignments prior to class and instructors review those assignments before class begins (Novak, 1999). Students in my philosophy classes, for example, are required to answer several questions about the reading and submit those answers electronically the night before our class meets. I read their answers prior to the class session and use their responses to tailor class discussion. JiTT assignments have many benefits, including improving the likelihood that students will do the reading. For the last five semesters, I’ve been experimenting with ways to use JiTT assignments to help students improve their metacognition.

In my early attempts to incorporate metacognition into JiTT assignments, I asked asked a variety of questions: What is your reading strategy? Was the current reading more challenging than the last? How would you know if your strategy as effective? Student answers were often informative, but they tended to focus on the content of the reading. For example, students would report that they found certain sections of the reading to be especially confusing or they found that an author’s view rested on a spurious assumption. While helpful in adjusting class time to hone-in on the parts of the material most in need of discussion, these questions did not always prompt students to reflect on their individual learning process. Consequently, I have continued to tweak my JiTT questions in an attempt to focus student attention more explicitly on aspects of the learning process. As I work to fine-tune my JiTT assignments, I often think about my own attempts to become more aware of my teaching practice and then I can see parallels to the kind of metacognition that I seek to encourage in my students. (Scharff & Draeger, 2015). I have come to believe that building questions on metacognition into JiTT assignments have at least three broad benefits.

First, metacognitive questions serve as an easy conversation starter about the aims of learning. For example, I have asked students: What are your goals in this course? What are your goals for the week? How does last night’s reading fit into one of your goals for the week? Most students respond that they hope to understand the readings, remember the relevant information for the exam, and get good grades. These answers are unsurprising. However, such pedestrian responses give me an opportunity to revisit my goals for the course, namely my desire to help students learn to uncover philosophical substructure (Draeger, 2014). They also provide me with an opportunity to encourage them to think more carefully about what they hope to achieve. I encourage them to think about their own motivations (or lack of) and their reasons for engaging in course content. While I wouldn’t need their JiTT responses to talk about various learning goals, students seem to be more responsive to those conversations when I am responding to their own answers to pre-class assignments. Such conversations have led me to ask new JiTT questions: How does this course fit into your degree program? What would you tell a parent about why this course is worth taking? How might this course might be relevant to your life 30 years from now? Students often report that my courses are irrelevant to their degree programs because my courses satisfy a general education requirement. This has led to fruitful conversations about the connection between their general education courses and their program of study, as well as how philosophy might figure into a student’s quest for employability and my desire to help them become lifelong learners.

Second, metacognitive questions prompt students to think about their learning processes. For example, I have asked students: What skills do you hope to develop this semester? How have your reading practices evolved as the semester has progressed? Are your annotation strategies effective? What is your strategy for revising papers? What is one thing you learned about the last round of revisions that you hope to carry through to the next round? Even though some student responses are less than illuminating and even when we don’t discuss their answers in class, students are still being prompted to think about their learning process multiple times a week. I have to believe that it reminds students that they need multiple learning strategies and they need to monitor their effectiveness. I have also seen student answers become more nuanced as the semester progresses. For example, students who reported being “confused by the reading” at the beginning of the semester often reported being “confused by” some particular feature of the reading (e.g., examples within the text, references to views not previously discussed) later in the semester.

Third, regular metacognitive questions help me (as the instructor) develop a learning profile of my students both individually and collectively. For example, I have asked students: What type of learning is required in this course? What are their personal characteristics that help or hinder their learning? Interestingly, students rarely point to personal characteristics that helped their learning. Further, many of the “hinder” answers tend to be predictable (e.g., I procrastinate, I have a busy schedule). However, other answers paint a picture of the individual learners in the seats in front of me. For example, some students report some version of “I am not a big reader outside of class and so long readings intimidate me” and quite a few talk about difficulties taking notes in a discussion class. These are not surprising observations, but it helps knowing which students are having which troubles (e.g., if someone asked me “choose the students that don’t like to read,” I would not always be able to correctly identify them). Likewise, some students offer some version of “I need entertaining examples because I get bored easily” while others report some version of “I am intellectually curious about most everything and I get distracted easily.” It is not surprising that students would be distracted, but the JiTT metacognition responses allow me to understand a little more about why particular students are struggling. This emerging profile helps me make course adjustments before, during, and after class.

There are many ways to encourage student metacognition. I am not suggesting that you adopt Just-in-Time techniques simply because they can encourage students to reflect on their learning process and facilitate conversation. I am doing JiTT assignments anyway. Fine-tuning my questions has been a way of using an existing teaching strategy to promote metacognition. Rather, I encourage you to think about how you might tweak your current teaching strategies to promote student metacognition. In my case, because students complete JiTT assignments multiple times a week and because I now include questions on metacognition within every JiTT assignment, students have many opportunities to reflect on their learning and to practice metacognition. The emerging picture of my students has also encouraged me (as the instructor) to be more metacognitive about my teaching process. While I need to continue fine-tuning my assignments, I am becoming ever more convinced that regular incorporation of activities that promote reflection on learning are a means by which to improve with metacognition.

References

Draeger, J. (2014a). “Just-in-Time for Metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/just-in-time-for-metacognition.

Draeger, J. (2014b), “Using metacognition to uncover the substructure of moral issues.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/using-metacognition-to-uncover-the-substructure-of-moral-issues

Draeger, J. (2015). “Using Just-in-Time assignments to promote metacognition.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/using-just-in-time-assignments-to-promote-metacognition.

Novak, G., Patterson, E., Gavrin, A., & Christian, W. (1999). Just-in-time teaching: Blending active learning with web technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Scharff, L. and Draeger, J. (2015). “Thinking about metacognitive instruction” National Teaching and Learning Forum 24 (5), 4-6.

Developing Mindfulness as a Metacognitive Skill

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

A simple concept for enhancing learning is to engage more of the brain in more of the students. “Interactive-engagement,” “collaborative/cooperative learning,” “problem-based learning” and an entire series of active learning pedagogies use the concept to optimize learning. Research shows that active learning works. While frequently espoused as “student-centered learning,” advocates frequently use the active learning terms to promote particular kinds of pedagogy as “student-centered.”

However, active learning is neither the only way to enhance learning nor is it usually as student-centered as advocates claim. Whether the design occurs by the course instructor or with an involvement of a more recent profession of “learning designers,” the fact is that the emphasis is on pedagogy and on student learning. As such, they are more focused on student learning than were older traditional methods of content delivery, but the reach to proclaim most learning-centered pedagogies as student-centered leaves a bit of a gap. Metacognition is the factor missing to help close the gap needed to make learning-centered practices more student-centered.

While pedagogy focuses on teaching, mindfulness focuses on knowing of one’s present state of engagement. Mindfulness develops by the learner from within, and this makes it different from the learning developed through a process designed from without. Metacognition is very student centered, and mindfulness could be the most student-centered metacognitive skill of all.

Because mindfulness involves being aware in the present moment, it can engage more of the brain needed for awareness by enlisting the parts of the brain concurrently distracted by our usual “default mode.” Operating in default mode includes thinking of imagined conversations, playing music inside of one’s head, unproductive absorption in activities in which one is not presently engaged, or thinking of responses to a conversation while not attending fully to hearing it.

Mindfulness receives frequent mention as a method of stress management, particularly when it enlists the parts of the brain that would otherwise be engaging in worrying or in preparing an unneeded flight-or-fight reaction. The need to manage stress by today’s college students seems greater than before. However, its value to student success extends beyond managing stress to enhancing cognitive learning through improving concentration and increasing the ability to focus and to improve interpersonal communication by enhancing ability to listen.

Mindfulness has its roots in Zen meditation, which laypersons easily perceive as something esoteric, mystical, or even bordering on religion. In reality, mindfulness is none of these. It is simply the beneficial outcome of practice to develop metacognitive skill. It is simple to learn, and measurable improvements can occur in as little as six weeks.

For blog readers, an opportunity to develop mindfulness is fast approaching on September 19, 2016, when Australia’s Monash University again offers its free massive open online course (MOOC) in mindfulness. Rather than gurus dressed in costumes, the instructors are psychology professors Drs Craig Hassed and Richard Chambers, who occasionally appear in ties and sportcoats. The course is immensely practical, and the two professors are also authors of a highly rated book, Mindful Learning, which is likely of interest to all members of this particular metacognitive blogosphere. Perhaps we’ll see each other online in Australia!

**This blog contribution is a short derivation from “Mindfulness as a Metacognitive Skill: Educating in Fractal Patterns XLVII” by the author and forthcoming in National Teaching and Learning Forum V25 N5.

Using Metacognition to Develop College Faculty

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D.

What does it take to become an exceptional college teacher? As many of us have learned, there’s much more to the art and science of teaching than merely knowing the content. Still, every year, several new faculty members begin teaching with the false assertion that solely learning more about their subject will lead to success in the classroom. Instead, metacognition about their development as a teacher could help propel them into their new roles with greater ease. Below is an appeal for new faculty to embrace metacognition about their instruction by understanding their developmental path with college teaching.

————-

Dear New Faculty,

Congratulations on starting your new role as a college teacher! You’ve worked hard to get to this point, spending years in class and writing that thesis or dissertation. Now you get to share all of that knowledge with aspiring students. Your passion will hopefully convert several of them into majoring in your discipline or even becoming your research prodigies. Your optimism is contagious and inspiring.

Despite the fact that you now hold an advanced degree, your learning is not over. In fact, the journey to becoming an effective teacher has just begun. Before you step into that classroom, take a strategic pause to become metacognitive about your teaching, not just your content. You must now design a course that is meaningful for your students. Sure, you can simply use the materials provided by the textbook publisher, especially those well-designed PowerPoint slides, but did you know college teaching requires so much more? Did you know there are developmental stages for becoming an effective college teacher?

Akerlind (2007) shares brilliant insights about progressing from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered approach. In order to focus on student learning, faculty need to become aware of how they are teaching and begin to adapt their instruction to best meet the needs of their students. In other words, effective college faculty engage in metacognition about their instruction through awareness of teaching strategies, reflection about their practice, and self-regulation of teaching methods based on student learning needs. To this end, Akerlind asserts that college teachers move through the following developmental stages:

If these stages hold true, what does this mean for you? As Akerlind shares, new teachers often expend most of their energies on understanding their disciplinary content really well. You may spend great effort reading the textbook and researching the topics as much as possible. In all likelihood, much of your class time will be spent lecturing or presenting information (perhaps using those textbook slides), a very teacher-centered style. In reality, if you take this approach, you may learn more than your students this year because you spent greater time and energy mastering the material than they did.

Over time, however, you may discover that students are not participating in class like you want, or you may notice dwindling attendance. Student evaluations might even reflect dissatisfaction with your teaching style. Don’t be dismayed; don’t give up. You will begin to shift into Akerlind’s next developmental stage by considering alternative methods for content delivery. You will move toward focusing on how to teach rather than what to teach, especially now that you feel more comfortable with the content of the course. During this stage, you will gain greater metacognition about your teaching.

Through trial and error, you will begin to explore and experiment with a variety of teaching strategies, increasing your toolbox of techniques from which to use. Trying these new strategies will not be sufficient, though. You will need to select evidence-based strategies drawn from the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) literature, and you will need to reflect on how well the new methods worked (also called reflective practice). Through reflection, you will begin to see which teaching techniques fit your personal style and subject matter. You will also begin to seek feedback, particularly from students, about how well these new strategies are being received.

Ultimately, though, you will discover that student satisfaction and snazzy teaching techniques fall flat if your students aren’t learning from the course. As Akerlind claims, you will move into the final developmental stage by designing your instruction and curriculum to be singularly focused on learning outcomes. You will search for a balance between being liked as a teacher to challenging students to transform their thinking. You may even embrace this positive restlessness and seek continuous improvement with your teaching each semester.

So why should you care about these stages of college teaching development? Because perhaps seeing your teaching as a journey and not a fixed goal will help you to be patient with yourself as you try new techniques and begin to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps metacognition about your future development will help you to progress more quickly through these stages to focusing on student learning rather than your instruction style. Go ahead and acknowledge that your first semester or two may be focused heavily on understanding the content at hand, but over time, try to embrace metacognitive instruction by leveraging knowledge about teaching and intentional awareness in the classroom to move toward more sophisticated methods for delivering that content. Become reflective practitioners who care about student feedback and continuous improvement, but eventually shift your focus to improving student learning outcomes.

The journey to becoming an effective college teacher will not happen overnight, even with this new metacognition you have, but rest assured that it will be rewarding and meaningful. In Bain’s (2004) pivotal work, What the Best College Teachers Do, you will discover that it could take up to 10 years to become an effective faculty member. However, maintaining metacognition about these stages of development will likely put you on target sooner, working toward a learner-centered approach to teaching. Good luck!

Resources:

Akerlind, G.S. (2007). Constraints on academics’ potential for developing as a teacher. Studies in Higher Education, 32(1): 21-37. doi: 10.1080/03075070601099416

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Two-in-One: Using Metacognition to Improve Judgment for Citizenship

by Alison Staudinger, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin – Green Bay

Higher education should prepare students for citizenship, yet this is a difficult task in this fractious political climate. Partisanship is at an all-time high in the United States and the electoral contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is unlikely to ease those tensions. The summer of 2016 has also been marked by polarized responses to videos of police brutality; #alllivesmatter and #blacklivesmatter share videos and display the structures of American society in starkly different terms. Students developing as citizens need habits of mind to help them evaluate the messy and propagandistic political world. Judging politically is a reflective, metacognitive process, not just aimed at political facts, but also values and ethical commitments, and in response to the pluralistic values of others. It is metacognitive because it requires a shift from one’s own reflections to the imagined reflections of others and a dialogue between these reflections. Here, I’ll discuss what is metacognitive about political judgment, give a (brief) nod to the work of Hannah Arendt, and offer some ideas for the classroom and remaining questions.

One difficulty in developing political judgment is our tendency to assign higher credibility to information that is easier for us to process, perhaps because we have heard it often, it fits into our ideology, or tells a familiar and coherent story (Schwartz, N. 2015). Thus information silos, as on social media where one may have many friends sharing the same stories or perspectives, can make metacognitive judgement difficult (Johnson et. all 2009). Political ideology can limit evaluation of information or policy positions, stopping the metacognitive process of thinking about our thinking about politics, and instead replacing it with the ease of confirmation bias.

Yet, if there is a way out of the political echo chamber, it seems likely to involve reflection and the ability to notice and evaluate that reflection. Indeed, Chick, Karnahan and Caris (2009) found that metacognitive reflection that was sensitive to emotion and affect helped students understand and respond to racism by providing distance to examine their own emotional responses. Mezirow (2003) frames this as “learning that transforms problematic frames of reference—sets of fixed assumptions and expectations (habits of mind, meaning perspectives, mindsets)—to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change” (58). He links this transformative learning to Jurgen Habermas’ discourse ethics, arguing that the goal of adult education is to prepare citizens for the critical reflective work both of collective problem solving and deliberative discourse.

Habermas’ discourse ethics are not the only approach to understanding how citizens develop politically in a plural world; indeed, one alternative theorist of political discourse and action is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Arendt, political theorist, wrote popular books on totalitarianism, political action and American politics and controversially covered the Eichmann trials, during which she developed her famous idea of “the banality of evil.” Slightly less well known is her unique work on political judgment, as she died before completing it. However, she provides a unique framework for thinking through reflective judgment as a mental “two-in-one.”

Arendt (1989) adapts Kantian aesthetic judgment to the political and social world, exploring how to evaluate new phenomenon when one does not have an existing concept or category under which it can be explained. The solution is a redefined “common sense” which, for Arendt, is “the intuitive feeling for worldliness” that allows us to share the world with pluralistic others (Schwartz 2015). Arendt’s common sense is not community norms— agreeing with those who post on our Facebook wall—although it is formed in part by the “company we keep” both in books and in person, in discourse with whom we form our ideas of what common standards of judgment are.

This orienting common sense requires metacognitive consideration of both our individual perspectives and those of pluralistic others. These positions are often in dynamic tension with each other, producing cognitive dissonance. The faculty of imagination allows us to move, mentally, outside ourselves to consider the status of others, although she is well-aware we are still always ourselves. Imagining the perspectives of others as well as our own is “enlarged mentality;” it does not replace the partial view we have from our own subject position, nor is it a universal “view from nowhere.” Instead, it allows us to reason via internal dialogue which, in the unfinished The Life of the Mind, she calls this the “two-in-one” of thinking.

Developing Arendtian metacognitive reflective judgment is a difficult task, given the barriers to imagination. However, consider the question of how to respond to a video, like that taken of Philando Castile, where a person is killed by police. After our immediate reaction and interpretation, we can improve this judgment by considering the perspectives of others, not as an additive process, but as an exercise in enlarged mentality, playing the positions off each other. As Arendt notes, our judgments are not “universally valid” because they cannot “extend further than those others in whose place the judging person has put himself” (Beiner et. all 2001). But certainly an attempt to think from the position others prompts us to consider the sources of our judgments and gather information on the perspectives of those others—it demands that we think through police brutality from a non-binary perspective, as the two-in-one is really many and one.

Arendt’s notion of the “two-in-one” is useful for framing the importance of student practices of self-dialogue and reflection prior to or even instead of deliberative contestation in the classroom. We might practice skills and reflective activities, building up to full-scale deliberation (Stephens et all. 2013), or include reflective practice in unexpected places, like law school (Casey). We can also adapt what we know about changing deeply held beliefs to prompt better reflection on standpoints and our thinking. Framing new information in non-challenging language or affirming student self-worth can help with their consideration of identity challenging ideas (Hardisy, Johnson, & Weber, 2010). My students often write on a big question prior to class, and then engage various materials that relate to this big question, and then revisit and revise their paper as a dialogue with several of these perspectives. We also often do “think-alouds” in class with a partner or small group to discuss which voices are present in our internal dialogue and how they relate to our world in common.

There are still deep ethical and epistemological questions about Arendt’s reflective judgment; for example, can we reason from the imagined position of others if our knowledge of their perspective is lacking? Arendt herself was harshly, and I think rightly, criticized for her lack of such knowledge when she critiqued the actions of the NAACP and black families at Little Rock in 1957. Perhaps meta-cognition about the pluralistic political world requires diverse knowledge about the actual viewpoints of others—knowledge often lacking in the racially and politically segregated U.S. If we want prepare our students for citizenship, we need to challenge them to “go visiting” the viewpoints of others and provide the resource t make this possible. Although political divisions and ideologies make two-in-one thinking difficult, cultivating a metacognitive process for political judgment is worthy educational goal.

References

Arendt, Hannah, and Ronald Beiner. (1989). Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beiner, Ronald, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, Charles Larmore, Onora O’Neill, George Kateb, Robert J. Dostal et al. Judgment, imagination, and politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.

Casey, Timothy. 2014. Reflective Practice in Legal Education: The Stages of Reflection. Clinical Law Review 20:317.

Chick, Nancy L.; Karis, Terri; and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009) “Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and

Learning: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 16. Available at: http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol3/iss1/16

Hardisty, D. J., Johnson,E.J., & Weber, E.U. (2010). A Dirty Word or a Dirty World? Attribute Framing, Political Affiliation, and Query Theory. Psychological Science, 21, 86-92.

Johnson, T. J., Bichard, S. L., & Zhang, W. (2009). Communication communities or “cyberghettos?’’: A path analysis model examining factors that explain selective exposure to blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15, 60–82

Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative learning as discourse.” Journal of transformative education 1, no. 1 (2003): 58-63.

Murray, T., Stephens, L., Woolf, B. P., Wing, L., Xu, X., & Shrikant, N. (2013). Supporting Social Deliberative Skills Online: The Effects of Reflective Scaffolding Tools. In A. A.

Ozok & P. Zaphiris (Eds.),Online Communities and Social Computing (pp. 313–322). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-39371-6_36

Schwarz, N. (2015). Metacognition. In M. Mikulincer, PR Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 203-229). Washington, DC: APA.”

Schwartz, J. P. (2015). To choose one’s company: Arendt, Kant, and the Political Sixth Sense. European Journal of Political Theory, 1474885115613700. http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885115613700

Hitting the Metacognitive Target with Learning Objectives

by Guy A. Boysen, McKednree University (gaboysen@mckednree.edu)

Imagine that you and your colleagues have just retired to the pub for a well-deserved pint at the end of a long week of work in the knowledge factory. After a few refreshing si ps, you hear the challenge of “Darts!” Rather than playing the usual game of Cricket or 301, the challenger proposes a new competition but does not bother to share the rules. So, you lob darts at random, sometimes hearing “Nice shot!” and other times “Too bad, mate!” Without a clear target to aim for, however, there is no way for you to improve your performance. You lose, and the next round is on you.

If that sounds frustrating, imagine how students feel when they don’t know what to aim for in their efforts at learning – that is, how they feel in classes without clear learning objectives. Learning objectives refer to statements of what students should be able to do after an educational experience. High-quality learning objectives are clear, measurable, and focused on student outcomes rather than instructional methods (Boysen, 2012). Consider these examples.

Students in Spanish will be able to ask grammatical questions to solicit various forms of information from Spanish speakers.
Students who complete library training will be able to identify peer-reviewed journal articles using the EBSCO database.
Students in Statistics will be able to compute means and standard deviations using hand calculations.
Readers of this blog will be able to describe the relation between learning objectives and metacognition.

In a straightforward way, learning objectives let students know what they need to know – this is an essential tool for the metacognitive skill of being able to self-assess progress toward educational goals.

Just as you will never win at darts without knowing where to aim, students cannot intentionally evaluate where they are in the learning process without objectives. For example, students in Spanish who are unaware of the learning objective to ask various grammatical questions might mistakenly believe that they are muy bueno with “¿Que pasa?” as their only query. In contrast, students who are aware of the learning objective can more effectively use metacognition by self-assessing their ability to do things like ask for food, directions, the time, or an add/drop slip. Although research is needed to determine if there is a direct link between learning objectives and metacognition, there is longstanding evidence that providing students with learning objectives leads to increased learning (Duell, 1974; Rothkopf & Kaplan, 1972).

Learning objectives clearly have potential as metacognitive tools for helping students assess their own learning, so how do the best college teachers use them? Well, according to An Evidence-Based Guide for College and University Teaching: Developing the Model Teacher (Richmond, Boysen, & Gurung, 2016), there are two fundamental questions that model teachers can say “Yes!” to with regard to learning objectives.

Do you “articulate specific, measurable learning objectives in your syllabi or other course documents?” (p. 197)

Model teachers know that, for every one of their readings, activities, tests, and papers, students can determine the learning objective and use it to consider whether or not they are achieving the intended goal. The syllabus is an especially important metacognitive tool. It is the place to introduce students to the concepts of metacognition and learning objectives. In fact, you can even use it to establish learning objectives about the development of metacognition itself (see here for more on metacognitive syllabi; Richmond, 2015).

Do you “provide constructive feedback to students is that is related to their achievement of learning objectives?” (p. 197)

Model teachers recognize that students may be unskilled and unaware (Taraban, 2016), so they frequently offer opportunities for objective evaluation. Evaluations such as quizzes, tests, and rubric scores help to keep students’ self-assessment of learning grounded in reality (see Was, 2014 and Taraban, 2014 for more on feedback). For example, students may be 100% confident in their ability to ask questions in Spanish – that is until an oral examination. Struggling to stammer out a modest “¿Que hora es?” and nothing else should lead students to a clearer awareness of their current abilities.

In summary, don’t let your students lob random intellectual darts at mysterious learning targets. Be a model teacher by providing them with clear learning objectives and feedback on their success so that they can hone their metacognitive skills!

References

Boysen, G. A. (2012). A guide to writing learning objectives for teachers of psychology. Society for the Teaching of Psychology Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology Online. Retrieved from https://legacy.berea.edu/academic-assessment/files/2015/02/Guide-to-Writing-Learning-Objectives-for-Teachers-of-Psychology-Boysen-2012.pdf

Duell, O. P. (1974). Effect of type of objective, level of test questions, and the judged importance of tested materials upon posttest performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 66, 225–323.

Richmond, A. S. (2015, March 6^th). The metacognitive syllabus. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognitive-syllabus/

Richmond, A. S., Boysen, G. A., Gurung, R. A. R. (2016). An evidence-based guide for college and university teaching: Developing the model teacher. Routledge.

Rothkopf, E. Z., & Kaplan, R. (1972). Exploration of the effect of density and specificity of instructional objectives on learning from text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 63, 295–302.

Taraban, R. (2014, December 10^th). Mind the feedback gap. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/mind-the-feedback-gap/

Taraban, R. (2016, April 1st). Unskilled and unaware: A metacognitive bias. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/unskilled-unaware-metacognitive-bias/

Was, C. (2014, August 28th). Testing improves knowledge monitoring. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/testing-improves-knowledge-monitoring/

Hypercorrection: Overcoming overconfidence with metacognition

by Jason Lodge, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne

Confidence is generally seen as a positive attribute to have in 21^st Century Western society. Confidence contributes to higher self-esteem, self-reported happiness. It apparently makes someone more attractive and leads to better career outcomes. With such strong evidence suggesting the benefits of confidence, it is no wonder that building confidence has become a major focus within many sectors, particularly in professional development and education.

Despite the evidence for the benefits of confidence, it has a dark side that is overconfidence. There are many occasions where it is problematic to overinflate our skills or abilities. Learning is one of the most obvious examples. According to the (in)famous Dunning-Kruger effect, unskilled learners are often unaware that they are in fact unskilled. The issue here is that those who are low in knowledge of an area are often ignorant to how much they don’t know about the area.

Overconfidence is particularly problematic for students when considering how important it is to make relatively accurate estimates about how they are progressing. For example, if a student is overconfident about their progress, they may decide to stop reviewing or revising a topic prematurely. If students have a difficulty in accurately self-evaluating their learning it can lead them to being underprepared to use the knowledge, for example in an exam or when they need it in practice.

Being wrong can be good

One of the main problems with overconfidence is that students can fail to correct misconceptions or realise that they are wrong. Being wrong or failing has been long seen as negative educational outcomes.

Recent research on productive failure (e.g. Kapur, 2015) has shown, however, that being wrong and coming to realise it is a powerful learning experience. As opposed to more traditional notions of error-free learning, researchers are now starting to understand how important it is for learners to make mistakes. One of the necessary conditions for errors to be effective learning experiences though is that students need to realise they are making them. This is a problem when students are overconfident because they fail to see themselves failing.

There is a silver lining to overconfidence when it comes to making mistakes though. Research on a process called hypercorrection demonstrates that when learners are highly confident but wrong, if the misconception can be corrected, they have a much more effective learning experience (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). In other words, overconfident students who realise that they are wrong about something tend to be surprised and that surprise means they are more likely to learn from the experience.

How metacognition helps with overconfidence

While hypercorrection has potential for helping students overcome misconceptions and achieve conceptual change, it doesn’t happen automatically. One of the main prerequisites is that students need to have enough awareness to realise that they are wrong. The balance between confidence and overconfidence is therefore precarious. It is helpful for students to feel confident that they can manage to learn new concepts, particularly complex and difficult concepts. Confidence helps students to persist when learning becomes difficult and challenging. However, students can have this confidence without necessarily engaging in careful reflective processing. In other words, confidence is not necessarily related to students being able to accurately monitoring their progress.

On the other hand though, it can be easy for students to feel confident in their knowledge of certain misconceptions. This is particularly so if the misconceptions are intuitive and based on real world experience. It is common to have misconceptions about physics and psychology for example because students have vast experience in the physical and social world. This experience gives them intuitive conceptions about the world that are reinforced over time. Some of these conceptions are wrong but their experience gives students high levels of confidence that they are right. Often careful observation or deliberate instructional design is required to shift students’ thinking about these conceptions.

Metacognition is critical in allowing students to monitor and detect when they are making errors or have incorrect conceptions. With misconceptions in particular, students can continue to believe false information if they don’t address the process at which they arrive at a conclusion. Often, overcoming a misconception requires dealing with the cognitive disequilibrium that comes from attempting to overwrite an intuitive conception of the world with a more sophisticated scientific conception.

For example, intuitively a heavy object like a bowling ball and light object like a feather will fall at different rates but, when observing both being dropped simultaneously, they fall at the same rate. The observation causes disequilibrium between the intuitive notion and the more sophisticated understanding of force and gravity encapsulated by Newton’s second law. Generally, overcoming this kind of disequilibrium requires students to shift strategies or approaches to understanding the concept to redress the faulty logic they relied on to arrive at the initial misconception. So in this example, they need to develop a higher-level conception of gravity that requires shifting from intuitive notions. Recognising the need for this shift only comes through metacognitive monitoring and effective error detection.

So metacognition is often necessary for correcting misconceptions and is particularly effective when students are confident about what they think they know and have the realisation that they are wrong. Overconfidence can therefore be managed through enhanced metacognition.

The research on confidence and hypercorrection suggests that it is good for students to be confident about what they think they know as long as they are prepared to recognise when they are wrong. This requires an ability to be able to detect errors and, more broadly, calibrate their perceived progress against their actual progress. While teachers can help with this to a degree through feedback and scaffolding, it is vital that students develop metacognition so that they can monitor when they are wrong or when they are not progressing as they should be. If they can, then there is every chance that the learning experience can be more powerful as a result.

References

Butterfield, B., & Metcalfe, J. (2001). Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1491–1494. DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.27.6.1491

Kapur, M. (2015). Learning from productive failure. Learning: Research and Practice, 1(1), 51–65. DOI: 10.1080/23735082.2015.1002195

When & Where to Teach Metacognitive Skills to College Students

Aaron S. Richmond, Ph.D.
Metropolitan State University of Denver

In past blogs, I’ve written about topics that focus on the relationship between academic procrastination and metacognition (Richmond, 2016), or different instructional methods to increase your student’s metacognition (Richmond 2015a, 2015b), or even how to use metacognitive theory to improve teaching practices (Richmond, 2014). However, during my morning coffee the other day I was reading a 2016 article in Metacognition in Learning by Foster, Was, Dunlosky, and Isaacson (yes, I am a geek like that). Studying the importance of repeated assessment and feedback, Foster and colleagues found that over the course of a semester sophomore and junior level education psychology students who were tested 13 separate times and provided feedback remained highly overconfident in their knowledge of the material. As many other researchers have concluded, severe overconfidence erodes accurate self-regulation and self-monitoring which can have a severe detrimental effect on student learning. After finishing my coffee, I thought about the potential long-term and pervasive impacts the lack of metacognition these students had and it dawned on me that in IwM we have not discussed when and where metacognitive skills should be taught in the college curriculum. Thus, I choose to focus this blog on potential suggestions/strategies on when and where to introduce teaching metacognitive skills in the college classroom.

When Should We Teach Metacognitive Skills?
First and foremost, as college and university teachers, we need to acknowledge that our students do not come to us from a vacuum and that they already have many developed, albeit sometimes erroneous and ineffective, metacognitive skills. Considering this fact, we need to adapt our metacognitive instruction on an individual student level to best teach our students. Now, to the question: When should we teach metacognitive skills? The answer is—of course ASAP! As one of the goals to metacognitive skills is to transfer across academic domains, introducing it during the first semester of college is imperative.

One of the most notable early interventions for metacognitive skills was done by Ken Kiewra at the University of Nebraska. Kiewra created a class “Academic Success” taught at the sophomore level using his Selection, Organization, Association, and Regulation (SOAR) model (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009). Jairam and Kiewra had modest effects of increasing student learning (e.g., recalling facts and associating relevant information among zoology terms) via these metacognitive skills. However, there are a few areas in which this approach to teaching metacognitive skills can be improved. First, this is not a class that all students were required to take (only education students). Thus, all other academic disciplines could benefit from this class (see more on this below). Second, most of the students who took this course were at the sophomore and junior college level. This course should be a first semester course for all students, rather than midway through the college career.

The final note regarding when we should teach metacognitive skills almost negates or precludes the initial question. That is, the ‘when’ is immediately, but immediately doesn’t mean or suggest once. Rather, metacognitive skills should be taught continuously throughout the college career with increasingly more advanced and effective memory and learning strategies. Just as a student would take an introductory course to a major, why not have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced metacognitive skills course?

Where Should Metacognitive Skills Be Taught?
Obviously, those at IwM, and presumably our readers, would quickly answer this question: EVERYWHERE! That is, metacognitive skills should be taught across the college curriculum. However, there are some academics who believe (a) our students have already learned effective learning strategies (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009), and (b) that metacognitive skills are not part of their curriculum. In response to the first belief, many of our incoming college and university students do not have effective metacognitive skills so it is important that we teach these skills in all different types of academic domains (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009). In response to the second belief, metacognition should be taught across all academic domains. This includes mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, nursing, psychology, anthropology. I will go so far as to suggest that metacognitive skills are tantamount to reading skills as it pertains to the learning process and should be incorporated throughout the curriculum. But herein lies the rub. I have yet to find a current model or research example of infusing metacognitive skill training across the curriculum. For example, in general studies education, why not have a metacognitive student learning objective that cuts across all academic domains. Or in a first-year-success program that is often taught in teams, why not incorporate metacognitive skill training via thematic instruction (e.g., various academic disciplines are asked to center their instruction around a similar topic) among several introductory level classes. That is, teach metacognition in General Psychology, Speech 101, Biology 101, etc. by using a threaded theme (e.g., racism) that requires teachers to teach metacognitive skills to help learn a particular topic. In the end, it is clear that all students in all disciplines could benefit from metacognitive skill training, yet researchers nor teachers have tackled these specific issues.

There Are Always More Questions Than Answers.
I’ve done it again, I’ve written a blog that touches on what I believe to be an important issue in metacognition and higher education that needs far more research. As such, I must wrap up this blog (as I always do) with a few questions/challenges/inspirational ideas.

Should metacognition, learning strategies, etc. be taught throughout the curriculum?
1. If so, how?
If not, should they be taught in a self-contained introduction to college course?
1. Should all college students to be required to take this course?
What other models of introducing and teaching metacognitive skills are there that may be more effective than a self-contained course vs. a thematic curriculum approach?
Once students have been introduced to metacognitive skills, what is the best method for continuing education of metacognitive skills?

References
Foster, N. L., Was, C. A., Dunlosky, J., & Isaacson, R. M. (2016). Even after thirteen class exams, students are still overconfident: The role of memory for past exam performance in student predictions. Metacognition and Learning, 1-19. doi:10.1007/s11409-016-9158-6

Jairam, D., & Kiewra, K. A. (2009). An investigation of the SOAR study method. Journal of Advanced Academics, 20(4), 602-629.

Richmond, A. S. (2016, February 16th). Are academic procrastinators metacognitively deprived?. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/are-academic-procrastinators-metacognitively-deprived/

Richmond, A. S. (2015a, November 5th). A minute a day keeps the metacognitive doctor away. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/a-minute-a-day-keeps-the-metacognitive-doctor-away/

Richmond, A. S. (2015b, July 20th). How do you increase your students metacognition?. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/how-do-you-increase-your-students-metacognition/

Richmond, S. (2014, August 28th). Meta-teaching: Improve your teaching while improving your student’s metacognition. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/meta-teaching-improve-your-teaching-while-improving-students-metacognition/

Don’t “Just Do It” – Think First

by Roman Taraban, PHD, Texas Tech University

“Just Do It” has been a great slogan for selling athletic equipment and has also spawned some humorous spinoffs, like Bart Simpson’s “Can’t someone else just do it?” And is it not how we sometimes solve problems: “Don’t think, just do it?” Although just doing it (or getting someone else to do it) may have some visceral appeal, models for teaching argue against just doing it when it comes to solving problems.

One of the most influential problem-solving models is Polya’s (1957) 4-step model: i) understand the problem, ii) develop a plan, iii) carry out the plan, and iv) look back. On this model, solvers don’t “do it” until the 3^rd step. What is really striking about this model is that it is mostly about critical thinking and metacognitive processing. The principles of understanding the problem, planning one’s approach to solving the problem, and reflecting on the solution after “doing it,” all require critical thinking and metacognition (Draeger, 2015). STEM disciplines have generally embraced the Polya model, suggesting that commitments to metacognitive thinking by researchers and instructors are widespread and well-entrenched. Two disciplines will be considered here to make that point: mathematics and engineering.

In a research study in mathematics, Carlson and Bloom (2005) collected and analyzed the problem solving behaviors of twelve expert mathematicians. The data showed that the mathematicians engaged in metacognitive behaviors and decisions that were organized within a general problem-solving framework consisting of Orienting, Planning, Executing, and Checking. One of the phases, Executing, is where one “does it” – the others are more metacognitive. Researchers have developed comparable models for problem-solving in engineering. These models preface equation-crunching with understanding the problem and planning a solution, and follow up with reflection on the solution. This is exemplified in the six-step McMaster model: Engage, Define the Stated Problem, Explore, Plan, Do It, and Look Back (Woods et al., 1997).

In spite of teachers’ best intentions, might students still just do it? Certainly! An alternative to metacognitive planning before doing, and monitoring, regulating, and reflecting, is to apply a purely rote strategy (Garofalo & Lester, 1985), also termed a “plug and chug” method (Maloney, 2011). Plug and chug in physics and engineering involves a mental search for equations that will solve the problem, but with little conceptual understanding of the nature of the problem, little strategic decision-making, and little metacognitive self-reflection and regulation of the solution process. In disciplines not involving equations, various matching and cut-and-paste strategies could qualify as plug-and-chug. James Stice, a distinguished professor in chemical engineering, described part of his own engineering training (Stice, 1999) that suggests how plug-and-chug may come about:

“When I was an undergraduate student, many of my professors would derive an equation during lecture, and then would proceed to work an example problem. They would outline the situation, invoke the equation, plug in the numbers and arrive at a solution. What they did always seemed very logical and straightforward, I’d get it all down in my notes, and I’d leave the class feeling that I had understood what they had done. Later I often was chagrined to find that I couldn’t work a very similar problem for homework.” (p. 1)

Much of the motivation for research on how experts solve problems, like Carlson and Bloom (2005), has led to developing didactic models for the classroom, like the six-step McMaster model (Woods et al., 1997) in engineering: Engage, Define the Stated Problem, Explore, Plan, Do It, and Look Back. These didactic models have been developed largely in response to the absence of metacognitive thinking among students.

Although teaching methods could account for some of the absence of metacognitive thinking in beginning students, domain-specific knowledge may also be a factor. Few would disagree that domain-specific knowledge plays a key role in successful problem solving. Indeed, Carlson and Bloom attributed the expertise of their mathematicians, in part, to “a large reservoir of well-connected knowledge, heuristics, and facts” (p. 45). Can a novice student readily access domain-related facts, organize information within the problem, muse, imagine, and conjecture over possible strategies, apply heuristics, and effectively monitor progress? Of course not. Obviously, the absence of domain-specific knowledge in beginning students enables and motivates the teaching of domain-specific knowledge. But I would like to argue that the absence of domain-specific knowledge also enables and motivates teaching students metacognitive processes. This may seem illogical, but it’s not. The point is that an absence of domain-specific knowledge provides instructors with a great opportunity to teach the domain-specific knowledge but also how to think about thinking about that knowledge, that is, how to be metacognitive while learning facts and procedures.

Getting students to “Think, then Do It” will require more than working examples for them on the blackboard in order to convey domain-specific knowledge. Instead, within a framework like that provided by Carlson and Bloom, the metacognitive processes at each step of solving the problem should also be modeled. Some students may show metacognitive behaviors early on, and all successful students will eventually catch on. However, to truly be a pedagogical principle, it needs to be part of the learning situation. A model of metacognitive instruction (Scharff, 2015) for the student could be guided by the work on scaffolding metacognitive processes proposed in the seminal work of Brown and Palinscar (1982). The point is to take the domain-specific knowledge that you are trying to convey and to model and scaffold it to students along with the metacognitive decisions and control that go with expert problem solving, and to do it early on in instruction. It is worth mentioning that James Stice, who was taught to plug and chug, became a follower and proponent of the six-step McMaster model as professor of chemical engineering.

There is an old Jack Benny joke. Jack Benny was a comedian known for being a cheapskate. One night a thug stopped him – “Don’t make a move bud, your money or your life.” After a long pause, the thug, clearly annoyed, repeated – “Look bud, I said….Your money or your life.” Jack Benny: “I’m thinking it over.” Just to be fair, sometimes we should just Do It and not think too much about it. When it comes to teaching and learning, though, thinking about thinking is better.

References

Brown, A. L., & Palinscar, A. S. (1982). Inducing strategic learning from texts by means of informed, self-control training. Tech Report No. 262. Urbana: University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading.

Carlson, M. P., & Bloom, I. (2005). The cyclic nature of problem solving: An emergent multidimensional problem-solving framework. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 58, 45-75.

Garofalo, J., & Lester Jr., F. K. (1985). Metacognition, cognitive monitoring, and mathematical performance. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 16(3), 163-176.

Maloney, D. P. (2011). An overview of physics education research on problem solving. Getting Started in PER..Reviews in PER vol. 2. College Park, MD: American Association of Physics Teachers. http://opus.ipfw.edu/physics_facpubs/49

Polya, G. (1957). How to solve it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Scharff, Lauren (2015). “What do we mean by ‘metacognitive instruction?” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-we-mean-by-metacognitive-instruction/

Stice, J. (1999). Teaching problem solving. In Teachers and students – A sourcebook (Section 4). University of Texas at Austin: Center for Teaching Effectiveness. Retrieved from

http://www.utexas.edu/academic/cte/sourcebook/teaching3.pdf

Woods, D. R., Hrymak, A. N., Marshall, R. R., Wood, P. E., Crowe, C. M., Hoffman, T. W., Wright, J. D., Taylor, P. A., Woodhouse, K. A., & Bouchard C. G. (1997). Developing problem solving skills: The McMaster problem solving program. Journal of Engineering Education, 86(2), 75–91.

How to train reflection-in-action?

by Dr. Dominique Verpoorten, Lecturer (Learning Sciences), IFRES-University of Liège, Belgium

In this post, I’d like to introduce the notion of « reflection amplifier » in relationship with the notion of “reflection-in-action”.

Common sense tells us that reflection lies somewhere around the notion of learning and thinking. People learn as a result of reflecting. Reflection is practised in order to consider an object in more detail (Amulya, 2004).

Objects about which reflection can be amplified are innumerable. One can boost thinking on life, space, love, germs, fossils, butterflies or any content topic. This post addresses one specific topic of reflection: oneself as a learner.

Taking learning as an object of reflection is assumed to be an essential factor of expert learners (Ertmer & Newby, 1996). Reflective practice in formal learning contexts is supposed to gradually increase learners’ awareness of what helps and hampers a consistent orchestration of the various dimensions of their learning processes.

There are a number of methods that are held to encourage reflection on learning. These include learning diaries, portfolios, discussions of learning strategies, use of video and observers in a learning context, etc. These highly valuable approaches address post-practice reflection or what Schön (1983) refers to as “reflection on action”, that is a thinking episode taking place after the event and re-evaluating it so as to gain insight for improvement in the future.

But what about the training of “reflection in action”? Here come the reflection amplifiers (RAs). They present as deliberate, well-considered, and structured opportunities for students to examine and evaluate aspects of their learning experience as they occur. Unlike post-practice introspection assignments (portfolios, learning blogs…), RAs are nested in the study material and offered to individuals during learning activities. In the temporal flow of learning, their contiguity to student’s doings commits them to reflection-in-action more than to reflection on action, though Schön’s (1983) distinction is relative: even a reflection that takes place “in-action” bears on a pre-existing context. But in the case of a RA the interval is supposed to be a matter of seconds or minutes rather than hours. A typical feature of RAs is that they focus learners’ instant reflection on aspects of the learning experience they are currently committed to. RAs therefore present as brief, structured and repeated reflection affordances, interspersed in the learning material and activated during its internalization. These built-in opportunities for reflection are purposed to offer stop-and-think episodes in the course of learning. Examples of reflections amplifiers assigned to students in the course of their learning could be:

Rate your current mastery of the study material
Give the degree of confidence you have in the correctness of your answer
For one minute, evoke mentally the content at hand
Give an estimation of your feeling of learning
Write down a question that the teacher could ask on this topic

The word “amplifier” is used intentionally to convey the idea that enacting such affordances for reflection in the course of learning expands the mental context of the task at hand and discloses aspects of it that would otherwise be left untouched.

Reflection amplifiers have in common that they are harnessed to a first-order learning assignment. They serve it but are not confused with it due to their brevity and their meta-learning dimension. Reflection amplifiers are intended to support students at examining aspects of their learning experience in the moment of learning. They induce regular mental tinglings for evaluating “what is going on” (Salmon & al. 2007) and for nurturing internal feedback (Butler & Winne, 1995). They invite learners to think about what they are doing while they are doing it. Through establishing a practice of reflection during learning, RAs provide students with an opportunity to develop a habit of and a positive attitude towards thinking about learning.
By providing students with deliberate and structured opportunities to examine and evaluate their own learning while this learning unfolds, RAs instantiate a form of “split screen teaching” (Claxton, 2006), that consists in maintaining a dual focus on the content of the lesson and the learning dispositions and processes that are in play. Do you practice split screen teaching by sometimes providing reflection amplifiers to your students? What do they look like?

References

Amulya, J. (2004). What is Reflective Practice? Cambridge, MA: MIT – Center for Reflective Practice.

Butler, D. L., & Winne, P. H. (1995). Feedback and Self-Regulated Learning: A Theoretical Synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 65(3), 245-281.

Claxton, G. (2006, September). Expanding the capacity to learn: a new end for education? Opening keynote address presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, UK.

Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (1996). The expert learner: Strategic, self-regulated, and reflective. Instructional Science, 24(1), 1-24.
Georghiades, P. (2004). From the general to the situated: three decades of metacognition. International Journal of Science Education, 26(3), 365-383.

Salmon, P., Stanton, N., Jenkins, D., Walker, G., Young, M., & Aujla, A. (2007). What Really Is Going on? Review, Critique and Extension of Situation Awareness Theory. Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, 4562, 407-416.

Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith.

More about RAs:

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/186755

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151345

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/169931

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/156417

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151799,

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/handle/2268/151374

The Challenge of Deep Learning in the Age of LearnSmart Course Systems (Part 2)

A few months ago, I shared Part 1 of this post. In it I presented the claim that, “If there are ways for students to spend less time per course and still “be successful,” they will find the ways to do so. Unfortunately, their efficient choices may short-change their long-term, deep learning.” I linked this claim to some challenges that I foresaw with respect to two aspects of the online text chosen for the core course I was teaching: 1) the pre-highlighted LearnSmart text, and 2) the metacognition-focused LearnSmart quizzing feature. This feature required students to not only answer the quiz question, but also report their confidence in the correctness of that response. (See Part 1 for details to explain my concerns. Several other posts on this site also discuss confidence ratings as a metacognition tool. See references below.) My stated plan was to “regularly check in with the students, have class discussions aimed at bringing their choices about their learning behaviors into their conscious awareness, and positively reinforcing their positive self-regulation of deep-learning behaviors.”

This post, Part 2, will share my reflections on how things turned out, along with a summary of some feedback from my students.

With respect to my actions, I did the following in order to increase student awareness of their learning choices and the impact of those choices. Twice early in the semester I took class time to explicitly discuss the possible learning shortcuts students might be tempted to take when reading the chapters (e.g. only reading the highlighted text) and when completing the LearnSmart pre-class quizzes (see Part 1 for details). I shared some alternate completion options that would likely enhance their learning and long-term retention of the material (e.g. reading the full text without highlights and using the online annotation features). Additionally, I took time to share other general learning / studying strategies that have been shown through research to support better learning. These ways of learning were repeatedly reinforced throughout the semester (and linked to content material when applicable, such as when we discussed human learning and memory).

Did these efforts impact student behaviors and choices of learning strategies? Although I cannot directly answer that question, I can share some insights based on some LearnSmart data, course performance, and reflections shared by the students.

With respect to the LearnSmart application that quizzed students at the end of each chapter, one type of data I was able to retrieve was the overall percent of time that student LearnSmart quiz question responses fell into the following correctness and confidence categories (a metacognition-related evaluation):

Students answered correctly and indicated confidence that they would answer correctly
Students answered correctly but indicated that they were not confident of the correctness of their response
Students answered incorrectly and knew they didn’t know the answer
Students answered incorrectly but reported confidence in giving the correct answer

I examined how the percentage of time student responses fell in each category correlated with two course performance measures (final exam grade and overall course grades). Category 1 (correct and confident) and Category 3 (incorrect and knew it) both showed essentially a zero relationship with performance. There was a small positive relationship between being correct but not certain (Category 2). Category 2 responses might prompt more attention to the topic and ultimately lead to better learning. The strongest correlations (negative direction) occurred for Category 4, which was the category about which I was most concerned with respect to student learning and metacognition. There are two reasons students might have responses in that category. They could be prioritizing time efficiency over learning because they were intentionally always indicating they were confident (so that if they got lucky and answered correctly, the question would count toward the required number that they had to answer both correctly and with confidence; if they indicated low confidence, then the question would not count toward the required number they had to complete for the chapter). Alternately, Category 4 responses could be due to students being erroneous with respect their own state of understanding, suggesting poor metacognitive awareness and a likelihood to perform poorly on exams despite “studying hard.” Although there was no way for me to determine which of these two causes were underlying the student responses in this category, the negative relationship clearly indicated that those who had more such responses performed worse on the comprehensive final exam and in the course at large.

I also asked my students to share some verbal and written reflections regarding their choices of learning behaviors. These reflections didn’t explicitly address their reasons for indicating high or low confidence for the pre-class quizzes. However, they did address their choices with respect to reading only the highlighted versus the full chapter text. Despite the conversations at the beginning of the semester stressing that exam material included the full text and that their learning would be more complete if they read the full text, almost half the class reported only reading the highlighted text (or shifting from full to highlighted). These students indicated that their choice was primarily due to perceived time constraints and the fact that the pre-class LearnSmart quizzes focused on the highlighted material so students could be successful on the pre-class assignment without reading the full text. More positively, a couple students did shift to reading the full text because they saw the negative impact of only reading the highlighted text on their exam grades. Beyond the LearnSmart behaviors, several students reported increasing use (even in other courses) of the general learning / study strategies we discussed in class (e.g. working with a partner to discuss and quiz each other on the material), and some of them even shard these strategies with friends!

So, what are my take-aways?

Although this should surprise no one who has studied operant conditioning, the biggest take-away for me is that for almost half my students the immediate reinforcement of being able to more quickly complete the pre-class LearnSmart quiz was the most powerful driver of their behavior, despite explicit in-class discussion and their own acknowledgement that it hurt their performance on the later exams. When asked what they might do differently if they could redo the semester, several of these students indicated that they would tell themselves to read the full text. But, I have to wonder if this level of awareness would actually drive their self-regulatory behaviors due the unavoidable perceptions of time constraints and the immediate reinforcement of “good” performance on the pre-class LearnSmart quizzes. Unfortunately, at this point, instructors do not have control over the questions asked in the LearnSmart quizzes, so that particular (unwanted) reinforcement factor is unavoidable if you use those quizzes. A second take-away is that explicit discussion of high-efficacy learning strategies can lead to their adoption. These strategies were relatively independent from the LearnSmart quiz requirement for the course, so there was no conflict with those behaviors. Although the reinforcement was less immediate, students reported positive results from using the strategies, which motivated them to keep using them and to share them with friends. Personally, I believe that the multiple times that we discussed these general learning strategies also helped because they increased student awareness of them and their efficacy (awareness being an important first step in metacognition).

————

Some prior blog posts related to Confidence Ratings and Metacognition

Effects of Strategy Training and Incentives on Students’ Performance, Confidence, and Calibration, by Aaron Richmond October 2014

Quantifying Metacognition — Some Numeracy behind Self-Assessment Measures, by Ed Nuhfer, January 2016

The Importance of Teaching Effective Self-Assessment, by Stephen Chew, Feb 2016

Unskilled and Unaware: A Metacognitive Bias, by John R. Schumacher, Eevin Akers, and Roman Taraban, April 2016

Using Metacognition to select and apply appropriate teaching strategies

by John Draeger (SUNY Buffalo State) & Lauren Scharff (U. S. Air Force Academy)

Metacognition was a recurring theme at the recent Speaking SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) conference at Highpoint university. Invited speaker Saundra McGuire, for one, argued that metacognition is the key to teaching students how to learn. Stacy Lipowski, for another, argued for the importance of metacognitive self-monitoring through the regular testing of students. We argued for the importance of metacognitive instruction (i.e. the use of reflective awareness and self-regulation to make intentional and timely adjustments to teaching a specific individual or group of students) as a tool for selecting and implementing teaching strategies. This post will share a synopsis of our presentation from the conference.

We started with the assumption that many instructors would like to make use of evidence-based strategies to improve student learning, but they are often faced with the challenge of how to decide among the many available options. We suggested that metacognitive instruction provides a solution. Building blocks for metacognitive instruction include 1) consideration of student characteristics, context, and learning goals, 2) consideration of instructional strategies and how those align with the student characteristics, context, and learning goals, and 3) ongoing feedback, adjustment and refinement as the course progresses (Scharff & Draeger, 2015).

Suppose, for example, that you’re teaching a lower-level core course in your discipline with approximately 35 students where the course goals include the 1) acquisition of broad content and 2) application of this content to new contexts (e.g., current events, personal situations, other course content areas). Students enrolled in the course typically have a variety of backgrounds and ability levels. Moreover, they don’t always see the relevance of the course and they are not always motivated to complete assignments. As many of us know, these core courses are both a staple of undergraduate education and a challenge to teach.

Scholarly teachers (Richlin, 2001) consult the literature to find tools for addressing the challenges just described. Because of the recent growth of SoTL work, they will find many instructional choices to choose from. Let’s consider four choices. First, Just-in-Time teaching strategies ask students to engage course material prior to class and relay those responses to their instructor (e.g., select problem sets or focused writing). Instructors then use student responses to tailor the lesson for the day (Novak, Patterson, & Gavrin, 1999; Simkins & Maier, 2004; Scharff, Rolf, Novotny, & Lee, 2013). In courses where Just-in-Time teaching strategies are used, students are more likely to read before class and take ownership over their own learning. Second, Team-Based Learning (TBL) strategies also engage students in some pre-class preparation, and then during class, students engage in active learning through a specific sequence of individual work, group work, and immediate feedback to close the learning loop (Michaelsen & Sweet, 2011). TBL has been shown to shift course goals from knowing to applying and create a more balanced responsibility for learning between faculty and students (with students taking on more responsibility). Third, concept maps provide visual representations of important connections (often hierarchical connections) between important concepts. They can help students visualize connections between important course concepts (Davies, 2010), but they require some prior understanding of the concepts being mapped. Fourth, mind mapping also leads to visual representations of related concepts, but the process is more free-form and creative, and often requires less prior knowledge. It encourages exploration of relationships and is more similar to brainstorming.

Any of these three tools might be good instructional choices for the course described above. But how is an instructor supposed to choose?

Drawing inspiration from Tanner (2012) who shared questions to prompt metacognitive learning strategies for students, we recommend that instructors ask themselves a series of questions aligned with each of our proposed building blocks to prompt their own metacognitive awareness and self-regulation (Scharff & Draeger, 2015). For example, instructors should consider the type of learning (both content and skills) they hope their students will achieve for a given course, as well as their own level of level of preparedness and time / resources available for incorporating that particular type of teaching strategy.

In the course described above, any of the four instructional strategies might help with the broad acquisition of content, and depending upon how they are implemented, some of them might promote student application of the material to new contexts. For example, while concept maps can facilitate meaningful learning their often hierarchical structure may not allow for the flexibility associated with making connections to personal context and current events. In contrast, the flexibility of mind-mapping might serve well to promote generation of examples for application, but it would be less ideal to support content acquisition. Team-Based-Learning can promote active learning and facilitate the application of knowledge to personal contexts and current events, but it requires the instructor to have high familiarity with the course and the ability to be very flexible during class as students are given greater responsibility (which may be problematic with lower-level students who are not motivated to be in the course). Just-in-Time-Teaching can promote both content acquisition and application if both are addressed in the pre-class questions. During class, the instructor should show some flexibility by tailoring the lesson to best reach students based on their responses to the pre-class questions, but overall, the lesson is much more traditional in its organization and expectations for student engagement than with TBL. Under these circumstances, it might be that Just-in-Time strategies offer the best prospect for teaching broad content to students with varying backgrounds and ability levels.

While the mindful choice of instructional strategies is important, we believe that instructors should also remain mindful in-the-moment as they implement strategies. Questions they might ask themselves include:

What are you doing to “check in” with your learners to ensure progress towards daily and weekly course objectives?
What are signs of success (or not) of the use of the strategy?
How can you adjust the technique to better meet your student needs?
Are your students motivated and confident, or are they bored or overwhelmed and frustrated? Are your students being given enough time to practice new skills?
If learning is not where it needs to be or student affect is not supportive of learning, what are alternate strategies?
Are you prepared to shift to them? If not, then why not?

These prompts can help instructors adjust and refine their implementation of the chosen instructional strategy in a timely manner.

If, for example, Just-in-Time assignments reveal that students are understanding core concepts but having difficulty applying them, then the instructor could tweak Just-in-time assignments by more explicitly requiring application examples. These could then be discussed in class. Alternatively, the instructor might keep the Just-in-Time questions focused on content, but start to use mind mapping during class in order to promote a variety of examples of application. In either case, it is essential that instructors are explicitly and intentionally considering whether the instructor choice is working as part of an ongoing cycle of awareness and self-regulation. Moreover, we believe that as instructors cultivate their ability to engage in metacognitive instruction, they will be better prepared to make in-the-moment adjustments during their lessons because they will be more “tuned-in” to the needs of individual learners and they will be more aware of available teaching strategies.

While not a magic bullet, we believe that metacognitive instruction can help instructors decide which instructional strategy best fits a particular pedagogical situation and it can help instructors adjust and refine those techniques as the need arises.

References

Davies, M. (2011). Concept mapping, mind mapping and argument mapping: what are the differences and do they matter? Higher education, 62(3), 279-301.

Michaelsen, L. K., & Sweet, M. (2011). Team‐based learning. New directions for teaching and learning,(128), 41-51.

Novak, G., Patterson, E., Gavrin, A., & Christian, W. (1999). Just-in-time teaching:

Blending active learning with web technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Richlin, L. (2001). Scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching. New directions for teaching and learning, 2001(86), 57-68.

Scharff, L. and Draeger, J. (2015). “Thinking about metacognitive instruction” National Teaching and Learning Forum 24 (5), 4-6.

Scharff, L., Rolf, J. Novotny, S. and Lee, R. (2011). “Factors impacting completion of pre-class assignments (JiTT) in Physics, Math, and Behavioral Sciences.” In C. Rust (ed.), Improving Student Learning: Improving Student Learning Global Theories and Local Practices: Institutional, Disciplinary and Cultural Variations. Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Simkins, S. & Maier, M. (2009). Just-in-time teaching: Across the disciplines, across the

academy. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113-120.

Meaningful Reflections for Improving Student Learning

by Ashley Welsh, Postdoctoral Teaching & Learning Fellow, Vantage College

I am a course coordinator and instructor for a science communication course (SCIE 113) for first-year science students. SCIE 113 focuses on writing, argumentation and communication in science and is part of the curriculum for an enriched, first-year experience program for international, English Language Learners. Throughout the term, students provide feedback on their peers’ writing in both face-to-face and online environments. The process of providing and receiving feedback is an important skill for students, however many students do not receive explicit instruction on how to provide or use constructive feedback (Mulder, Pearce, & Baik, 2014). In order to better understand my students’ experience with peer review, I conducted a research project to explore how their use and perceptions of peer review in their writing developed over the course of the term.

Many of the data collection methods I used to assess students’ perceptions and use of peer review in SCIE 113 this past term incorporated acts of reflection. These included in-class peer review worksheets and written reflections, small and large group discussions, an end-of-term survey about peer review, and my own researcher reflections. Periodically throughout the semester, I paired up the students and they engaged in peer review of one another’s writing. They each had a worksheet that asked them to comment on what their partner did well and how that person could improve their writing. During this activity, my teaching assistant and I interacted with the pairs and answered any potential questions. Afterwards, students independently completed written reflections about the usefulness of the peer review activity and their concerns about giving and receiving feedback. Before the class finished, we discussed students’ responses and concerns as a whole group. Students’ worksheets and written reflections, as well as classroom observations, offered insight into how my pedagogy mapped to their use of and reflections about peer review.

As of late, I have been more deliberate with designing pedagogy and activities that offer students the time and space to reflect and record their strengths and weaknesses as learners. The term reflection, is often used when discussing metacognition. As Weinert (1987) describes, metacognition involves second-order cognitions such as thoughts about thoughts or the reflections of one’s actions. With respect to metacognitive regulation, Zohar and Barzilai (2013) highlight that an individual can heighten their awareness of their strengths/weaknesses and evaluate their progress via reflection. This reflection process also plays a key role in metacognition-focused data collection as most methods require students to reflect upon how their knowledge and skills influence their learning. Providing survey responses, answering interview questions, and writing in a journal require a student to appraise their personal development and experience as a learner through reflection (Kalman, 2007; Aktruk & Sahin, 2011).

While the act of reflection is an important component of metacognition and metacognitive research, its use in the classroom also presents its own set of challenges. As educators and researchers, we must be wary of not overusing the term so that it remains meaningful to students. We must also be cautious with how often we ask students to reflect. An extensive case study by Baird and Mitchell (1987) revealed that students become fatigued if they are asked to reflect upon their learning experiences too often. Furthermore, we hope these acts of reflection will help students to meaningfully evaluate their learning, but there is no guarantee that students will move beyond simplistic or surface responses. To address these challenges in my own classroom, I attempted to design activities and assessments that favoured “not only student participation and autonomy, but also their taking responsibility for their own learning” (Planas Lladó et al., p. 593).

While I am still in the midst of analyzing my data, I noticed over the course of the semester that students became increasingly willing to complete the reflections about peer review and their writing. At the beginning of the term, students wrote rather simplistic and short responses, but by the end of the term, students’ responses contained more depth and clarity. I was surprised that students were not fatigued by or reluctant to complete the weekly reflections and discussions about peer review and that this process became part of the norm of the classroom. Students also became faster with completing their written responses, which was promising given that they were all English Language Learners. As per John Draeger (personal communication, April 27, 2016), students’ practice with these activities appears to have helped them build the stamina and muscles required for successful and meaningful outcomes. It was rewarding to observe that within class discussions and their reflections, students became better aware of their strengths and weaknesses as reviewers and writers (self-monitoring) and often talked or wrote about how they could improve their skills (self-regulation).

Based on my preliminary analysis, it seems that tying the reflection questions explicitly to the peer review process allowed for increasingly meaningful and metacognitive student responses. The inclusion of this research project within my class served as an impetus for me to carefully consider and question how my pedagogy was linked to students’ perceptions and ability to reflect upon their learning experience. I am also curious as to how I can assist students with realizing that this process of reflection can improve their skills not only in my course, but also in their education (and dare I say life). This research project has served as an impetus for me to continue to explore how I can better support students to become more metacognitive about their learning in higher education.

References

Akturk, A. O., & Sahin, I. (2011). Literature review on metacognition and its measurement. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 3731-3736.

Baird, J. R., & Mitchell, I. J. (1987). Improving the quality of teaching and learning. Melbourne, Victoria: Monash University Press.

Kalman, C. S. (2007). Successful science and engineering teaching in colleges and universities. Bolton, Massachusetts: Anker Publishing Company, Inc.

Mulder, R.A., Pearce, J.M., & Baik, C. (2014). Peer review in higher education: Student perceptions before and after participation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 15(2), 157-171.

Planas Lladó, A., Feliu Soley, L., Fraguell Sansbelló, R.M., Arbat Pujolras, G., Pujol Planella, J., Roura-Pascual, N., Suñol Martínez, J.J., & Montoro Moreno, L. (2014). Student perceptions of peer assessment: An interdisciplinary study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(5), 592-610.

Weinert, F. E. (1987). Introduction and overview: Metacognition and motivation as determinants of effective learning and understanding. In F. E. Weinert & R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 1-16). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Zohar, A., & Barzilai, S. (2013). A review of research on metacognition in science education: Current and future directions. Studies in Science Education, 49(2), 121-169.

Improve with Metacognition

Year: 2016

Bringing a Small Gift – The Metacognitive Experience

Can Reciprocal Peer Tutoring Increase Metacognition in Your Students?

Table 1. Examples of Lower and Deep Level Metacognitive Regulation in Reciprocal Peer Tutoring by De Backer et al. (2016, pp. 41-42)

The GAMES Survey: A Tool to Scaffold Metacognitive Practices

Promoting metacognitive reading through Just-in-Time Teaching

Metacogntion: Daring Your Students to Take Responsibility for Their Own Successes and Failures.

Selecting a quantitative measure of metacognition

Do Your Questions Invite Metacognition?

A Whole New Engineer: A Whole New Challenge

Fine-tuning Just-in-Time assignments to encourage metacognition

Developing Mindfulness as a Metacognitive Skill

Using Metacognition to Develop College Faculty

Two-in-One: Using Metacognition to Improve Judgment for Citizenship

Hitting the Metacognitive Target with Learning Objectives

Hypercorrection: Overcoming overconfidence with metacognition

When & Where to Teach Metacognitive Skills to College Students

Don’t “Just Do It” – Think First

How to train reflection-in-action?

The Challenge of Deep Learning in the Age of LearnSmart Course Systems (Part 2)

Using Metacognition to select and apply appropriate teaching strategies

Meaningful Reflections for Improving Student Learning