Boosting Metacognition through In-Class Assessments

By Jennifer A. McCabe, Goucher College

Five years ago, I radically changed the assessment format of my undergraduate Human Learning and Memory course, from a more traditional model with three big exams to a frequent low-stakes testing approach, which involved administering a short quiz to start most class periods (and nixing big exams). This choice came on the heels of a shift from a content-driven focus to an elaboration and integration emphasis in this course, and a shift from a textbook to five popular press books about learning and memory (syllabus available by request). I decided that the assessments should more intentionally reflect a central goal for the course that students would come to class each day prepared to actively engage with and discuss the assigned material. When I first made this change, I gave little explicit thought to metacognitive development in my students; as I describe in this blog post, along the way I tweaked the way the quizzes were framed and administered to more transparently support metacognition.

The first iteration of the daily low-stakes assessment was described as a “KCA Quiz,” designed to assess (and improve) students’ Knowledge, Connection, and Application (“KCA”) of course topics and readings. At the start of most class periods, students had about 10 minutes to complete a 5-item open-book and open-notes quiz, which could include factual questions, connection questions, application questions, and thought/opinion questions. These would mainly focus on the reading assignment for the current day, but could also draw from prior assigned readings/topics. Students were expected to bring all their notes and books to class each day in hard copy (no electronics allowed), for reference. After collecting the quizzes, we discussed the answers as a large group, and then the quizzes were graded on a scale of 0 (absence) to 1 (0 or 1 correct) to 2 (2 or 3 correct) to a maximum of 3 (4 or 5 correct).

Certainly some elements of this assessment strategy had the potential to impact metacognition. For one, there was a consequence for lack of preparation if students could not find the answers in time. Also, receiving immediate feedback in class about whether their answers were correct should have given them insight into their learning. Yet, given what we now know about the power of retrieval practice (i.e., the testing effect; see recommended reading below), namely the inherent memory and metacognitive benefits, I was dissatisfied with the low (or no) expectation that students would retrieve the information from memory without using external sources. Therefore, I worked toward developing a modified version of “KCA Quizzes” that would better support retrieval practice and metacognition, yet preserve the low-stakes and frequent-testing components.

Starting in Fall 2016, I made several changes to this component of the course. First, I started calling them “KCA Assessments” instead of “KCA Quizzes.” Previously, I would get some complaints – in person and on course evaluations – about the pressure and stress of having a quiz every day. Simply shifting the language from “quiz” to “assessment” completely eliminated those complaints. I think that being “assessed” rather than “quizzed” activates a different schema for the students – perhaps representing a metacognitive shift from a performance focus to more of a learning focus.

This is particularly striking given that along with the name change, I made the assessments more challenging. Now they are a hybrid of closed- and open-books/notes, with a unique metacognitive twist. Students start by dividing their paper into left and right columns. For the first five minutes, they answer the five questions from memory (closed-book) in the left column. Then, I announce they can open their books and notes, and anything they want to add or modify about their answers is written in the right column. They know that I grade their answers (using the same generous scale described above) based only on whether they got them correct through the combination of closed- and open-notes. Yet using the left-right column method, they are forced not only to spend time effortfully retrieving the information (or even just trying – which as we discuss in class, still benefits memory), but also have a clear record of how easily and accurately they could arrive at correct answers from long-term memory, without consulting external sources. This supports metacognition by building students’ explicit awareness of their level of learning, which can then be used to guide their further learning behaviors. I encourage them to strive to be able to answer all the questions in the left column, but the pressure of testing is relieved by the back-up plan to consult course materials.

Recently, I administered a brief anonymous feedback survey about the KCA Assessments. Of the 21 students who responded in a class of 25, 86% agreed or strongly agreed that the assessments “improved my metacognition – that is, they helped me think and know more about my own learning and memory.” When asked an open-ended question about which aspect(s) of the assessments supported metacognition, 65% identified the closed/open-book hybrid approach, with comments such as:

“You couldn’t be convinced you know something if you couldn’t get it during the closed- book portion.”

“Helped me see what I actually remembered and what I needed help with or didn’t encode or couldn’t retrieve.”

“This allowed me to use my own memory to remember answers and gave me an idea of what I need to focus on more for when I read for the next class.”

“Having the closed then open note format really obviously shows what you processed more deeply than others.”

Other answers described the focus on deeper processing and application to real-life issues, learning to be more interactive and engaged with course reading assignments, getting immediate feedback after the assessments, and the reduced-pressure grading scale. The majority (90%) probably or definitely “would recommend keeping the KCA Assessments for future classes.”

The current iteration of this in-class assessment strategy grew from my own metacognitive insight as an instructor, with regard to balancing student learning, engagement, and incentives for examining and potentially changing learning strategies. Based on observing student performance, and on student feedback on course evaluations and from this survey, this approach is palatable (even enjoyable) for students, encourages deep and elaborative reading, supports durable memory for course material, and – at least by way of self-report – boosts metacognition in undergraduates.

Introducing Metacognition to Students

by Hillary Steiner, Ph.D., Kennesaw State University

The students in my first-year seminar were engaged in a small group activity, which had spread outside of the classroom into the hallways. It was my first semester teaching this seminar, and we were approaching midterm. “Adam,” a good student who normally acted as a leader during group activities, sat alone, trying to stifle tears. He seemed grateful that I cared to ask what was wrong, but doubtful that I could help. His story was one I’d heard before. After years of straight As in science classes, he was encountering his first failures in an important chemistry course that was a gateway course to his major. His plan was to drop the course and rethink the career plans he’d first made as a child. Could I explain why “studying like crazy” wasn’t working? His chemistry professor couldn’t. While I had introduced good study strategies to the students a few weeks prior, this touching conversation caused me to rethink the way I approached the topic. Drawing on my background in educational psychology, I came to two conclusions: 1) I needed to make sure students understood the why behind study strategies so they’d be better prepared to implement them, and 2) I needed to reach out to other faculty to encourage the application of these strategies in the context of content-area courses. Since that time, I’ve written about these activities for a faculty audience (Steiner, 2014; 2016; Steiner, Dean, Foote, & Goldfine, 2013; 2016) and changed the way I approached metacognition.

Lately there seems to be a buzz about metacognition at my institution. Dr. Saundra McGuire, Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success at Louisiana State University and author of a popular book on the topic (McGuire, 2015), visited our campus recently to speak about the importance of metacognition. Unlike me, who first learned of metacognition in my graduate training, McGuire discovered metacognition from outside educational psychology. As a chemistry professor, she saw the powerful ways her students’ learning was transformed when they used metacognitive strategies. Inspired by her campus visit, many faculty began requesting more information about how they could use metacognition in their own classes. At our teaching and learning center where I currently serve as a faculty fellow, my colleagues and I responded by offering more workshops and consultations on how to put the concept into practice. In these interactions, most faculty easily grasped metacognition, understood its importance, and were able to generate some strategies for their courses. However, what they needed was a quick and easy way to promote the idea to students—a concise primer for how (and why!) to become a metacognitive college student. I realized that such a document could also serve as a jumping-off point for discussion with my own students.

The handout was developed with this in mind. Keeping in mind students’ motivations for using such a document, I kept the language brief, encouraging, and jargon-free. I did not include scholarly references, but I did include a short list of resources students could access for further reading. My intent was to provide students enough of an explanation and rationale for metacognition that they’d have sufficient motivation to put the suggested strategies to use in an authentic context. Many faculty with whom I’ve worked feel they lack adequate time to introduce metacognition in their content-area courses. However, while first-year seminars and learning-to-learn classes offer a great opportunity to talk at length about metacognition, students especially benefit when content-area faculty encourage it in their individual disciplines. I am hopeful that this handout can serve as a resource for time-strapped faculty to distribute to their students who, like Adam, are searching for that life hack that will help them succeed in college.

References

McGuire, S. Y. (2015). Teach students how to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Steiner, H. H. (2014). Teaching principles from cognitive psychology in the first-year seminar. E-Source for College Transitions, 11, 14-16.

Steiner, H. H. (2016). The strategy project: Promoting self-regulated learning through an authentic assignment. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 28, 271-282.

Steiner, H.H., Dean, M. L., Foote, S. M., & Goldfine, R. A. (2013). Applying TLC (a targeted learning community) to transform teaching and learning in science. Learning Communities Research and Practice, 1(3), Article 5.

Steiner, H. H., Dean, M. L., Foote, S. M, & Goldfine, R.A. (2016). The targeted learning community: A comprehensive approach to promoting the success of first-year students in general chemistry. In L. C. Schmidt & J. Graziano (Eds.), Building synergy for high-impact educational initiatives: First-year seminars and learning communities. Columbia, SC: National Resource Center.

Developmental Framework for Teaching Expertise

A group of faculty at the University of Calgary share a framework for growth of teaching expertise that demonstrates that “teaching expertise involves multiple facets, habits of mind (or ways of knowing and being), and possible developmental activities.” They share this framework with the hope that others will share, adapt and use it in their own local contexts. The full paper is also available. Note that they also refer to it as a “framework for self-reflection” for faculty, which means it can be used to support metacognitive instruction.

Developing a Learning Culture: A Framework for the Growth of Teaching Expertise

It shouldn’t be Top Secret – Bloom’s Taxonomy

By Lauren Scharff, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy *

Across the past year or so I have been reminded several times of the following fact: Most students are not aware of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and even if they are aware, they have no clue how or why their awareness of it might benefit them and their learning. Most instructors have heard of at least one version of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and some keep it in mind when designing learning activities and assessments. But, rarely do instructors even mention it to their students.

Why don’t instructors share Bloom’s Taxonomy with their students? Is it a top secret, for instructors only? No! In fact, awareness and use of Bloom’s taxonomy can support metacognitive learning, so students should be let in on the “secret.”

What were the key experiences that led me to this strong stance? Let me share….

In May of 2016, I was fortunate to attend a keynote by Dr. Saundra McGuire at High Point University. In her keynote address and in her book, Teach Students How to Learn (2015), McGuire shared stories of interactions with students as they became aware of Bloom’s Taxonomy and applied it to their learning. She also shared data showing how this coupled with a variety of other metacognitive strategies lead to large increases in student academic success. Her work served as the first “ah ha” moment for me, and I realized that I needed to start more explicitly discussing Bloom’s Taxonomy with my students.

An additional way to highlight Bloom’s Taxonomy and support student metacognitive learning was shared this past October (2017) when Dr. Karl Wirth led a workshop as part of our 9^th Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Forum at the U. S. Air Force Academy. In his workshop he shared examples of knowledge surveys along with data supporting their use as a powerful learning tool. Knowledge surveys are collections of questions that support student self-assessment of their knowledge, understanding, and skills. When answering the questions, students rate themselves on their ability to answer the question (similar to a confidence rating) rather than fully answering the question. Research shows that most students are able to accurately self-assess (confidence ratings correlate strongly with actual performance; Nuhfer, Fleisher, Cogan, & Gaze, 2017). However, most students do not take the time to carefully self-assess their knowledge and abilities without formal guidance and encouragement to do so. In order to be effective, knowledge surveys need to ask targeted / granular questions rather than global questions. Importantly, knowledge survey questions can span the full range of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Dr. Wirth incorporates best practices by taking the time to explain Bloom’s Taxonomy to his students and explicitly share how his knowledge survey questions target different levels.

Sharing Bloom’s Taxonomy in our classes is a great first step, but ultimately, we hope that students use the taxonomy on their own, applying it to assignments across all their courses. However, just telling them about the taxonomy or explaining how aspects of our course tap into different levels of the taxonomy may not be enough to support their use of the taxonomy beyond our classrooms. In response to this need, and as part of an ongoing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project at my institution, one of my student co-investigators (Leslie Perez, graduated May 2017), created a workshop handout that walks students through a series of questions that help them apply Bloom’s as a guide for their learning and academic efforts. This handout was also printed in a larger, poster format and is now displayed in the student dorms and the library. Students use the handout by starting in the middle and asking themselves questions about their assignments. Based on their answers, the walk through a path that helps them determine what level of Bloom’s Taxonomy they likely need to target for that assignment. It should help them become more explicitly aware of the learning expectations for their various assignments and support their informed selection of learning strategies, i.e. help them engage in metacognitive learning.

Figure 1. Snapshot of the handout we use to guide students in applying Bloom’s Taxonomy to their learning. (full-sized version here)

As someone who is a strong proponent of metacognitive learning, I have become increasingly convinced that instructors should more often and more explicitly share this taxonomy, and perhaps even more importantly, share how it can be applied by students to raise their awareness of learning expectations for different assignments and guide their choice of learning strategies. I hope this post motivates instructors to share Bloom’s Taxonomy (and other science of learning information) with their students. Feel welcome to use the handout we created.

————

McGuire, S. (2015). Teach Students How to Learn. Stylus Publishing, LLC, Sterling, VA.

Nuhfer, E., Fleisher, S., Cogan, C., Wirth, K., & Gaze, E. (2017). How random noise and a graphical convention subverted behavioral scientists’explanations of self-assessment data: Numeracy underlies better alternatives. Numeracy, 10(1), Article 4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.10.1.4

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

Contemplating Contemplative Pedagogy

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

Like many trained in the academy, I am skeptical of “woo”– practices with trappings of scientific import, but lacking empirical evidence. This is despite my recognition that science has always been suffused by power and social hierarchy in the very framing of its questions. In my pedagogical life, this means it has taken me a long time to warm up to “mindfulness,” a powerful, relatively recent trend in education. Mindfulness is sometimes touted as the solution to many serious problems— lack of emotional constraint, student stress and even faculty burnout. Some might wonder if its popularity doesn’t merely adjust us to the difficulties of life in late capitalism, which in the classroom often appear through long days of emotional labor. But, of course, there are branches of mindfulness associated with nearly every culture and major religion on the globe, many with complex histories and practices that have clearly been important for humans long before our fears of robot overlords emerged. Still, I tend towards asking many of my students to come into more contact with the world, not less, as I feared that meditation or the like might do. Contemplation might be good for self-care, I thought— or working through one’s own “shadow self,” just like therapy, but the justice-oriented classroom requires the tools of critique and conflict. Or does it?

My above assumptions were powerfully challenged at the The Center for Contemplative Mind’s Summer Session on Contemplative Learning in August of 2017, where I spent a week exploring the “tree” of contemplative pedagogy and practice, and did more coloring and dancing than at any other academic experience to date. I want to share three important concepts that might be useful for integrating a mindful approach to metacognition into your life or classroom. Ed Nufer has already written on the focus on the “present” that mindfulness brings, and Chris Was asked us to reconsider the relationship between mindfulness and metacognition. It is my hope that these three concepts are a tiny contribution to that reconsideration, and counter the idea that mindfulness practitioners seek to move beyond the self, rather than reflect on their learning.

First, presenter Kakali Bhattacharya shared how mindfulness helps her flourish in the often hostile institutional spaces of academia. Bhattacharya uses the image of a cup overflowing, saying that you must give to others from the overflow and thus must keep your cup full. For her, mindfulness as a method of self-care was coupled with a commitment to “post-oppositional” thinking and politics. Post-oppositionality requires rejecting existing narratives that frame struggles as Machichean battles between good and evil, a move that is difficult in our partisan times. However, this ability to recognize non-absolutes in a political sense may bear dividends in an intellectual one. Drawing on this, I replaced an assignment that had students debate two contrasting positions with one where they tried to reimagine the problem, offer a variety of solutions, or response from a position of intellectual humility about their own stance. While our in-class process was messy, their ultimate papers on the topic were creative and veered away from the same two arguments I’m used to reading.

The second concept, closely related to post-oppositionality, is “negative capability,” an idea taken from John Keats’ correspondence but now popular in psychology and business. Negative capacity names the ability to tolerate uncertainty, or, as Keats says, to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach after fact and reason……”. (Cite Research). This might seem initially a strange concept to link to metacognition— it seems initially to involve not thinking about thinking, or, rather, willingly allowing yourself to think two contradictory things or to dwell in a lack of knowledge or understanding. For Keats, this is a process of imagination preferable to that of thinking, in the technical sense. Keats, as a Romantic, is generally understood as a critic of reason and fan of feeling. His poetic practice involves inhabiting the minds of his characters and even objects; he wrote that he could imagine a billiard ball enjoying “its own roundness, smoothness, volubility and the rapidity of its motion.” Cultivating these spaces of flow, or negative capability, might increase our ability to also reflect on our own learning and thinking, even as we, in those moments, refrain from committing to them or even to our own identity. Certainly an exercise to explore this idea would be easy to devise— although actually inhabiting an object is harder to do. In a class on ecology, imagining oneself as a plant and perhaps writing from that perspective might open up new vistas but also encourage negative capacity as a tendency of mind.

My mindfulness experience also left me wondering about the costs of integrating some of these practices into student learning shorn of their embeddedness into spiritual or cultural traditions, which brings me to the third concept— of avoiding treating mindfulness as a mere means to an end. Meditation is central to buddhism, but also to a variety of indigenous spiritual practices, and I wondered if they would work without this framework. Were they turned into, as one presenter worried, “McMindfulness” practices? One person I met was passionate about the notion that in meditation there is “No path, no wisdom, no gain” — a radical de-instrumentalization of the practice. To fully understand this saying would take a great deal of meditation, but I began to recognize throughout the week that the focus on the inward development that can occur in mindful practice was, paradoxically, likely to bear more fruit if not linked to specific goals or learning objectives from the outside. This realization was very hard to think about integrating in my classrooms— as each day is driven by specific goals linked to broader course objectives. My challenge for this year is to develop the negative capacity I need in order to engage in some of these practices with my students non-instrumentally while also recognizing the benefits research has shown for improving learning, happiness and health. And, I may need a commitment to post-oppositionality to navigate barriers to “woo” in some academic cultures.

Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition Part 2: Going Granular

Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities- retired

In Part 1, we noted that the highest stages of thinking are not merely cognitive, but they require cognitive knowledge and skills with the addition of metacognitive reflection involving affect. We also promised to present some ways to help students increase the capacity for reaching these highest levels of thinking through using metacognition to understand and develop affective reasoning.

Granular components make up a whole shape

This contributed post, Part 2, has three components. The first recognizes that understanding a way of knowing can take two forms, global and granular. The second provides research-based evidence that gaining an understanding of a metadiscipline’s way of knowing (e.g., science) by gaining awareness of the essential interconnections (granular approach) that constitute the metadiscipline is more effective than trying initially to understand the metadiscipline through considering it as a whole (global approach). The third introduces an example of a heavily affective way of knowing—ethics— and its interconnected components.

From describing to understanding

The popular definition of metacognition as “thinking about thinking” invites a universal response: “OK. So, now what do we think about?” No individual invented or discovered any complex way of knowing, such as science or ethics. Instead, these ways of knowing developed over a long time through the collective contributions of many workers. Over centuries, added insights made awareness of new concepts possible, and better understanding allowed an improved global articulation of each specific way of knowing.

In a few years of college education, we strive to produce understanding of bodies of knowledge that took centuries to develop. We believe that an effective sequence of gaining understanding of a metadiscipline usually recapitulates the historical order of its development. This parallel process for understanding a complex way of knowing involves first becoming aware of the essential interconnected concepts. Afterwards, scholars have increased capacity for constructing their global understanding of a way of knowing by learning how each concept contributes to the reasoning process that characterizes that way of knowing. To aid teaching and assessments of major ways of knowing, it is valuable to distinguish how global and granular queries elicit different ways of thinking and understanding.

Global approaches to understanding address complex issues with a single question. Examples are “How do you treat others ethically?” and “How well do you understand science?”

Granular approaches to thinking address the interconnected concepts that enable specific ways of knowing. For example, the Science Literacy Concept Inventory (SLCI) (Nuhfer et al. 2016a) is a granular instrument. It addresses a dozen interconnected concepts that science rests upon through twenty-five multiple-choice challenges. The composite score on all twenty-five items provides the measure of competence to answer the global challenge of “How well do you understand science as a way of knowing?” It achieves this measure without either directly asking participants the global question or asking them to name any of the specific concepts.

An example query from the SLCI follows.

Which of the following statements presents a hypothesis that science can now easily resolve?

Warts can be cured by holding quartz crystals on them daily for a week.
A classmate sitting in the room can see the auras of other students.
Radio City Music Hall in New York is haunted by several spirits.
People with chronic illnesses have them as punishment for past misdeeds.

The query tests for a granular understanding of science as a way of knowing the physical world through testable hypotheses. The query seeks to see if a student can recognize which of the statements is testable and addresses the physical world. All four options present possible hypotheses, but only one option offers a testable hypothesis and addresses physical phenomena. Note that the query tests for understanding, not for a memorized definition of “hypothesis” or “science.” Answers to twenty-five such questions that address a dozen concepts give a highly reliable assessment of understanding science as a way of knowing.

Now comes the rub. Experts can perform effective metacognition of their understanding in direct response to a single complex global question because their understanding has already assimilated the essential granular concepts that underlie science. Their knowing “what to think about” now comes intuitively from long experience. Novices (students) who directly try to address a global question about a complex issue don’t yet have the experiences that enable experts to respond quickly by unconsciously incorporating the most essential granular concepts in their informed response.

Novices need to methodically consider each of the granular concepts as checkpoints before they can reach a well-informed response. With practice in doing so over time, they can internalize the concepts and intuitively employ them more holistically. An early start in recognizing that granular-to-global-understanding process helps to achieve internalizing earlier in one’s career or education. Without instruction, the process will not begin until a challenge makes the need for the skill apparent, and an inept response can prove costly if the challenge involves a high-stakes decision.

Granular disclosure deepens understanding quickly — the evidence from science

As noted, experts have the advantage of experience. However, their traditional educational experiences rarely included metacognitive reflection, so few of our current experts had the privilege of early understanding that might have resulted from undergraduate instruction on how to achieve an understanding of an ambiguous problem through metacognitive reflection on the most relevant underlying checkpoints of a relevant way of knowing. Many experts achieved this only after high-stakes challenges forced them to adopt more appropriate thinking.

If instructors explicitly engaged in relevant metacognitive instruction, might we be able to produce better future experts than exist now? Research says “yes” by showing that minds gain an increased global understanding of science simply from responding to a granular spectrum of queries that address the interconnected concepts that underlie science (Nuhfer et al., 2016b; 2017).

These research measures started with a global query that honestly disclosed the nature of the SLCI and asked students to estimate their anticipated scores. Our current dataset consists of 1576 participants, and the correlation between their estimates from this initial global self-assessment and their actual test scores was r = .28.

Following the global query, participants completed the SLCI knowledge survey. Knowledge surveys are granular self-assessment instruments that direct students to reflect metacognitively on the interconnected, granular components underlying a comprehensive topic. The SLCI contains 25 test items. For this research, participants first rate their competency on each item and then they answer all the questions. The correlation between the cumulative self-assessment on all 25 items on the entire knowledge survey and participants’ demonstrated competence from their score on the SLCI was r = .6. On later postdicted global queries (recorded after taking the knowledge survey and after taking the Inventory), the correlations between the global self-assessed scores and the actual SLCI scores all remained high at between r = .5 and r = .6.

These results offer a valuable insight: students knew no more content about science after taking the knowledge survey than they did before taking it because no instruction or study was involved. However, taking a knowledge survey provided a granular disclosure of what they must “think about” and conveyed a significantly better understanding of the complexity of the global query than did a detailed global description of the query. Improved metacognitive understanding of the challenge relative to one’s immediate competency is not the same thing as improved content knowledge. Rather, the former clarifies to the learner the specific content learning that one needs to get to improve his or her overall competency.

When we decide to teach a complex way of knowing, conveying an understanding of what the knowing involves (i.e., conveying the granular concepts) will contribute to success. Further, metacognitive exercises are more effective than hearing the key points in lectures, because metacognitive reflection is focused interactive engagement with the problem. The focused conversation with self that is the hallmark of metacognition enlists sufficient parts of the brain to build understanding. Listening alone engages relatively little of the brain’s neural network and produces little understanding that can be retained. Metacognitive exercises will be most effective if we build students’ competence through taking a granular approach from the very start. We want to direct our students to think about and internalize the checkpoints rather than to try to answer the global question directly from unexamined feelings.

From science to ethics

Science focuses on cognitive thinking that uses testable evidence. Instructors are most familiar with developing such thinking, which lies within Perry’s stages 4, 5 and 6. Developing highest level thinking abilities, (stages 7, 8 and 9) requires additional components that allow us to go beyond constructing strong, defendable arguments and enter the realm of using our results for making decisions and acting on them. These highest levels of thinking are metacognitive and affective. Reaching them requires that we develop an awareness of how our own affective feelings are an influence on our decisions, and it further requires that we develop capacity for empathy so that we truly understand how our actions impact others.

Like science, ethics constitutes a complex way of knowing, but the latter is a way of knowing that involves more affect. We treat one another ethically because we feel that we should do so, even when competing feelings and pragmatic arguments may exist to do otherwise in our perceived self-interests. Thus, an understanding of ethics requires understanding a different set of interconnected concepts.

The four granular ethical principles or concepts are, beneficence – “do good;” nonmaleficence – “do no harm;” justice – “treat equals as equals,” and autonomy – “respect others’ control over their own lives.” These provide our checkpoints for granular understanding.

To help readers initiate a global understanding of an ethical decision as experienced through a granular approach, I’ve included a short module exercise with this blog entry. Open it; read it. The text is less than 900 words. Afterwards, confront a few of the reflective exercises at the end of the module.

In Part 3, we can pick up our discussion with deeper exploration of the role of affect and metacognition in making ethical decision. Afterwards, we can explore the role of metacognition in other affective dimensions of thinking.

Tackling your “Laundry” List through Metacognitive Goal Setting

by Tara Beziat at Auburn University at Montgomery

On almost every to-do list I make these days is the word “Laundry.” With two kiddos and a husband who is an avid exerciser, our laundry quickly piles up. Recently, when I told my husband I had everything washed, I paused and thought about my goal of getting the laundry done. I can never actually get it all done. The goal is too broad and it is not time bound. I paused again and thought here I go again being metacognitive: I have goals; I am monitoring them and seeing if I meet them; I realized I needed to make adjustments. In going through this metacognitive process at home, I realized there were applications in my classroom too. I needed to help my students reframe their goals of “reading the textbook or “studying” and build better plans to reach them.

Backwards Planning

The first thing we need to do with goal setting is to build better plans to reach those goals, which research suggests could involve working backwards from the end state of those goals, (Jooyoung, Lu & Hedgock; 2017). It seems that when we have distant goals that involve many tasks, like a comprehensive exam, mid-term project or final presentation, a variety of issues come into play. Inadvertently, obstacles or “speed bumps” slow down our momentum towards the end goal and leave us discouraged. By starting with the end goal (e.g. comprehensive exam) and working backwards to the present time, we often anticipate these potential hurdles. This type planning also leads to the creation of sub-goals. The relatively immediacy of these sub-goals and then the completion of them leads to greater motivation in meeting the final goal.

What this means in my course is that I need to help students develop a timeline, so they see all of the tasks and activities they need to do to reach their end goals. As we develop this timeline, we will work backwards. As we chart out the plan for success, we can acknowledge potential hurdles that may require them to take more time with one task or even shift their preparation. If a large project is due the Monday after the Iron Bowl, a significant event here in Alabama, they may need to consider when they can work on the project prior to that game. By forecasting these “speed bumps,” and planning out the steps in reverse to reach their ultimate goals.

Set Specific Goals

Schunk (1990) identified specificity as one of the keys in goal setting. When we set specific goals, we can better gauge the amount of time and effort it will take to complete this goal. Specificity also allows for better monitoring, a key component in being metacognitive, and can lead to increased self-efficacy as one meets these goals. So students’ goals of “doing well in the course” or “studying harder” are not specific enough and need to be adjusted. To do well in the course, students need to consider what does this actually mean and what sub-tasks are involved to reach this goal. For example, they need to consider what they need to get on the various quizzes and assignments in the course if they want to have an A. This leads to a discussion about preparing for class, allocating study time and allocating time to assignments for the course. All of these can go on this timeline where we work backwards.

Time-Bound Goals

The proximity of the goal plays a key factor in our motivation (Schunk, 1990). Goals that are proximal are more motivating than distal goals. This again goes back to why it is important to plan backwards. It allows us to set up intermediate proximal goals during the semester so we can reach the distal goals. Students (and even professors) often say they are going to study in the afternoons or they are going to read over the weekend. Invariably, “speed bumps” occur and the studying and reading are pushed aside. By blocking out time in your schedule, just like you block out time to attend class, with start times and end times you are more likely to devoted your undivided attention to the task. Dr. Paul Pacheco-Vega provides great advice about planning and how to set up your calendar to get your tasks done. He even shows how to adjust your schedule for when those speed bumps occur. The key is to set aside time in your calendar but also to be aware of that life may just throw you a curve.

By helping my students reframe their goals and build a backwards timeline of how to accomplish their goals, I increase the chances of my students not only being successful in my course but also in their future courses. I am also helping them become more metacognitive. They are learning metacognitive strategies related to setting goals and monitoring and evaluating their progress toward this goal. As an added benefit this approach may lead to higher self-efficacy and increased learning.

Metacognitive strategies are not just for the classroom or academic environment, they have helped me improve my laundry process too! I have set better goals for my chore of doing laundry. I start with the end goal, to have all of the laundry washed and put away by Monday morning. The “laundry” is limited to the clothes in the hampers on Friday. I then set out to complete one load of laundry on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then I put it away on Monday. This plans leaves lots of room for the numerous unforeseen hurdles in rearing two children under two.

Jooyoung, P., Lu, F., Hedgcock, W. (2017). Forward and Backward Planning and Goal Pursuit. Psychological Science. DOI:10.1177/0956797617715510

Schunk, D. H. (1990). Goal Setting and Self-Efficacy During Self-Regulated Learning. Educational Psychologist, 25(1), 71-86

Fundamental concepts and bottlenecks as guides to metacognitive instruction

by John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

In an earlier post, Lauren Scharff and I argued that metacognition can help instructors select and apply appropriate teaching strategies (Draeger & Scharff, 2016). More specifically, we argued that metacognition encourages instructors to consider the particulars of each learning environment (e.g., student background, learning goals, classroom culture) and we offered a series of question prompts to guide the conversation (e.g., what are you doing to check-in with students? What strategy adjustments might you make?). This post extends that work by offering two additional conceptual anchors to ground discussion, namely fundamental concepts and bottlenecks.

First, fundamental concepts can serve as a conceptual anchor for metacognitive instruction. Gerald Nosich describes fundamental and powerful concepts as those “core ideas used to organize other ideas and unlock important questions, insights, and discoveries” (Nosich, 2012). When designing a course, fundamental concepts guide my decisions regarding how much to cover and how much time to devote to a particular topic. As I am making choices, I ask myself “how does this material help students better understand the fundamental concept of the course?” In assessment, I want my assignments to align with the most important aspects of the course and fundamental concepts articulate those important features. And in class instruction, fundamental concepts guide class conversation and provide a mechanism for refocusing peripheral lines of questioning. Therefore, if metacognitive instruction encourages me to be intentional about my learning objectives and student progress towards achieving them, then fundamental concepts serve as a constant reminder to me (and my students) of what is most important.

By way of illustration, the concept of justice is fundamental concept to my upper division course in philosophy of law. The course readings are roughly subdivided into theoretical discussions that articulate particular philosophical conceptions of justice (e.g., procedural, moral) and applications in the law (e.g., landmark United States Supreme court cases). The theories illuminate elements in the court cases and the cases provide illustrations of the theoretical features. Without explicit reference to a fundamental concept, the course can seem like an endless list of court cases with each case, and each detail of each case, seeming as important as all the others. Through an explicit focus on the fundamental concept, however, the course is organized around a conceptual web with justice at the center and theories and cases emanating out in order of importance (e.g., theories can articulate conceptions of justice and cases can be organized according to those conceptions). As someone aspiring to practice metacognitive instruction, I regularly check-in with students and make adjustments based on class discussion. When students seem to be “in the weeds,” I can use the concept of justice (and our various conceptions of it) as a way to refocus the conversation on what is most important to the course. We can then build back the details of the theories and the cases. Further, some students relish the details of cases, but they are less inclined to consider how the cases illustrate the theories that we’ve been reading. Again, the concept of justice allows me to reframe class conversation and build back the structural details of the course (e.g., theories of justice, court cases). Finally, I make adjustments in my preparation between class sessions based on my informal assessment of student understanding in relation to the fundamental concept. In this way, fundamental concepts work in conjunction with my efforts to be a metacognitive instructor.

A second type of conceptual anchor for metacognitive instruction can be found by considering the bottlenecks of a given course. Middendorf and Pace (2004) describe course bottlenecks as aspects of the course (concepts/skills) that are both essential to the course and places where students consistently struggle. Students in my philosophy of law courses, for example, often confuse descriptive claims (how things are) with normative claims (how things should be). This confusion can cause students to be frustrated by class discussion and flummoxed by written assignments. For example, students in the grips of this confusion tend to focus on the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court reached a decision by a 5-4 margin without considering that it can (or perhaps even should have been otherwise). They reason that if the court ruled this way, then that’s the end of the story (descriptive claim about how the law is). These students tend not to consider whether the court might have been mistaken in their ruling (a normative question). Even if these students memorize court rulings and the rationale for those decisions, they have not yet engaged with the normative underpinnings of the course (e.g., whether a particular ruling is just). As someone trying to practice metacognitive instruction, I need to monitor student progress and make necessary adjustments. Bottlenecks (e.g., student struggles with normative questions) give me a predictable place to check-in and refocus student attention.

Moreover, given that the fact I can anticipate that students are likely to struggle with normative questions (the bottleneck of the course), I am more intentional about course design, instruction, and feedback on assessment. For example, I intentionally begin the course with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” because King’s argument makes it clear that there is such a thing as an unjust law. We then follow up by considering a number of landmark cases early in the semester, such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. In the former, the court supported the “separate but equal” doctrine. In the latter, they rejected it. We talk about what made the Plessy unjust and why Brown readdresses that injustice. This launches into more theoretical discussions about the types of reasoning offered in those decisions and how they are related to the fundamental concept of justice. By considering these cases, students have early illustrations of a just and unjust law (normative claims). This exercise becomes a touchstone for later in the semester when students struggle with the descriptive and normative distinction. Because metacognitive instruction demands that I regularly check-in, I am tuned into the fact that students are often stuck in the normative bottleneck . When this happens, we can revisit our conversations about King, Plessy and Brown. Moreover, if this teaching strategy doesn’t work, then I know that I need to choose another strategy. Student understanding will be stymied unless I can help them overcome predictable confusions. Clearing the bottleneck, therefore, can open up learning opportunities, but clearing the bottleneck only happens if I am aware of student difficulties and willing to make changes (i.e. metacognitive instruction).

This post has built on the thought that metacognitive instruction can help instructors choose appropriate instructional strategies. In particular, fundamental concepts can help instructors be intentional and explicit about what is most important about their courses. Likewise, locating consistent sources of student difficulty can help frame where and how instructional energies can be best spent. In short, both fundamental concepts and bottlenecks ground metacognitive instruction by providing anchor points and guiding instructors towards promising teaching strategies.

References

Draeger, J. & Scharff, L. (2016). “Using Metacognition to select and apply appropriate teaching strategies.”Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/using-metacognition-select-apply-appropriate-teaching-strategies/

Middendorf, J., & Pace, D. (2004). Decoding the disciplines: A model for helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking. New directions for teaching and learning, 2004(98), 1-12.

Nosich, G. (2012) Learning to think things through: A guide to critical thinking across the disciplines. Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition: Part 1

by Ed Nuhfer, PhD, California State Universities (retired)

Roman Taraban launched such an important topic for our blog on July 20 with “Hate-Inspired Webforums, PTSD, and Metacognition” that it is surely worth extending his discussion further.

Roman noted that groups develop recognizable vocabularies (discourse) and manners of speaking for set purposes. The purpose of developed vocabulary and manner of speech of hate groups is to enlist support and then empower and activate those with dispositions toward bias and bigotry. Activation in hate groups includes intimidation, shaming, shunning, and physical violence. Affect is the ultimate origin of discourse because the desire to promote such discourse is an affective feeling. Like cognitive thinking and psychomotor activity, affect is essential to human life and function. However, affect can guide us to act in ways that are ineffective, toxic, or destructive.

Learning and education are the processes through which we support and advance civilization. The purpose of civilization may be to elevate effective, beneficial actions and to minimize deleterious ones. Through learning and education, we develop frameworks of reasoning and processes for developing beneficial proficiencies. Examples of a psychomotor framework would be a process through which one learns to hunt for food, play a musical instrument, or to produce a painting. Examples of cognitive frameworks would be the logic of language and the use of testing and verification as a way of knowing through which we understand the physical world. An example of an affective framework is ethics—the way of knowing through which we evaluate the nature of feelings that are directing (or attempting to direct), our choices and decisions through which we act.

It is relatively easy to assess when psychomotor efforts are effective and successful. It is more difficult to see how language presents a fallacious argument or when an accepted cognitive perception about the physical world constitutes a misconception. It is most difficult to determine whether an affective feeling is likely to direct us to actions that are beneficial and healthy or toxic and perverse. We observe our affective state through metacognition, which is a purposefully directed internal awareness. Metacognition has an ineffable quality. In contrast, physical action and cognitive reasoning are easier to assess through their immediate products.

The history of education seems marked by an initial focus on the development of effective psychomotor skills needed for survival, technology, and simple arts. Later educational efforts offered an emphasis on written language, literature, increasingly sophisticated arts, and science. We finally are arriving at a time in Western education when an acceptance is dawning that becoming educated should proceed beyond cognitive and psychomotor development to understanding ourselves and our affective traits. This pattern seems inevitable because it is recapitulated on a smaller scale in our development as individuals.

If we are lucky, we start life acquiring the skills needed for our survival and further development. If we are particularly fortunate, we progress to gaining valid knowledge, valuable skills, and capacity for understanding and appreciating the social and natural realms in which we live. Finally, if we are uncommonly privileged through fortune, we can develop wisdom that promotes our living in an expanded awareness of our reality and increased capacity for nurturing and caring well for our natural world and others around us.

Given the progression outlined above, we should expect that metacognition will be our students’ most challenging and least-developed capacity for learning and becoming educated. As educators, we should also expect struggle and resistance, both individually and collectively, against the legitimacy of affective development efforts and metacognition as essential to becoming educated. We have already seen such resistance to these advances.

In hindsight, it now appears that Benjamin Bloom and his team of educators who worked in the 1950s and 60s seemed decades ahead of their contemporaries by recognizing the indispensable importance of the affective domain to the process of becoming educated. The Bloom team’s contribution on affect took many years before its importance was realized. At the time Bloom published his taxonomy of the cognitive domain, he was producing a second volume on the taxonomy of the affective domain (and still later, the psychomotor domain), the established behavioral sciences were focused solely on cognition. These sciences ridiculed affect, dismissed metacognition (see Dunlosky and Metcalf, 2009) and treated both as nonsense that obstructed objective reasoning and cognitive thinking. Bloom’s first volume on the cognitive domain became the most-cited educational reference in history, but the second volume on the affective domain fell into such obscurity that few college professors even know that it existed. The academic realm so de-legitimatized affective feelings that researchers from the 1960s into the early 1990s were actually afraid to study or write about emotions (see Damasio, 1999).

William Perry’s 1960s landmark work (Perry, 1999) was contemporary with Bloom’s research. Perry presented his discovery of distinct stages of adult intellectual development that he derived from analysis of language patterns (discourse) that manifested during interviews that Perry held over several years with groups of students. This longitudinal study found that students changed their thinking and reasoning process during years of becoming educated. Moreover, the interviews revealed that the highest stages went beyond cognitive thinking by incorporating and regulating metacognitive awareness of one’s affective inclinations. This discovery of the nature of highest-level reasoning arrived with awkward timing, given the regard by scholars for affect and emotions. In Perry’s entire book, reference to “affect” occurs only once (in a brief footnote on page 49) and to “emotions” only once (on p. 140). “Feeling” / “feelings” appear thirty-nine times, but mostly in the quotations of statements made by students during interviews. Perry seemed unable to write openly about these aspects, so the three chapters on his three highest stages are conspicuously brief. Today, a close reading of these chapters indicates that he had probably also discovered the development of emotional intelligence in his interviews, but he seems to have understood the dangers that any emphasis on emotion might pose to his larger discovery.

Another landmark book (King and Kitchener, 1992) that followed Perry’s interview approach refused to venture even that far. These authors restricted their investigation of higher intellectual stages to purely cognitive reasoning. However, by 2004 (Journal of Adult Development, 2004) a synthesis revealed that many investigations and classification schemes that followed Perry all mapped to each other and were essentially describing the same stages.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Affective Domain seems to map even better onto the Perry stages than it does to Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, (see Nuhfer, 2008) indicating that building affective capacity is indeed a developmental process. Thus, well-designed higher education curricula can build it, providing instructors design the curricula to produce the highest levels of thinking.

As an added benefit, development of metacognitive awareness is probably the best way to curtail the influence of “hate groups,” whether these be minor cults or mainstream establishment organizations. People with metacognitive awareness can perceive when their affect is getting involved from external attempts to direct their abilities toward beneficent or maleficent ends. In part 2, we’ll consider how teaching any discipline presents an opportunity to push thinking to highest levels through using metacognitive awareness to reflect on ethics, respect, courage, and gratitude.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

Dunlosky, J. and Metcalf, J. (2009). Metacognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Journal of Adult Development (2004). Special volume of nine papers on the Perry legacy of cognitive development. Journal of Adult Development (11, 2) 59-161 Germantown NY: Periodicals Service Co.

King, P. M., and Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing Reflective Judgment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Nuhfer, E. B. (2008). The feeling of learning: Intellectual development and the affective domain: Educating in fractal patterns XXVI. National Teaching and Learning Forum, 18 (1) 7-11.

Perry, W. G. Jr. (1999). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass (a reprint of the original 1968 work with minor updating).

Mind Mapping: A Technique for Metacognition

by Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe, Rusty Carpenter, Eastern Kentucky University

Downloadable

Background

The Provost at Eastern Kentucky University invited Saundra McGuire to speak on metacognition as part of our University’s Provost’s Professional Development Speaker Series. Our unit was tasked with designing related programming both before and after McGuire’s visit. Our aim was to provide a series of effective workshops that prepared the ground for our university’s Quality Enhancement Plan 2.0 on metacognition as a cross-disciplinary tool for cultivating reading skills. The following mind mapping exercise from one of four workshops was taught to over 50 faculty from across campus and the academic ranks. Feedback rated its popularity high and suggested its appropriateness for any level of any discipline with any size class.

Scientific Rationale

The Mind Map, a term invented by Tony Buzan in The Mind Map Book (1993), “is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlocking the potential of the brain” (9). For that reason, Buzan’s subtitle is How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential. A mind map provides a way for organizing ideas either as they emerge or after the fact. Perhaps the mind map’s greatest strength lies in its appeal to the visual sense.

We chose to share mind mapping with our faculty because according to Brain Rules (2008), rule number ten is “Vision trumps all other senses” (221). For proof, the author, John Medina, cites a key fact: “If information is presented orally, people remember about 10%, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65% if you add a picture” (234). Because of its visual nature, mind mapping provides a valuable metacognitive tool.

How Mind Mapping Supports Metacognition

Silver (2013) focuses on reflection in general and in particular “the moment of meta in metacognition—that is the moment of standing above or apart from oneself, so to speak, in order to turn one’s attention back upon one’s own mental work” (1). Mind mapping allows thinkers a visual-verbal way to delineate that moment of reflection and in capturing that moment to preserve its structure. Because analysis is one of Bloom’s higher-order learning skills, mind mapping leads to deep thinking, which makes self-regulation easier.

Method

Essentially, a mind map begins with what Gerry Nosich in Learning to Think Things Through (2009) calls a fundamental and powerful concept, “one that can be used to explain or think out a huge body of questions, problems, information, and situations” (105). To create a mind map, place the fundamental and powerful concept (FPC) you wish to explore in the center of a piece of paper and circle it. If at all possible, do something with color or the actual lettering in order to make the FPC even more visual. For instance, if you were to map the major strategies involved in metacognition, metacognition is the FPC, and you might choose to write it as such:

M E T A
Cognition

Increasing the visual effect of the FPC are lines that run to additional circled concepts that support the FPC. These Sputnik-like appendages are what Buzan calls basic ordering ideas, “key concepts within which a host of other concepts can be organized” (p. 84). For example, if you were working with our metacognition example, your lines might radiate out to a host of also-circled metacognitive strategies, such as retrieving, reflection, exam wrappers, growth mindset, and the EIAG process of Event selection-Identification of what happened-Analysis-Generalization of how the present forms future practice (for a fuller explanation see our It Works for Me, Metacognitively, pp. 33-34). And if you wanted to go one step further, you might radiate lines from, for instance, retrieving, to actual retrieving strategies (e.g., flashcards, interleaving, self-quizzing).

Uses for Mind Maps

Mind mapping has many uses for both students and faculty:

Notetaking: mind mapping provides an alternative form of notetaking whether for students or professors participating in committee meetings. It can be done before a class session by the professor, during the session by the student, or afterwards as a way of checking whether the fundamental and powerful concept(s) was taught or understood.
Studying: instead of rereading notes taken, a method destined for failure, try reorganizing them into a mind map or two. Mind mapping not only offers the visual alternative here, but provides retrieval practice, another metacognitive technique.
Assessing: instead of giving a traditional quiz at the start of class or five-minute paper at the end, ask students to produce a mind map of concept X covered in class. This alternative experiment will demonstrate to students a different approach and place another tool in their metacognitive toolbox.
Prioritizing: when items are placed in a mind map, something has to occupy center stage. Lesser items are contained in the radii.

Outcomes

Mind maps are easy, deceptively simplistic, fun, and produce a deep learning experience. Don’t believe it? Stop reading now, take out a piece of paper, and mind map what you just read. We’re willing to bet that if you do so, the result will provide a reflection moment.

References

Buzan, T. (1993). The mind map book: How to use radiant thinking to maximize your brain’s untapped potential. New York: Plume Penguin.

McGuire, S. Y., & McGuire, S. (2015). Teach students how to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Medina, J. (2008). Brain rules. Seattle: Pear Press.

Nosich, J. (2009). Learning to think things through. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Silver, N. (2013). Reflective pedagogies and the metacognitive turn in college teaching.

In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. Lavaque-Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 1-17). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Sweet, C., Blythe, H., & Carpenter, R. (2016). It Works for Me, Metacognitively. Stillwater, OK: New Forums.

Appendix: How to Use Word to Create a Mind Map

Click Insert.
Click Shapes and select Circle.
Click on desired position, and the circle will appear.
Click on Draw Textbox.
Type desired words in textbox (you may have to enlarge the textbox to accommodate words).
Drag textbox into center of circle.
Repeat as desired.
To connect circles, click Insert Shapes and then Select Line.
Drag Line between circles.

Metacognitive links connecting the Arts and STEM

by Jessica Santangelo and Ilona Pierce, Hofstra University

We may be an unlikely pair at first glance – an actor and a biologist. We met after Jess gave a talk about the role of metacognition in supporting student learning in biology. Ilona realized during the talk that, though unfamiliar with the term metacognition, what she does with theatre students is inherently metacognitive. This has led to rich conversations about metacognition, the role of metacognition in teaching, and the overlap between the arts and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and mathematics).

Here we offer a condensed version of one of our conversations in which we explored the overlap between metacognition in the arts and STEM (STEAM).

Ilona: In actor training, (or voice/speech training, which is my specialty) self-reflection is the core part of an actor’s growth. After a technique is introduced and application begins, we start to identify each student’s obstacles. In voice work, we examine different ways we tighten our voices and bodies then explore pathways to address the tension. As tension is released, I’ll typically ask, “What do you notice? How are things different than they were when we began?” This is what hooked me in at your lecture….you worked with the students, uncovering their shortcomings (their version of TENSION) and you watched their test scores go up. It was a great thing to see, but I sat there thinking, “doesn’t every teacher do that?”

Jess: In my experience, most STEM courses do not intentionally or explicitly support students reflecting on themselves, their performance, or their learning strategies. I’m not entirely sure why that is. It may be a function of how we (college-level STEM educators) were “brought up,” that many of us never had formal training in pedagogy, and/or that many STEM educators don’t feel they have time within the course to support students in this way.

When you contacted me after the lecture, I had an “aha!” moment in which I thought “Woah! She does this every day as an inherent part of what she does with her students. It’s not something special, it’s just what everyone does because it’s essential to the students’ learning and to their ability to grow as actors.” Though you hadn’t been aware of the term “metacognition” before the talk, what you are having your students do IS metacognitive.

Ilona: Of course, the students have to be taught to notice, and prodded into verbalizing their observations. In the beginning, when I ask, “What do you notice?” I’m typically met with silence. They don’t know what they notice. I have to guide them: “How has your breathing changed? Are you standing differently? What emotions arose?” As the course goes on, I’ll ask for deeper observations like, “How does your thinking/behavior during class help you/hinder you? What patterns are arising?” It’s not unusual to hear things like, “I realized I talk fast so that people don’t have the chance to interrupt me,” or “If I speak loudly, I’m afraid people will think I’m rude.”

Jess: I think that highlights a difference in the approach that educators within our respective fields take to our interactions with students. Your class is entirely focused on the student, the student’s experience, and having the student reflect on their experience so they can adjust/adapt as necessary.

In contrast, for many years, the design of STEM courses and our interactions with students focused on the conveyance of content and concepts to students. Some STEM classes are becoming more focused on having the students DO something with content/concepts in the classroom (i.e., active learning and flipped classrooms), but that hasn’t always been the case. Nor does having an active learning or flipped classroom mean that the course intentionally or explicitly supports student metacognitive development.

Ilona: Principles and content are an important part my coursework as well, but most of it is folded into the application of the skills they’re learning. The environment helps to support this kind of teaching. My students are hungry young artists and the class size is 16 – 18 max. This allows me to begin by “teaching” to the group at large, and then transition to doing one-on-one coaching.

When you work with your students, do you work individually or in small groups?

Jess: I am pretty constrained in terms of what I can do in the classroom as I generally have 44-66 students/section (and faculty at other institutions are even more constrained with 100+ students/section!). However, even with my class size, I generally try to minimize whole-group lecture by having students work in small groups in the classroom, prompting them to discuss how they came to a conclusion and to make their learning visible to each other. One-on-one “coaching” generally occurs during office hours.

I’m really drawn to the word “coaching” here. I feel like you literally coach students – that you work with them, meeting them wherever they are in that moment, and help them gain awareness and skills to get to some endpoint. Does that accurately capture how you view yourself and your role? How does that play out in terms of your approach to your classes and to your interactions with students?

Ilona: I think it’s “teacher” first and then I transition to “coach”. But I also use one-on-one coaching to teach the entire class. For example, one student gets up to share a monologue or a poem. Afterwards, I ask a question, maybe a couple: ”What did you notice about your breathing? Your body? Your emotions?” If the student has difficulty answering, I’ll guide them to what I noticed: “Did you notice… i.e. your hands were in fists the whole time?” I might turn to the class and say, “Did you guys notice his hands?” The class typically will notice things the performer doesn’t. I’ll ask the class, “As an audience member, how did his clenched hands make you feel (emotionally, physically)? Did you want him to let them go, or did it help the piece?” So the coaching bounces from the individual to the group, asking for self-reflection from everyone.

Jess: It sounds like we do something similar in that, as I prompt one student in a small group to explain how they arrived at a conclusion, I’m using that as an opportunity to model a thought process for the rest of the group. Modeling the thought process alone isn’t necessarily metacognitive, but I take it a step farther by asking students to articulate how the thought process influenced their ability to come to an accurate conclusion and then asking them to apply a similar process in other contexts. I’m essentially coaching them towards using thought process that is inquisitive, logical, and evidence-based – I’m coaching them to think like a scientist.

When I reflect on my title: professor/teacher/instructor/educator versus coach, I’m struck that the title brings up very different ideas for me about my role in the classroom – it shifts my perspective. When I think of professor/teacher/instructor/educator, I think of someone who is delivering content. When I think of a coach, I think of someone standing on the sidelines, observing an athlete perform, asking the athlete to do various exercises/activities/drills to improve various aspects of their performance. You seem to fit squarely in the “coach” category to me – you are watching the students perform, asking students to reflect on that performance, and then doing exercises to improve performance via the release of tension.

Ilona: I definitely do both. Coaching to me implies individualized teaching that is structured in a way to foster independence. Eventually, a coach may just ask questions or offers reminders. It’s the last stop before students leave to handle things on their own. Like parenting, right? We start with “hands on”, and over time we teach our children to become more and more independent, until they don’t need us anymore.

Jess: I wonder how often STEM educators think of themselves at coaches? How does viewing oneself as a coach alter what one does in the classroom? Is there a balance to be struck between “teaching” and “coaching”? How much overlap exists between those approaches?

In thinking about myself, I can wear both hats depending on the circumstance. I can “teach” content and “coach” to help students become aware of their level of content mastery. When I think of myself as a teacher, I feel responsible for getting students to the right answer. When I think of myself as a coach, I feel more responsible for helping them be aware of what they know/don’t know and supporting their use of strategies to help them be successful. Isn’t that the point of an athletic coach? To help an athlete be aware of their bodies and their abilities and then to push an athlete to do and achieve more within their sport? The academic analogy then would be to push a student to be aware of what they know or don’t know and to effectively utilize strategies to increase their knowledge and understanding. The goal is to get students doing this on their own, without guidance from an instructor.

The other piece to this is how the students respond and use the metacognitive skills we are trying to help them develop. I wonder: Are your students, who are being encouraged to develop strong metacognitive skills in their theatre classes, naturally transferring those skills and using them in other disciplines (like in their bio class!)? If not, and if they were prompted to do so, would they be more likely to do so (and do so successfully) than non-theatre students who haven’t been getting that strong metacognitive practice?

Ilona: One would hope so. My guess is that when they get into non-acting classes, they revert to the student skills they depended on in high school. Although, I often get “metacognitive success stories” after summer break. Students will report that during their lifeguard or food-service gig, they realized their growing skills of self-awareness helped them to do everything from using their voices differently to giving them greater insight into their own behavior. If they can make connections like this during a summer job, perhaps they can apply these skills in their bio class.

Metacognition and Teacher-Student-Curriculum Relationships

by Steven Fleisher, Ph.D., California State University Channel Islands

I have heard many express that teacher-student relationships have nothing in common with families. But while teacher-student relationships are best described as collegial, at least within higher-education, this author believes that much can be learned from family theories and research. In particular, family research provides insights into how to support the development of trust in this context rather than relationships based principally on compliance. In other words, a classroom “is” a family, whether it’s a good one or a bad one. In this posting, we will explore metacognitive processes involved in building and maintaining stable relationships between students and the curriculum, teachers and the curriculum, and between teachers and students.

Family systems theory (Kerr & Bowen, 1988), though originally developed for clinical practice, offers crucial insights into not only teacher-student relationships but teaching and learning as well (Harrison, 2011). While there are many interlocking principles within family systems theory, we will concentrate on emotional stability, differentiation of self, and triangles.

The above triangle provides a representation for the following relationships: students-curriculum, teacher-curriculum, and teacher-students. Although any effective pedagogy would work for this discussion, we will focus specifically on the usefulness of knowledge surveys in this context (http://elixr.merlot.org/assessment-evaluation/knowledge-surveys/knowledge-surveys2) and their role in building metacognitive self-assessment skills.[1] Thus, what are some of the metacognitive processes involved in the relationships on each leg of our triangle? And, what are some of the metacognitive processes that would support those relationships in becoming increasingly stable?

Student-Curriculum Relationships

Along one leg of the triangle, students would increase the stability of their relationships with the curriculum as a function of becoming ever more aware of their learning processes. Regarding the use of knowledge surveys, students would self-assess their confidence to respond to given challenges, compare those responses with their developed competencies, and follow with reflective exercises to discover and understand any gaps between the two. As their self-assessment accuracy improves, their self-regulation skills would improve as well, i.e., adjusting, modifying, or deepening learning strategies or efforts as needed. So, the more students are aware of competencies in the curriculum and the more aware they are of their progress towards those competencies, the better off students will be.

As part of a course, instructors can also guide students in exploring how the material is useful to them personally. Activities can be designed to support exploration and discovery of ways in which course material relates, for example, to career interests, personal growth, interdisciplinary objectives, fostering of purpose, etc. In so doing, the relationships students have with the material can gain greater stability. Ertmer and Newby (1996) noted that expertise in learning involves becoming “strategic, self-regulated, and reflective”, and by bringing these types of exercises into the course, students are supported in the development of all these competencies.

Teacher-Curriculum Relationships

These relationships involve teachers becoming more aware of their practices, their student’s learning, and the connection between their practices and their student’s learning. In other words, the teacher is trying to ensure fit between student understanding and curriculum. Regarding knowledge surveys, teachers would know they are providing a pedagogical tool that supports learning and offers needed visibility for students.

In addition, once teachers have laid out course content in their knowledge surveys, they can look ahead and anticipate which learning strategies would be the best match for upcoming material. Realizing ahead of time the benefits of, let’s say, using structured group work for a particular learning module, teachers could prepare themselves and their students for that type of activity.

Teacher-Student Relationships

These relationships involve the potential for the development of trust. When trust develops in a classroom, students not only know what the expectations involve but are set more at ease to explore creatively their understanding and ways of understanding the material. For instance, students may well become aware of the genuine and honest help being provided by chosen learning strategies. Knowledge surveys are particularly useful in this regard as students have a roadmap for the course and a tool structured to facilitate the improvement of their learning skills.

Teachers also have an interpersonal role in supporting the development of student trust. Family systems theory (Bowen & Kerr, 1988) holds that we all vary in our levels of self-differentiation, which involves how much we, literally, realize that we are separate from others, especially during emotional conflict. In other words, people vary in their abilities to manage emotional reactivity (founded in anxiety) with being able to use one’s intellect to compose chosen and valued responses. Harrison (2011), in applying these principles in a classroom, noted that when teachers are aware of becoming emotionally reactivity (i.e., defensive), but are also aware of using their intellect, as best as possible, to manage the situation (i.e., remaining thoughtful and unbiased in their interactions with students), they are supporting emotional stability and trust.

Kerr and Bowen (1988) also reported that self-differentiation involves distinguishing between thoughts and feelings. This principle gives us another metacognitive tool. When we are aware, for example, that others do not “make” us feel a certain way (i.e., frustrated), but that it involves also our thinking (i.e., students are just being lazy), this affects our ability to manage reactivity. If we are aware of becoming reactive, and aware of distinguishing thoughts and feelings, we can notice and reframe our thoughts (i.e., students are just doing what they need to do), and validate and own our emotions (i.e., okay I’m frustrated), then we are better positioned to respond in ways that attune to our needs as well as those of our students. In this way, we would increase our level of self-differentiation by moving toward less blaming and more autonomy.

Final Note

Kerr and Bowen (1988) also said that supporting stability along all the relationships represented by our triangle not only increases the emotional stability of the system, but provides a cushion for the naturally arising instabilities along individual legs of the triangle. This presence of this stability also serves to further enhance the impact of effective pedagogies. So, when teachers are aware of maintaining the efficacy of their learning strategies, and are aware of applying the above principles of self-differentiation, i.e. engaging in metacognitive instruction, they are better positioned to be responsive and attuned to the needs of their students, thus supporting stability, trust, and improved learning.

References

Ertmer, P. A. & Newby, T. J. (1996). The expert learner: Strategic, self-regulated, and reflective. Instructional Science, 24(1), 1-24. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/journal/11251

Harrison, V. A. (2011). Live learning: Differentiation of self as the basis for learning. In O.C. Bregman & C. M. White (Eds.), Bringing systems thinking to life: Expanding the horizons for Bowen family systems theory (pp. 75-87). New York, NY: Routledge.

Kerr, M. E. & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Image from: https://www.slideshare.net/heatherpanda/essay-2-for-teaching-course-4

[1] Knowledge surveys are comprised of a detailed listing of all learning outcomes for a course (perhaps 150-250 items). Each item begins with an affective root (“I can…”) followed by a cognitive or ability challenge expressed in measurable terms (“…describe at least three functions of the pituitary gland.”). These surveys provide students with a roadmap for the course and a tool structured for building their confidence and accuracy in learning skills.

Hate-Inspired Webforums, PTSD, and Metacognition

by Roman Taraban, Texas Tech University

In linguistics, a register is a variety of speech used for distinct purposes in particular social settings. In a manner consistent with that terminology, I am here using the term discourse register to refer to sets of specific terms and meanings, and to specific vocabularies used by groups in order to achieve distinct purposes. Unlike a dictionary, a register is not so much concerned with the meanings of words as it is with their association with cognitions, affects, and behaviors. A discourse register can link together such disparate phenomena as hate speech, PTSD, and metacognition by virtue of the fact that each has a distinct discourse register, that is, each applies a specific vocabulary and manner of speech. The purpose of this blog post is to suggest that these disparate phenomena are similar by virtue of the way that they operate. The second purpose is to suggest a way of increasing our understanding of metacognitive processing by beginning to implement some of the technology that has already been extensively applied to hate-inspired webforums and trauma-related therapies.

Regarding hate speech, the internet has provided radical right groups the means to organize networks that often promote bias, bigotry, and violence. An example is Stormfront (https://www.stormfront.org/forum/), which was established by white supremacist and ex-felon Don Black in 1996. (Figea, 2015). Right-wing extremists use the internet to build identity and unity with “like-minded” individuals. This has prompted researchers and government analysts to analyze extremist communications in order to gain an understanding of these groups. Importantly, key indicators in the communications are sought out that could indicate future events (Figea, 2015; Figea et al., 2016).

What are the key indicators in extremist communications? The answer lies in part in the concept of a discourse register. It consists of the specific vocabulary and ways of communicating that characterize the shared conversations and practices of a group. For example, Figea (2015) applied machine learning to analyze Stormfront forum exchanges in an attempt to assess the level of three affects: aggression towards an outgroup, racism, and worries about the present or future. A sample of forum posts was classified by humans for the affects, then a machine was trained on the human classifications and tested on a new sample of forum posts. Key indicators for the racism affect were black, race, Jew, protest, and Zionist, corresponding to topics in the forums associated with Black inferiority, Jewish conspiracy, and government corruption (Figea, 2015).

The idea of a shared discourse among a group of individuals provides the theoretical glue that allows binding the activities, speech, and shared identity of groups of individuals. In some cases, the analysis of discourse has provided insights into the motivations and behaviors of extremist and terrorist groups, as described by Figea and colleagues (2015; Figea et al., 2016). In other cases, researchers have applied the idea of discourse and discourse analysis to prosocial activities involving counseling and therapy. Pennebaker and King (1999) proposed that “the way people talk about things reveals important information about them” (p. 1297). In order to assist them in their analyses, Pennebaker and colleagues developed and tested the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) software. This software has been successfully applied to the analysis of texts in a variety of contexts and applied to a wide range of dimensions. These include analyses of emotionality, social status, group processes, close relationships, deception and honesty, thinking styles, and individual differences (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010).

Jaeger et al. (2014) examined the associations between trauma-related experiences (e.g., PTSD, depression, anxiety) and the content of the narratives written by trauma patients. The researchers found significant differences between daily vs trauma-related narratives in the use of cognitive-mechanism words (e.g., cause, know, ought) and negative emotion words (e.g., hate, worthless, enemy). There were also strong associations between the words that patients used and the severity of their trauma. The approach and outcomes in Jaeger et al. was similar to that employed by Figea and colleagues.

A perk of the LIWC software is that it allows individuals to develop their own specialized dictionaries and to import those dictionaries into LIWC to analyze language use for evidence of the target constructs. When individuals express sadness, they use words like sad, loss, cry, alone (Pennebaker & King, 1999). Sadness is part of a person’s emotion register. Can we apply this analytic approach to metacognition and ask, What is the discourse of metacognition? As instructors, how do the ways we talk about teaching reflect a metacognitive register – i.e., words that reflect an understanding of cognitive functioning, learning, limitations, self-regulation, monitoring, scaffolding, and so on. How do the ways we talk about students, classrooms, homework, and student collaboration mirror metacognitive understanding and processing? Current technology allows us to begin exploring these questions. Following the model provided in Figea (2015; Figea et al., 2016), one place to start might be this Improve With Metacognition (IWM) forum. The analysis of published scholarship on metacognition would be another source of texts to use to train and analyze a machine to detect key metacognitive indicators in texts. Human coders would code sentences in a sample of the texts as involving or not involving metacognition. These classification would be used to train a machine. After training, the machine would be tested on a new sample of texts.

Development of a metacognitive register is subject to the same constraints as any good scholarship. The developers need to be experts in the area of metacognition, and they need to have a clear grasp of how metacognition works. The linguistic analysis dictionary that they develop needs to be accurate and comprehensive. It needs to be a team effort – one individual cannot do it alone. The dictionary needs to be tested for construct validity, internal consistency, and for reliable test results across a variety of participants and contexts. In spite of the challenges inherent in the task, the prospect of a ready analytic tool for metacognition could help in advancing the application of the powerful cognitive suite of metacognitive processes in classrooms.

References

Figea, L. (2016). Machine learning for affect analysis on white supremacy forum. Downloaded from https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:955841/FULLTEXT01.pdf .

Figea, L., Kaati, L, & Scrivens, R. (2016). Measuring online affects in a white supremacy forum. In IEEE Xplore. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745448

Pennebaker, J. W., & King, L. A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language Use as an individual difference. Journal of Personally and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1296-1312.

Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24-54.

A ‘New Ear’ for Student Writers: Building Awareness of Audience

by Michael Young, Robert Morris University

Downloadable

Motivation and Background:

A fundamental hurdle for most inexperienced writers is gaining a sense of their audience, and how a different consciousness may interpret the words, the organization, and the presentation that they (the writers) use to share ideas. It is different than knowing rules, techniques, or traditions of writing. It requires more than knowledge of the topic about which they are writing. Writers must be aware of their own individual thinking, their own choices, their motivations, and how these could be interpreted or misinterpreted by other people’s ways of thinking. This need for awareness of their own thoughts that could then support their writing efforts, i.e. metacognitive writing, led me to develop a new pedagogical process for the writing classroom that uses active presentations by others to convey audience interpretation.

I used this process for three years in creative writing courses, partially because students were already pursuing genres that often are interpreted orally, but believe it could be applicable to any writing course, especially with the following course characteristics: 1) upper division/at least sophomore level so the students are already somewhat experienced collegiate writers and 2) class size is small, ideally 20 or fewer students. No special materials, other than imagination and the means to convey ideas, are needed for the in-class exercises.

Nuts and Bolts:

This pedagogical process has several steps. To first prepare the students and get them thinking about how an audience might interpret their work, the students are given an initial survey on their then-current process of writing and concept of their potential audience. Consistently, three out of five agreed that they had a “mental picture” of their reader, but it was often no further developed than their college peers or even themselves. Most could not describe their readers any further and some said they had not considered a concept of a readership. Perhaps, for them, they had written only and ever with the teacher, and so a grade, in mind.

The second step involves having canonical examples of their genre, fiction or poetry, interpreted by others. During this step those others give a presentation / reading of the work in a manner that conveys their interpretation of the writing. Those others can be classmates or a more external audience. For example, the first two years I used this process, the others were members of the Forensics Team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, then led by Professor Ann Burnett.

A third step, which has evolved over the years, was to have others present the students’ own writing back to them. This third step was implemented as a cycle. The students wrote their piece (either individually or as a group) and then gave it to others (classmates or external individuals) for interpretation with no additional input from the writers. The presenters would convey their interpretation, which then could be used by the writers to guide their revisions based on a better understanding of possible audience interpretation. If revisions were made, then the cycle of interpretation could be repeated.

Outcomes:

When this was done at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a project funded by a grant from the university’s Teaching Council, 80% of the collaborative groups elected to revise their texts after hearing them interpreted. They noted the experience of hearing their stories being told by someone else, someone who was sharing their own understandings and insights into the words, heightened an awareness of qualities like the “flow and rhythm” of words or of “trying to make a picture in my head”, and an overall greater attention to what their drafts were able to communicate. For example, the potential hollowness of easy clichés might not have occurred to the writers or a lack of descriptions they had had in mind but which were not articulated were now more evident. Further, the majority of the class reported being much more aware of their own thinking (an aspect of metacognition) and the thinking of others.

By hearing, and sometimes seeing by the use of movements, how another person re-created the writer’s intentions, each writer had the opportunity to perceive how their audience understood what had been written down – in a way, to hear their own thinking – and to questions themselves. Is that what they had wanted someone else to feel, to think or had their expression fallen short of their conception? In other words, the process allowed them to “hear it (their work) with a ‘new ear’” and some of them realized they “should have found another way to get that (sic) message across.” That “new ear”, hopefully, was them more carefully listening to and questioning their own thoughts, i.e. being metacognitive about their own writing.

Participatory Pedagogy: Inviting Student Metacognition

by Nicola Simmons, Brock University, nsimmons@brocku.ca

Downloadable

Background

I teach higher and adult education, including adult developmental psychology, and like to invite my students to be aware of their cognitive processes. I see this as central to being an adult learner. One strategy I have developed is engaging students in creating course outcomes and content. I hope to help students become more aware of, more involved in, and better assessors of their own learning; in short, to examine their learning through a metacognitive lens.

This example is from a Masters of Education class, Exploring Approaches to Professional Development. The class is typically quite small (up to 20 students) but I have used it in groups of 50 students at the undergraduate level as well.

The Approach

The course follows Siemens’ (1984) participatory pedagogy (see syllabus excerpt) to invite students to co-construct the course process, including choosing course readings and creating grading rubrics:

As Biggs (2011) notes, student course co-ownership helps engage students in deep learning; it also builds their awareness of their learning processes. The first assignment, for example, asked them to:

Articulate your intended learning during this course, including a focus for personal and professional development. What will your development focus be? What will you do to realize your plan?

This engages students metacognitively as they take responsibility for their learning path and prepares them for the final assignment, a reflective ‘portfolio,’ in which they synthesize their learning over the term:

Create a creative and critical summary of your changing perspectives and reflections throughout the course, integrating readings (both assigned and others). Discuss your key learning, referring to course and outside experiences. Exemplary projects demonstrate critical analysis, synthesis, and self-evaluation. Can be any format (paper, song, performance, art; format negotiable). Addresses:

What theories help you?
What have you learned?
How can you use that?
How have you changed?
How do you know?

Each of these prompts invites consideration of the learning and development process and supports students in acquiring habits of mind that will allow them to approach future courses with a metacognitive lens. This has also led to their growth as scholars: One year, many of the students engaged in a self-study that included conducting a literature review and creating questions to guide our reflections. The result of that work was several conference presentations and a peer-reviewed paper (Simmons, Barnard, & Fennema, 2011) that outlined the transformative learning resulting from the student co-constructed course.

What was fascinating to me were the ways the course process built not only students’ metacognition about their learning, but also about their teaching. One wrote

I told my colleagues the story of this course and they were moved to consider new ways of doing culminating projects. Why isn’t there more choice? Why do we tell students what they must produce to demonstrate their own learning? Why don’t we add the additional layer of asking students to find the best way to demonstrate their learning?

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Developing metacognition is not a pain-free process! One student described the transformation during the process from fear to increased confidence.

Activities were out of my comfort zone and there were times that I struggled with the unknown … I was able to see the value once I moved beyond the frozen fear of uncertainty to ask myself “What did I want to gain from this course? How did I learn when pushed out of my comfort zone?” I had to be transformed into a student who was open to this new concept and new territory for learning…[where] mistakes … would not be judged but instead used as stepping stones toward learning.

Instructors should be mindful of the importance of support throughout the process. Just as the students are invited to be metacognitive about their processes, it helps if the instructor is transparently metacognitive about the overall course path. For me that looked like saying things like “this may be new for you, but I’d like you to consider trying it” and reassuring them that discomfort was a sign they were onto something good!

The course format continues to unsettle students but also transform them into metacognitive learners, and I finish with one student’s illustrative words:

I remember thinking at the time that the final project was the most difficult task that I had encountered … I really had to ponder … how my journey through the course could be effectively captured and conveyed … It continues to personify my journey through work/life, the choices we make when we meet resistance or the paths we take … how we travel the road is for our choosing.

References

Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at the university: What the student does. Maidenhead, UK: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906-911.

Siemens, G. (2008). New structures and spaces of learning: The systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning. Paper Presented for Universidade do Minho, Encontro sobre Web 2.0, Braga, Portugal, October 10. Available online at http://elearnspace.org/Articles/systemic_impact.htm

Simmons, N., Barnard, M., & Fennema, W. (2011). Participatory pedagogy: A compass for transformative learning? Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 4.

Make It Stick in Cognitive Psychology

by Jennifer A. McCabe, Goucher College,
jennifer.mccabe@goucher.edu

Downloadable

Motivation and Background: I am a cognitive psychologist with a research program focused on metacognition and applied memory in education. I decided three years ago to structure my Cognitive Psychology course around the principles described in the book, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014). Many memory-improvement principles are discussed in this book, including: practice retrieving new learning from memory, space out your retrieval practice, interleave the study of different problem types, elaboration, and reflection. Other topics include the fluency illusion, getting past learning styles, and developing a growth mindset. Adopting this book as required reading, and structuring the course to reflect these principles, dovetailed with my increasing commitment to prompt and support students’ metacognitive growth. I hoped that this would both enhance student learning on objective tests (in a notoriously challenging course), and also explicitly support a course learning outcome: Improve your metacognitive skills (knowing what you know, learning how to learn).

Context in which the activity or process has been used: This has been included in three sections of Cognitive Psychology, a 200-level course offered at Goucher College, a small liberal arts institution in Baltimore, Maryland. The class size is 25-30 students, and I have been teaching this course for 13 years.

Description of activity or process methods: The description of the activity is in my Cognitive Psychology syllabus (available through Project Syllabus: http://teachpsych.org/Resources/Documents/otrp/syllabi/JM16cognitive.pdf). On the first day of class, I describe the Make It Stick” Reflection Papers. For each class period in which a chapter is assigned, students prepare and bring to class a 1-page, single-spaced reflection. Content and style is open, but they must demonstrate deep and careful thinking about the topic, and explicit connections to life experiences, habits and plans/intentions, and course material. They can also include questions and/or other personal reactions to the chapter. I note that this assignment requires elaboration and reflection, two effective learning strategies discussed in the book. Students submit 8 reflection papers during the semester (one per chapter), each worth up to 5 points. Out of a 500-point class, this assignment is worth up to 40 points (8%).

The first reflection paper is due early in the semester, typically the second week, then the subsequent seven chapters/papers are due approximately once per week. We take time in class on those days to engage in small- and large-group discussion. Most of these discussions are framed in terms of metacognition, particularly in light of research suggesting that college students do not always understand how learning works, and cannot always predict which memory strategies lead to the best retention (e.g., McCabe, 2011). I encourage them to consider their lives as learners, and how they can use information from the book to adjust their strategies.

We also talk about how this course is structured to reflect “best practice” learning strategies. For example, students take a self-graded “retrieval practice” quiz at the start of most class periods, because research shows that frequent, effortful, low-stakes, cumulative, spaced (distributed) retrieval practice: (1) produces the most durable learning; and (2) improves metacognitive accuracy of what you know. I strive to be transparent in the purpose for all course elements. In a sense, then, I see Make It Stick as a framework for the entire course – core content and topics for discussion, rationale for course design, and hopefully motivation for students to engage and feel empowered in their own learning.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned:

Since implementing this assignment, I believe that students’ knowledge about effective learning strategies has improved. They seem to enjoy the book as a required course component – on an anonymous questionnaire, 88% agreed that Make It Stick should be included in future classes. When asked whether this course had supported the learning outcome of improving metacognitive skills, 100% agreed or strongly agreed (71% strongly agreed). And when asked about one way this course has changed the way they think or behave in the world, 78% included a statement relating to metacognition. Some examples include:

“I now analyze the way I am absorbing and encoding information. I have never thought about the way I learn but now I am so grateful to accept the study strategies that work and throw away the ones that don’t.”

“It has helped me to develop a better understanding of effective study/learning strategies. Improved my metacognitive skills!”

“When I study and am overconfident in my skills, I think about metacognitive skills and test myself. This class helped me study better.”

Of course the major challenge with teaching students metacognition is that it is only half the battle to acquire knowledge about how learning works. I still struggle with motivating students to actually implement these strategies. Many are desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994), feeling effortful and error-prone (and even frustrating) in the short term, and only showing benefits due to this initial challenge at a later time. I encourage students to use the strategies regularly, so that they become habits of mind, but I’m not convinced they consistently do so after one semester of exposure to this material. Yet the fact that they make statements such as the ones above gives me hope that they are integrating the Make It Stick ideas about metacognition into their lives.

Though this assignment has been part of a highly relevant course, Cognitive Psychology, the book Make It Stick (or selected chapters) could enhance a number of courses in and outside of psychology – as well as first-year seminars and similar courses that focus on student skill development, with the goal of teaching them how to be better learners.

References

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings.

In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

McCabe, J. (2011). Metacognitive awareness of learning strategies in undergraduates. Memory & Cognition, 39, 462–476. doi:10.3758/s13421-010-0035-2

Teaching Transformation Through Becoming a Student of Learning

by Patrick Cunningham, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology,
Holly Matusovich & Sarah Williams, Virginia Tech

Downloadable

Motivations and context:

I teach a variety of Mechanical Engineering courses at a small private undergraduate institution with approximately 2000 students. The courses I teach focus on the application of scientific theory and math to solve engineering problems. Since I started teaching I have been interested in how to help students to learn more deeply in my courses. This eventually led me to a sabbatical in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where I established a research partnership with Dr. Holly Matusovich, and later Ms. Sarah Williams, studying student metacognitive development. We have been interested in how to help students to become more sophisticated and lifelong learners and how to aid instructors in supporting this student development. This collaboration initiated a research-to-practice cycle, where my interest in enhancing student learning led to research on student metacognitive development, and research results have influenced my teaching practice.

Description of the process:

The research-to-practice cycle has transformed my teaching by helping me become a student of learning. For me the process has involved formal educational research, but it does not have to. My implementation of the cycle follows:

Identify what teaching and learning issue you care about and develop partnerships.
Plan the study.
Implement the study and analyze the data.
Interpret the results and use them to direct modifications to your teaching.
Repeat steps 1-4.

I am interested in enhancing student learning and that led to collaborative metacognition research with Dr. Matusovich. Other possible partnerships may be with colleagues, your teaching and learning center, disciplinary education researchers (e.g., engineering or physics education), or even education researchers at your own institution (e.g., educational or cognitive psychology).

We planned the research through the preparation of a successfully funded NSF grant proposal. The process included establishing research questions, specifying study phases, determining what data to collect and how, and planning for data analysis. Even if you are not engaging in formal research, the quality and success of your study will depend on a well laid out plan. As a mechanical engineering professor, my collaborators proved to be indispensable partners for this.

Early in our research, we gathered baseline data through student interviews on how students approach learning in engineering science courses and how they define learning. We have found that students predominantly rely on working and reviewing example problems as a means of learning. This approach to learning falls into the category of rehearsal strategies, where students are seeking to memorize steps and match patterns rather than develop a richer conceptual understanding. While it is important to know facts, results from learning science show rehearsal strategies are insufficient for developing adequate conceptual frameworks that are necessary for transferring concepts to new situations and being able to explain their understanding effectively to others – key aspects of engineering work. To construct such rich conceptual frameworks students also need to engage in elaborative and organizational learning strategies, but students reported underutilization of these strategies. Students’ overreliance on example problems does not align with being able to apply course concepts to real-world problems.

In reviewing the data, I also realized that I might be part of the problem. My teaching and assessments had been primarily organized around working problems with little variation. The research helped me change. I decided to scaffold students’ use of a broader range of monitoring, elaborative, and organizational strategies by changing my approach to teaching. I realized that I could empower my students by helping them learn about and refine their learning skills – even as I teach the content of the course.

I made significant changes to my course. I changed the grade category for “homework” to “development activities” to include the regular homework, and new homework learning check quizzes and video quizzes. These quizzes provided low-stakes opportunities for formative feedback to students about their conceptual understanding. I also changed my classroom activities, engaging students in evaluating and explaining given solutions with errors, recall practice, interrogating examples with “what if” questions and answering them, and creating problems for specific concepts. For the next project steps, we are collecting data on these implementations so the research-to-practice cycle can begin again.

Outcomes:

My students performed at least as well on traditional problem solving exams as students in other sections of the same course. Importantly, they reported feeling more responsible for their learning and that they had to exert more effort in their learning than in other engineering science courses. For me, this has been a more fulfilling teaching experience. Not only have I found that students asked better questions about course content, but I also had more conversations with students about how they can learn more effectively and efficiently. It has added rigor and a clarity of purpose in my teaching that reaches beyond course content.

Lessons learned:

I learned to articulate the differences between my course and other courses and to get buy-in from students as to what I was trying to do. As a teacher, student resistance to change can be hard but it is worth it to improve teaching and learning experiences. Collaborative partnerships help!

Acknowledgement:

The metacognition research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1433757, 1433645, & 1150384. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Utilizing a Metacognition Chart for Exam Review and Metacognitive Skill Development

by Dana Melone, Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School

Downloadable

Motivation and Context:

I teach AP Psychology at a Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. My students range in age from 15-18 years old. They also come into my classroom with a variety of grade point averages ranging from below a 2.0 to above a 4.0. While some students have excellent, note taking and study skills as well an understanding of what they need to study, I find that most of my students (even the top ones) tend to try to study everything and get overwhelmed. They also do not utilize review time to their advantage.

At the same time my students love review games and in class review time. However, for years I was hesitant to play them or give them time to review in class because they would be so actively engaged in the game or review activity that they would not take the time to consider what they knew and what they did not know, and how this should effect their studying (i.e. practice metacognition about their learning). I wanted to engage them in demonstrations and games but I also wanted them to use those activities to guide their studying and develop effective learning strategies that could be used beyond my course. In response to this dilemma, I developed the metacognitive prompt chart below.

Nuts and Bolts:

In order to help students gauge how much they know, I have started requiring them to complete the metacognitive chart as they are reviewing in class or playing a review game I have also pointed out that they can use the chart even when they are working on current content. The chart consists of 4 columns that help students categorize their understanding of the concepts.

Students use the chart by putting the concept names in the column that best describes their understanding of each concept as we move through review activities or games. There are also two questions at the bottom that ask them about the focus of their studying and patterns they have seen over time. In the end, they have a chart that allows them in one glance to know what they need to study and what they have knowledge of.

What concepts need to be the focus of your studying? How will you make sure you are studying them actively?
Look at your past charts, what concepts seem to remain a problem? How will you address this?

My students have this chart out any time we are going over previously learned content or reviewing (multiple times a week). I encourage my students to re-examine their charts once a week to look for patterns over time and reflect on what they need to get help with or review. I also encourage them to combine any charts as we near assessments that are cumulative. Multiple times a month I collect the sheets and can visibly see areas that all my students are struggling. I have been able to use it for my own personal metacognition in planning review, re-teaching, and remediation times.

Outcomes:

This chart has proven its effectiveness on many levels. Students have been able to visibly see the areas that they need improvement in and should focus on. They are also able to examine these sheets over time to see patterns in the content that they are struggling with and doing well with. An unintended outcome has been the ability to use it as the teacher for ongoing formative assessment of my classes.

Metacognitive Time Capsule Assignments for Reflection on Writing Skills

by Sarah Robinson*, U. S. Air Force Academy
sarah.robinson@usafa.edu

Downloadable

Motivations and Context:

I teach upper level Geoscience courses on Remote Sensing and Imagery Analysis—essentially using satellite imagery to study earth surface materials and processes. In addition to the course objectives on imagery analysis, I also have a course objective on communication. Specifically, I want my students to be able to construct a convincing, clear, and concise written argument that communicates their analysis choices and subsequent results. Using imagery to analyze a geospatial problem is not enough; students also need to be able to write a convincing technical summary that communicates their analysis and results to others.

One of the challenges with communication course goals is that writing is often approached with a fixed mindset (Dweck, 2007), meaning it is viewed as some innate quality that you either have or you don’t. With a fixed mindset, it simply doesn’t make sense to expend effort on writing (ex. write drafts or read feedback) because there is no clear path for improvement—it is a fixed skill regardless of effort. However, if students alternatively view writing with a growth mindset they see writing as a skill that can be improved with practice and use of specific actions/strategies to make progress. Engaging in a growth mindset requires reflection on abilities and progress (self-awareness) and identification of strategies for improvement (self-regulation). In terms of writing, this translates into effort expended on practice in multiple assignments/drafts, reflection on progress and feedback, and identification of strategies to improve future writing assignments. Course design and assignments that promote metacognition through self-awareness and self-regulation can help students develop this growth mindset. Specifically, I incorporate systematic practice, actionable feedback and a time capsule reflection assignment in my course design.

Nuts and Bolts:

Systematic Practice:

Students have 3 lab assignments and a final project where they are asked to analyze geospatial problems using imagery and then summarize their analysis and results in 1-2 paragraphs. Each lab assignment has different geospatial problems, but the writing expectations and format are the same—for each geospatial problem, students write a summary that includes an introduction to the research problem, an explanation of their analysis choices in solving the problem, and an evaluation of their results. By having the same format (but different topic) for each writing assignment, students get systematic practice in writing a convincing, clear, and concise written argument.

Actionable Feedback:

The consistent format and expectations across writing assignments allows me to use the same rubric for every assignment. While the content changes with each assignment, students can reflect on their progress by looking at their rubric scores across the semester. For the first assignment, the rubric is the same, but a multiplier is applied to the score to compensate for their initial lack of familiarity with the format. In addition to rubric scores, I provide comments in the text (students submit electronic copies of their assignments) that provide actionable feedback on how to improve the next submission. Because the comments are relevant to a future assignment, students report that they engage in self-regulation by reading and using the feedback to improve their next assignment.

Metacognitive time capsule assignment

To support student self-awareness of their progress over the semester, I created a time capsule assignment where students compare their writing on the first lab with their writing on the final project. This assignment supports student metacognitive development because it asks students to develop self-awareness by reflecting on the changes they see in their writing. As all of their submissions are digital, students have copies of all their assignments and feedback across the semester. This assignment asks students specific questions to guide their reflection and asks them to provide example text from their assignments to support their statements. I am very clear in class that they receive full credit for participating in the assignment—they are not graded on what is in their answers, only on whether they provided complete answers.

There are two keys to this assignment for effective student reflection: the “time capsule” aspect and the consistent assignment format. Having students preserve and read their actual first writing assignment is critical—this first assignment essentially captures who they were at the beginning of the semester and preserves it, as in a time capsule, to be revealed intact at the end of the semester. The time capsule aspect allows for unfiltered, direct comparison by students of their skills then vs. their skills now that is not overwritten by their experiences during the semester.

The other key component is having a consistent assignment format to make comparison easier. This assignment would not have worked as well if students were comparing writing assignments that had very different formats or expectations. By keeping the format/expectations consistent, students are better able to see and explain their progress.

Outcomes:

I had trepidations about giving this time capsule assignment the first time I used it—I honestly didn’t know how students would respond. I was pleasantly surprised to see how engaged they were—instead of just writing their answers during class time, they were sharing with each other their comparisons between their first paragraphs and what they were then able to write for their final project. Their written answers documented their reflection on the changes they saw in their technical writing skills (self-awareness) and identified writing habits that they could continue/change in future classes (self-regulation).

Lessons Learned and future directions:

This type of time capsule assignment is something that I will continue to build into my courses. The planning required to design a consistent format and preserve early assignments is a small cost for the benefits of having students develop self-awareness and self-regulation and supporting a growth mindset.

Reference

Dweck, Carol S. (2007). “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” New York: Ballantine Books.

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

Practicing Metacognitive Instruction Informs Continuous Class Improvement While Reinforcing Student Self-Awareness of Learning

by Lara Watkins (Bridgewater State University
lwatkins@bridgew.edu)

Downloadable

Motivations and background:

I have been teaching a course titled “Anthropology of race, class and gender” for about five years at a state university. As a course that covers requirements for the core curriculum as well as for anthropology majors, the student population is diverse with first year through final semester students including both majors and non-majors. The course is taught in person with about 25 students per section.

I implemented a series of mid-course reflections for a variety of reasons. (1) I sought to encourage students to reflect upon their learning in the course as a way of helping them to recognize and assess their own learning over time, while (2) simultaneously providing an indicator of the main messages being retained by students to help in course planning for the future. The reflection served as a low stakes evaluation of learning, which then fed into continuous course improvement. Pragmatically, I was interested in (3) if there were specific barriers to student comprehension of the material that might make a substitute reading or focused classroom interventions appropriate. Since student metacognition about their learning can inform metacognitive instruction, I also sought (4) to assess the degree to which students saw value in a particular reading and (5) could link it to other course materials and their own learning, thereby encouraging learning across multiple levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002).

Nuts and Bolts / Procedure:

Each semester, I incorporate four in-class, mid-course reflections. Students completed each pen-and-paper reflection in about five minutes. They had the option of handing in the reflection anonymously or adding their name to the form. Each mid-course reflection was about 3-5 questions long. The first question always asks students to state a few key points that they have learned in that particular section of the course, while the last question always provides students a place to anonymously raise questions and concerns. The middle questions vary depending on my evolving concerns or interests.

The middle questions on the reflection example shared here focused on the use of a full-length book; however, in general, the middle questions focus on a specific aspect of that portion of the course (e.g. a reading, the use of an online learning tool, etc.), that obviously is assigned to deepen learning, but through which student experiences could provide insight on the degree to which there are barriers to this ultimate goal. My goal in this particular example was to find out if students were engaged in the reading, if they were taking away the main ideas, and if there were noted challenges that could be mitigated in future iterations of the course.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned:

The first question (which asked for students to summarize what they had learned across a few weeks of the course) provides a useful snapshot of the main messages interpreted and retained by students. Through assessing student summary of information in question one, I have found that students were not able to reiterate key points to the same degree across different portions of the course, thereby suggesting which particular section(s) of the course needed further elaboration and attention in later semesters.
For this particular reflection example, I found that the students’ perspectives of the book did not align with my anticipation of their perspective. (The students were more positive than I expected.) Checking in with students throughout the semester helps to give the instructor a tangible and direct indicator of student interpretations of the course and course materials. This can feed into continuous course improvement.
This course meets twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays. A key lesson learned from the student feedback is that they need lengthier readings to be due on the Monday. While this might appear intuitive, instructors sometimes lose sight of student logistics when constructing their syllabi and the multitude of topics to be covered. It also highlights the need to build in multiple, explicit reminders for students to start lengthy readings in advance.
Instructors implementing a similar activity in class will want to consider the benefits and drawbacks to allowing for anonymous submission. I chose for the feedback to be anonymous by default so that students would feel comfortable sharing their honest assessments and could clearly let me know if they had not completed the reading without feeling that it would impair their grade in any way. If instructors would like to track progress over time for individual students, then they may desire to have students identify themselves. I have found it appropriate to individually email students who identify their name and raise a specific question/concern. Students often express gratitude for the personal outreach as it directly addresses a question or concern that they have, thereby decreasing their perceived barriers to success, and it conveys respect and concern for their individual learning trajectory, thereby cultivating a supportive learning climate.

This reflective approach provides a series of quick and useful indicators of student learning that I can use as an instructor to adjust my teaching and better support my students’ learning. A second benefit is that they help center the students’ attention on the metacognitive and higher-order processes of remembering, connecting, analyzing, and evaluating course concepts. Providing short assessments like this at a few time points across the semester is an easy way to “take the pulse” of a particular class and then use that feedback to identify teaching practices that are working well and those that might need to be tweaked. Metacognitive instruction leads to continuous course improvement and, ultimately, to better facilitation of student learning.

Reference

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41, 212-218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2

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Year: 2017

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Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition: Part 1

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Utilizing a Metacognition Chart for Exam Review and Metacognitive Skill Development

Metacognitive Time Capsule Assignments for Reflection on Writing Skills

Practicing Metacognitive Instruction Informs Continuous Class Improvement While Reinforcing Student Self-Awareness of Learning