Month: November 2017

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 9th 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.