by Patrick Cunningham, Ph.D., Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

“Dr. C, you really expect your students to do a lot!” I quickly replied, “Yes!” We then engaged in a discussion of things only students can do for their learning. How can we help more of our students recognize their responsibility for their learning? Three strategies I employ include explicit and direct instruction, questioning for self-discovery, and in-class opportunities to practice new learning strategies. Each of these strategies direct students’ focus to things under their control.

Helping our students recognize and embrace their responsibility for their learning requires metacognitive activity. Specifically, it requires building metacognitive knowledge of persons and strategies and engaging in metacognitive regulation through planning for and monitoring learning experiences. Direct instruction and in-class learning strategy practice can expand metacognitive knowledge. Questioning for self-discovery can facilitate students metacognitive monitoring and planning for subsequent learning experiences.

For explicit and direct instruction, I start a discussion within the first two days of class by asking, “What does it mean to learn something?” Most responses include applying and explaining concepts. Good answers, but I press for more depth. In turn I respond, “Apply to what? Explain to whom?” Learning something, they say, means being able to apply concepts to real circumstances. My engineering students also come up with a variety of people or groups of people to explain things to: their grandmother, family members, a cross-functional design team, a boss, peer engineers, marketing/sales professionals, or even customers. These answers are good operational definitions of learning. Next, I talk to my students about the knowledge frameworks that underlie these abilities.

In order to apply concepts to real and diverse circumstances and to explain concepts effectively to a range of audiences we must have many routes to and between the elements of our knowledge and a logical structure of the information. That is, our knowledge frameworks must be well populated, richly interconnected, and meaningfully organized (Ambrose et al., 2010). However, as novices in an area, we start with sparsely populated and isolated knowledge frameworks. I then share with students that they are the only ones who can construct their knowledge frameworks. The population and interconnection of elements depends on what they individually do with the material, in class and out of class. As the instructor, I can create opportunities and experiences for them, but I cannot build their knowledge frameworks for them. Students are responsible for the construction work.

For self-discovery I use guiding questions to help students articulate learning goals, combat the Illusion of Comprehension, and make cause-and-effect linkages between their learning behaviors and outcomes. I may ask, “What goals do you have for your homework/study sessions?” Students often focus on getting assignments done or being “ready” for exams, but these are not directly learning goals. It is helpful here to ask what they want or need to be able to do with the information. Eliciting responses such as: “Apply ____ to ____. Create a ____ using ____. Explain ____.” Now we can ask students to put the pieces together. How does just “getting the homework done” help you know if you can apply/create/explain? We are seeking to help students surface incongruities in their own behavior, and these incongruities are easier to face when you discover them yourself rather than being told they are there.

A specific incongruity that many students struggle with is the Illusion of Comprehension (Svinicki, 2004), which occurs when students confuse familiarity with understanding. It often manifests itself after exams as, “I knew the material, I just couldn’t show you on the exam.” My favorite question for this is, “How did you know you knew the material?” Common responses include looking over notes or old homework, working practice exams, reworking examples and homework problems. But what does it mean to “look over” prior work? How did you work the practice exam? How did you elaborate around the concepts so that you weren’t just reacting to cues in the examples and homework problems? What if the context of the problem changes? It is usually around this point that students begin to realize the mismatch between their perceptions of deep understanding and the reality of their surface learning.

Assignment or exam wrappers are also good tools to help students work out cause-and-effect linkages between what they do to learn material and how they perform. In general, these “wrappers” ask students to reflect on what they did to prepare for the assignment or exam, process instructor feedback or errors, and adjust future study plans.

It is important, once we encourage students to recognize these incongruities, that we also help direct students back to what they can do to make things better. I direct conversations with my students to a variety of learning strategies they can employ, slanted towards elaborative and organizational strategies. We talk about such things as making up problems or questions on their own, explaining solutions to friends, annotating their notes summarizing key points, or doing recall and reviews (retrieval practice).

However, I find that telling them about such strategies often isn’t enough. We trust what is familiar and comfortable – even ineffective and inefficient learning strategies that we have practiced over years of prior educational experiences and for which we have been rewarded. So I implement these unfamiliar, but effective and efficient strategies into my teaching. I want my students to know how to do them and realize that they can do them in their outside of class study time as well.

One way I engage students with new strategies is through constructive review prior to exams. We start with a recall and review exercise. I have students recall as many topics as they can in as much detail as they can for a few minutes – without looking anything up. Then I have students open their notes to add to and refine their lists. After collectively capturing the key elements, I move to having pairs of students work on constructing potential questions or problems for each topic. I also create a discussion forum for students to share their problems and solutions – separately. As they practice with each others’ problems, they can also post responses and any necessary corrections.

In concert, direct instruction, questioning for self-discovery, and in-class opportunities to practice new learning strategies can develop our students’ sense of responsibility for their learning. It even can empower them by giving them the tools to direct their future learning experiences. In the end, whether they recognize it or not, students are responsible for their learning. Let’s help them embrace this responsibility and thrive in their learning!

References

Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M., & Norman, M. (2010) How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Svinicki, M. (2004). Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Acknowledgements

This blog post is based upon metacognition research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1433757 & 1433645. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Next Blog-post:

Overcoming student resistance to engaging in their metacognitive development.