Month: October 2021

Using Learning Portfolios to Support Metacognition

Dr. Sarah Benes, Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Nutrition and Public Health, Merrimack College

Over the past four years, I have been exploring the concept of metacognition. In many ways, I think metacognition has been a large part of how I work as a practitioner both in my personal practice of reflection and in how I practice the art of teaching. However, it wasn’t until I switched faculty positions that I really started to dive into intentional research and practice around metacognition.

line drawing of a satchel, pen and paper inside a circleAs noted in the “Finding Your People” blog post, this was largely because I had difficulty adjusting to new students at a new school. The challenges that arose prompted me to find ways to meet the needs of my new students in order to support their growth as learners and as people. One of the strategies that quickly arose as a strategy that could help was metacognition.

I am the kind of teacher who likes to try things. I have done a number of different activities (both research based and more “practice based”) over the past 4 years and have learned much from all of them. However, one practice in particular that stands out to me as having a significant impact on student learning and in the overall experience of the course was the use of learning portfolios. I have used similar strategies previously in both graduate and undergraduate courses, but never with an intentional focus on metacognition. The books, Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (New Pedagogies and Practices for Teaching in Higher Education) by Kaplan et al., (2013) and Creating Self Regulated Learners by Nilson (2013), were resources I used (along with other research) to put the pieces together to design and develop the learning portfolio.

I primarily teach two courses: Introduction to Public Health (mostly first-year students) and Health Behavior and Promotion (mostly sophomores and juniors). Both courses serve students in the School of Health Science. I first integrated the learning portfolio into my Health Behavior and Promotion course with great success. I plan to create a learning portfolio for my Introduction to Public Health course this fall and am excited to see how it works!

Overview of the Learning Portfolio

The learning portfolio was a “deliverable” that students worked on for the whole semester. The learning portfolio was connected to a course “e-book” in which I introduced weekly topics and objectives, outlined the class preparation & included prompts for the learning portfolio (more on the “e-book” below). Students kept notes, reflections, and responses to other assignments in their portfolios. In order to support student success, students submitted the portfolios 4 times over the semester (about every 3 weeks). Each time students submitted the portfolio they received a grade based mainly on completeness. I considered “completeness” the extent to which they addressed all prompts.

I should note here that not all of their reflections are necessarily connected to metacognition. However, in most sets of prompts given, the majority of the prompts related to metacognition. Students were asked to reflect specifically their experiences in the course, how their experiences were impacting their learning, connections they are making to the content, their perceptions of the usefulness and applicability of content in their lives, their use (or lack of) metacognitive and self-regulation strategies, etc.

E-Book

One component of the learning portfolio involved responding to prompts in the “e-book”. The “e-book” included the following three “components”: 1) an introduction to the content for each week (and how it connects to previous learning), 2) guidance on what to focus on in the class preparation, and 3) metacognitive reflective questions.

The introduction to the content included connections to the learning objectives (which were also presented in the syllabus), described why they were learning the material and how it connected to previous learning. I hoped that the introduction would help them monitor and evaluate their understanding of the course content week to week and within the broader context of the whole course.

With the class preparation guidance, I was hoping to help students develop task oriented skills. I have often found it a challenge to get students to complete class preparation. Students have also been honest and shared that my concerns around the lack of class preparation completion were not unfounded. I thought that providing some guidance on what to focus on and look for might help increase the number of students completing the class prep and also increase students’ ability to retain the information and be ready to use the content in class. I also hoped that the guidance might also help them with task oriented and evaluative skills.

While I don’t have any specific data about the impacts, I definitely noticed a positive difference in student participation during this semester compared to others. Students also seemed to have a stronger grasp on the content. Of course, there are many reasons that I could attribute to these improvements, but my teaching itself didn’t change that much and the one variable that was definitely different was the “e-book” and learning portfolio.

The final component of the “e-book” were the reflective questions. Questions varied week to to week. Sample questions::

  • How does what you read and watched for today connect to your prior knowledge learning? How does it connect to the reading from Monday?
  • Review the syllabus and assignments posted in the Assignments folder, what assignments do you feel align with your strengths as a student? Which might be more challenging? Why? What are strategies you could use to help you to be successful?
  • What are 3 key points from these readings and the video that you think are important for college students to know?

Each class prep assignment had these kinds of reflective questions for students to activate and connect to prior learning, to monitor and evaluate their learning, and to help them identify their strengths and areas for improvement.

Lessons Learned

Using a learning portfolio in my course taught me many things:

  • I have learned that students communicate their thoughts, reflections and experiences in many different ways. Some responses are brief and concise, some are more “stream of consciousness”, and some provide extremely thoughtful and thorough, more polished responses. I learned to focus more on the purpose of the activity (to think about themselves and their learning), rather than the “quality” of their reflections. I felt that my my bias of what I believe a quality reflection “looks like” might impact students’ learning and growth.
  • I experienced the value of being able to have a “dialogue” with students through the portfolio though my feedback. Sometimes the feedback was a question, my perspectives, a connection to course content, etc. I saw the learning portfolio as a dialogue between me and the students more than a gradable assignment (though assigning points helps with motivation and completion). Student responses to these questions helped me to connect with students more deeply and provide feedback to support their learning and also add different perspectives than we may have been able to cover in class. I feel that I was able to get to know students a lot better through this model, that I was able to engage differently with each student (which I don’t always get to do in a course) .
  • The learning portfolio was also a place where students recorded responses to in-class discussion prompts. Sometimes I would have students respond to discussion prompts before the discussion in class to allow students to gather their thoughts, and sometimes it was after discussion to allow for processing time. I learned that this was a great way to be able to receive responses from all students as I often can’t get around to hear from students when discussing in class and students don’t always feel comfortable speaking up but it is often not because they don’t have valuable contributions. The learning portfolio structure allowed me to “hear from” each student.
  • I learned that it takes a little work to get “buy in” from students, which is why I spend about 2 weeks at the start of the semester talking about learning and metacognition. That way, students have a foundation to understand the “why” behind the learning portfolio (and other aspects of the course). However, I believe the time is well spent and that the content and skills they gain from both the class content and the learning portfolio are as important (maybe for some students even more important) than the course content itself.

Conclusion

Adding the learning portfolio to my class has been one of the more impactful strategies I have tried. It is a lot of upfront work and a decent amount of work during the semester if I respond to all students, but I saw a significant improvement in student engagement and student learning. I also felt that I connected more with students and got to know them better. I am looking forward to trying this approach with my first-year students this fall (perhaps another blog post will be in order to share how it goes)!


Meta What? Scaffolding learning for the still developing prefrontal cortex

by Kristy Forrest, M.Ed., Academic Advisor and Success Coach,
Office of Academic Support & Advising, Merrimack College

(Post #5 Integrating Metacognition into Practice Across Campus, Guest Editor Series Edited by Dr. Sarah Benes)

Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of thought itself. In practice, it involves student planning, monitoring, evaluating and regulating thoughts in relation to learning and problem-solving. More broadly, metacognition in college refers to higher-order thinking, “thinking about thinking,” and impacts student reflection and educational motivation.

drawing of human head silhouette with a light bulb lighting inside to represent thinking     

My team and I, representing the Office of Academic Support & Advising at Merrimack College, serve traditional college-aged students at a private four-year catholic institution. As Advisors and Success Coaches, part of our role is to provide developmental skill building workshops, programming, and courses. Together, we strive to support all student development including metacognitive growth. We teach our students the concept of metacognition, how to apply it, and its value in achieving academic success.

Metacognition in Teaching

Our approach is interdisciplinary. Combining concepts from advising theory, pedagogy, and developmental and learning psychology, we designed a one-credit academic development course for our students on academic probation. The idea is to learn new academic skills that are transferable in all coursework. As instructors, we help students understand metacognition as an intervention to trigger deeper understanding, comprehension, and most importantly, how applying metacognitive practices can eliminate prior gaps in their learning.

Students learn that applying metacognitive study practices not only develops deeper curiosity as learners but also how the cycle of previewing, attending, and reviewing increases the quality of their work. Additionally, they see that reflective thinking, self-regulation and self-discipline results in higher quality academic performance. Once they begin to achieve success they are more empowered and motivated to engage in work that is difficult. Moving beyond study skills to enhanced scholarly work has become our hook. We gain student buy-in much faster than when we focused only on study skills.

Nuts & Bolts of Our Course


For students who take our 1 credit course, over 90% enrolled increase their GPA an average of 1 to 1.7 points, and ultimately get and stay off academic probation. As mentioned above, we do teach the basic mechanics, habits and skills needed to be effective college students but buy-in can be tough with getting college students to see value in foundational study skills. Although we know how critical these skills are, they say that workshops about these topics often make them feel belittled. Until struggling students experience the benefits of these practices, there is quite a bit of resistance. They are, however, intrigued when we use terminology like, “applying metacognitive practices for academic success and development of higher order thinking”, and “increased competencies”.

In our one-credit course my team and I combine philosophical and practical theoretical concepts such as Chickering’s “Seven Vectors of Student Identity”; Bandura’s Self-Efficacy: Rotter’s Locus of Control: Dweck’s Growth Mindset; Duckworth’s Grit Model; and, of course, Flavell and McGuire’s Models on Metacognition. Students are required to engage in this scholarship and reflect on how each applies to them.      

We begin with the concept of student identity and ask them what this means for them. We learned that so many of our students do not identify as scholarly students and so their self-concept needs reframing. This is where we initiate reflective thinking. When we ask students to take the time to define and explore what it means to be a student, and compare it with newly learned metacognitive strategies, we begin to see transformation in their approach to their learning. With greater awareness of how knowledge is acquired, that the expectation in college is to move beyond memorization to instead analyzing and evaluating, and that learning how to think about thinking, our students better understand where the goal post is. They now value becoming self-disciplined, self-regulated learners.

With this messaging, we also help them to connect how their thoughts and emotions impact their behaviors and how they are in control of their academic consequences. After establishing this new insight we discuss locus of control, growth mindset, grit, and metacognitive study practices. Through these frameworks we also work to dispel their imposter syndrome and slowly we see them disarm.

Metacognition in Advising & Coaching

Beyond our course, through general advising and coaching, we typically find academic struggles are not a reflection of student capacity, but rather a problem in habits and skills, or, lack of metacognition in their practice. In one-to-one student coaching meetings we provide individualized attention using metacognitive strategies in supporting our students to connect the dots in their coursework. Ideally, professors are doing this already. However, there are times when we see the assignments go unquestioned by students simply trying to check the done box and not understanding the why and how in the work. Basically, students sometimes fail to integrate incremental assignments with the larger concepts.

We work to develop academic skills including metacognitive strategies, so that students better comprehend their material and build competencies in their discipline. As college educators serving adolescents, we need to consider that developmentally, without a fully developed prefrontal cortex, adolescents may not have the full capacity or neuro-connectivity to put these pieces together on their own. Metacognition supports the development of this exact connectivity. 

The Missing Meta Link in Student Learning

Students frequently report after learning about metacognition they now have an explanation to why they were struggling. They share that they never knew how impactful the little things like organizing, planning, scheduling, previewing, attending, and reviewing are. After recognizing that they previously did not exercise metacognitive skills, and they begin using them, students are able to recognize enhancement in their academic performance. A bonus is when their defenses come down and they open up.

Metacognition is one way that allows students to connect their choices and actions to their academic results. Referring back to developmental psychology, connecting thoughts, feelings and behavior is still really hard for a person with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. As advisors, coaches, and instructors, shedding light on this for students is where we can make a difference. Additionally, we plant seeds for further integrated learning as our adolescents develop into emerging adulthood.

Big Returns of Metacognition

The returns of learning this concept are bountiful. My favorite thing about teaching students the concept of metacognition is how it can open the floodgates to their development because it applies to every area of learning across all academic programs, disciplines, professions, or careers in every industry. Knowing about metacognition is not just a college tool. It’s a life tool.