Author: Amy Parks

Assessing Reflective Writing with the Index for Metacognitive Knowledge

Reflection is a staple of contemporary writing pedagogy and writing assessment. Although the power of reflective writing has long been understood in writing studies, the field has not made progress on articulating how to assess the reflective work. Developed at the crossroads of research in reflection and metacognition, the Index for Metacognitive Knowledge (IMK) is designed to help writing researchers, teachers, and students articulate what is being rewarded in the assessment of reflection and to articulate the role of metacognitive knowledge in critical reflective writing.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3dc6w4hg

Ratto Parks, Amy. (2023). What Do We Reward in Reflection? Assessing Reflective Writing with the Index for Metacognitive Knowledge. Journal of Writing Assessment, 16(1). DOI:  10.5070/W4jwa.1570


Want to Kick Start a Conversation about Metacognition? Assign the Blind Draft

by Amy Ratto Parks, Ph.D., University of Montana

Although many of us feel held in suspense about the state of teaching and learning in the fall, there is one thing I know for sure: I will still be using the Blind Draft assignment. The Blind Draft is a homework assignment that requires students to compose a short draft into a completely blackened computer screen; without any visual cue from the writing, they quickly become aware of their thinking. This single assignment builds classroom community, grounds students in their own minds and bodies, introduces them to a new way of understanding themselves as learners, and kicks off a course-long conversation about metacognition.

Photo of a woman with a cloth blindfold around her eyes

Right now, teaching and learning are happening in a remarkably distracting set of circumstances. National and global issues lead us into internet news and social media cultures that have had wide-ranging and varied impacts on teachers and students in Western cultures. Through the visually dominant world inside our screens we are propelled forward (Brockman, 2011) away from our own minds and bodies and into carefully sculpted Instagram lives, snappy Twitter feeds and sharp info graphics. But in order for teaching and learning to happen well, our minds have to move away from the glossy surface and focus on the task at hand. We know that students who are able to monitor their attention by developing skills in attention literacy (Brockman, 2011) also demonstrate strong meta-cognitive awareness and are positioned for a productive learning experience (Tarricone, 2011).

The Blind Draft offers students an initial small step into meeting their own minds as learners. It creates a unique and memorable composing and revision experience that provides a platform for experience-based reflection and conversation about how differently individual student’s minds might respond to novel learning challenges (Yancey, 1998). Those conversations provide an opening into a discussion about how metacognitive concepts help us understand how to navigate writer’s block, writing anxiety, and other common writing barriers. Supporting a sustained conversation about how students respond to writing challenges will help athleticize their attention (Caldwell, 2018), build personal understanding, and help them develop an increased sense of agency (Negretti, 2012) over their own identities and abilities as writers.

The Assignment

One of the most beautiful things about the Blind Draft is the simplicity of its design, however, it does work best with a bit of set up at the start because students immediately question the simplicity.

The set up

Because students focus so carefully on their grades, there is an underlying sense of risk in any work assigned in a class. Therefore, it is important to frame the assignment as an experiment where the goal is to participate in the experiment so that you all will have something interesting to talk about during the next class. You will also want to think of a very (very) general writing prompt such as, write about “you and food” or “you and happiness” for students to respond to in their drafts.

The directions

In general, the work happens in three parts: 1) Students type in response to the prompt without being able to see what they’re typing for 15 minutes. 2) They revise the messy blind draft. 3) They reflect briefly on their own writing behavior You might offer them the following directions:

Step 1: Compose (Note: The blind drafting process works best when typing on a computer)

  1. Set a timer for 15 minutes.
  2. Open and save a blank document. (Note: Saving the document before typing is important because sometimes typing blindly leads one to delete the entire document!)
  3. Make a mental note of the writing prompt.
  4. Turn off or cover the screen. 
  5. Type without stopping for 15 minutes. 
  6. Print or save document as “blind draft.” (Note: This will be your preference depending on whether you are collecting hard copy or electronic versions. The important thing is simply that they specify which draft was the blind draft and which was the revision. It seems as though that would be obvious, but sometimes it isn’t.)

Step 2: Revise

  1. Revise the draft into 1-2 page essay. (You can keep everything from the first draft or nothing at all and rearrange as you please.)
  2. Print or save document as “revised blind draft.”

Step 3: Reflect

  1. List the kinds of changes you made between drafts.
  2. Did you like this exercise? Hate it? Something in between? 
  3. Where did you rest your eyes without a screen to study?  
  4. Print or save document as “reflection.”

These instructions often cause laughter or anxiety — or both. Students need reassurance that yes, that first draft will be a terrific and spectacular mess, and that yes, that is the goal; they also appreciate a reminder that the second draft allows them to share a stronger more controlled version of their writing.

Student Responses

It turns out that students either love or hate this assignment; there is very little in between. I begin the discussion of the drafts by asking people to raise their hands if they hated this assignment, then if they loved it, and this initial question is often enough to begin a robust conversation about how differently they engaged with the writing. Why would some people feel constrained by this and other feel liberated? Right from the start, they are plenty baffled by anyone who had an experience that differed from their own.

Specifically, students say similar things about the assignment. Mostly, they notice everything their minds were doing besides writing. The often found themselves asking:

  • How long is 15 minutes? They report that they fixate on wondering how much time has passed and whether or not they are writing quickly. (In other words, am I doing a good job?)
  • How much am I writing? They report fixating on how much they have written, even when there is no assigned length requirement. (In other words, am I doing a good job?) They also realize that while they were distracted by the blind writing, they didn’t notice how much they were writing. Some students report writing less than they imagined, but most write more (and often report that they had no idea how often they’re thinking about page length rather than the topic of the writing).
  • Why did I try to fix the errors? In every class, students will laughingly recount trying to backspace and delete an error – even when they are not sure they made an error. They describe trying to count backward the correct number of letters to fix a spelling mistake even when they realize that it is unlikely that they will have actually corrected the error. (In other words, am I doing a good job?)

Take-away Messages

In a mini-lecture afterward, I explain that:

  • The human cognitive processes are messy and unpredictable (Flavell, 1976). Therefore, we need to expect a certain amount of confusion or chaos in the learning process. Reinforcing this early in a class helps students normalize challenge and difficulty.
  • The cognitive processes that inform writing of any kind are also are messy and unpredictable (Flower & Hayes, 1981). Therefore, we also need to leave room for some confusion and chaos in the writing process! This idea normalizes the fact that writing is always challenging and pushes back against the myth that writing is just easy for some people.
  • The process of writing is not linear – it’s recursive. We don’t just write; we write, re-read, write, re-read (Olive, 2014). Therefore, though we all want to sit down and “hammer out” an essay, strong writing doesn’t happen that way.
  • Our eyes don’t stay on the words we’re typing; they are skipping back and ahead (de Smet, M. J. R., Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2018). Therefore, if you’re on a first draft and haven’t written much, your eyes keep looking back and ahead at nothing which can induce panic and mental paralysis.
  • It is important to sometimes “write badly” (Ballenger, 2018). Leaving space for chaos in drafting allows us to become aware of our own mental processes, thoughts and ideas – and can make space for new connections and ideas to come forward.

You might wonder what I do after collecting this assignment since it produces a lot of material at once. Since the goal was the experience of the work, I do not line edit their writing or respond to each draft; instead, I thank them for investing in the experiment and I reinforce how beautifully messy their blind drafts were. The students really do take quite a risk by just turning in something as messy as a blind draft and it is nice to remind them that by turning it in that have confronted the chaos of their own writing minds, and therefore, have already done a good job.

Perhaps more importantly, the Blind Draft assignment helps them develop a sustained awareness of how their minds are working while writing and for many students that extends into their ability to monitor their thinking and behavior while completing other academic tasks (i.e. metacognition).

Works Cited

Ballenger, B. P. (2018). The curious writer. Boston: Pearson.

(2011) Is the internet changing the way we think? The net’s impact on our minds and future. Brockman,   John (Ed.) New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

Caldwell, C. (2018). Bodyfulness. Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

de Smet, M. J. R., Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2018). Exploring the Process of Reading During Writing Using Eye Tracking and Keystroke Logging. Written Communication, 35(4), 411–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318788070

Olive, T. (2014). Toward a parallel and cascading model of the writing system: A review of research on writing processes coordination. Journal of Writing Research, 6(2), 173-194. doi:10.17239/jowr-2014.06.02.4

Negretti, R. (2012). Metacognition in student academic writing: A longitudinal study of  Metacognitive awareness and its relation to task perception, self-regulation, and evaluation of performance. Written Communication, 29(2), 142–179.

Tarricone, P. (2011). The taxonomy of metacognition. New York: Psychology Press.

Yancey, K.B. (1998). Reflection in the writing classroom. Logan: Utah State  University Press.


Learning to Write and Writing to Learn: The Intersection of Rhetoric and Metacognition

by Amy Ratto Parks, Ph.D., University of Montana

If I had to choose the frustration most commonly expressed by students about writing it is this: the rules are always changing. They say, “every teacher wants something different” and because of that belief, many of them approach writing with feelings ranging from nervous anxiety to sheer dread. It is true that any single teacher will have his or her own specific expectations and biases, but most often, what students perceive as a “rule change” has to do with different disciplinary expectations. I argue that metacognition can help students anticipate and negotiate these shifting disciplinary expectations in writing courses.

Let’s look at an example. As we approach the end of spring semester, one single student on your campus might hold in her hand three assignments for final writing projects in three different classes: literature, psychology, and geology. All three assignments might require research, synthesis of ideas, and analysis – and all might be 6-8 pages in length. If you put yourself in the student’s place for a moment, it is easy to see how she might think, “Great! I can write the same kind of paper on three different topics.” That doesn’t sound terribly unreasonable. However, each of the teachers in these classes will actually be expecting some very different things in their papers: acceptable sources of research, citation style and formatting, use of the first person or passive voice (“I conducted research” versus “research was conducted”), and the kinds of analysis are very different in these three fields. Indeed, if we compared three papers from these disciplines we would see and hear writing that appeared to have almost nothing in common.

So what is a student to do? Or, how can we help students anticipate and navigate these differences? The fields of writing studies and metacognition have some answers for us. Although the two disciplines are not commonly brought together, a close examination of the overlap in their most basic concepts can offer teachers (and students) some very useful ways to understand the disciplinary differences between writing assignments.

Rhetorical constructs are at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and metacognition because they offer us the most clear illustration of the overlap between the way metacognitive theorists and writing researchers conceptualize potential learning situations. Both fields begin with the basic understanding that learners need to be able to respond to novel learning situations and both fields have created terminology to abstractly describe the characteristics of those situations. Metacognitive theorists describe those learning situations as “problem-solving” situations; they say that in order for a student to negotiate the situation well, she needs to understand the relationship between herself, the task, and the strategies available for the task. The three kinds of problem-solving knowledge – self, task, and strategy knowledge – form an interdependent, triangular relationship (Flavell, 1979). All three elements are present in any problem-solving situation and a change to one of the three requires an adjustment of the other two (i.e., if the task is an assignment given to whole class, then the task will remain the same; however, since each student is different, each student will need to figure out which strategies will help him or her best accomplish the task).

Metacognitive Triangle

The field of writing studies describes these novel learning situations as “rhetorical situations.” Similarly, the basic framework for the rhetorical situation is comprised of three elements – the writer, the subject, and the audience – that form an interdependent triangular relationship (Rapp, 2010). Writers then make strategic persuasive choices based upon their understanding of the rhetorical situation.
Rhetorical vs Persuasive

 In order for a writer to negotiate his rhetorical situation, he must understand his own relationship to his subject and to his audience, but he also must understand the audience’s relationship to him and to the subject. Once a student understands these relationships, or understands his rhetorical situation, he can then conscientiously choose his persuasive strategies; in the best-case scenario, a student’s writing choices and persuasive strategies are based on an accurate assessment of the rhetorical situation. In writing classrooms, a student’s understanding of the rhetorical situation of his writing assignment is one pivotal factor that allows him to make appropriate writing choices.

Theorists in metacognition and writing studies both know that students must be able to understand the elements of their particular situation before choosing strategies for negotiating the situation. Writing studies theorists call this understanding the rhetorical situation while metacognitive theorists call it task knowledge, and this is where two fields come together: the rhetorical situation of a writing assignment is a particular kind of problem-solving task.

When the basic concepts of rhetoric and metacognition are brought together it is clear that the rhetorical triangle fits inside the metacognitive triangle and creates the meta-rhetorical triangle.

Meta-Rhetorical Triangle

The meta-rhetorical triangle offers a concrete illustration of the relationship between the basic theoretical frameworks in metacognition and rhetoric. The subject is aligned with the task because the subject of the writing aligns with the guiding task and the writer is aligned with the self because the writerly identity is one facet of a larger sense of self or self-knowledge. However, audience does not align with strategy because audience is the other element a writer must understand before choosing a strategy; therefore, it is in the center of the triangle rather than the right side. In the strategy corner, however, the meta-rhetorical triangle includes the three Aristotelian strategies for persuasion, logos, ethos, and pathos (Rapp, 2010). When the conceptual frameworks for rhetoric and metacognition are viewed as nested triangles this way, it is possible to see that the rhetorical situation offers specifics about how metacognitive knowledge supports a particular kind problem-solving in the writing classroom.

So let’s come back to our student who is looking at her three assignments for 6-8 papers that require research, synthesis of ideas, and analysis. Her confusion comes from the fact that although each requires a different subject, the three tasks are appear to be the same. However, the audience for each is different, and although she, as the writer, is the same person, her relationship to each of the three subjects will be different, and she will bring different interests, abilities, and challenges to each situation. Finally, each assignment will require different strategies for success. For each assignment, she will have to figure out whether or not personal opinion is appropriate, whether or not she needs recent research, and – maybe the most difficult for students – she will have to use three entirely different styles of formatting and citation (MLA, APA, and GSA). Should she add a cover page? Page numbers? An abstract? Is it OK to use footnotes?

These are big hurdles for students to clear when writing in various disciplines. Unfortunately, most faculty are so immersed in our own fields that we come to see these writing choices as obvious and “simple.” Understanding the way metacognitive concepts relate to rhetorical situations can help students generalize their metacognitive knowledge beyond individual, specific writing situations, and potentially reduce confusion and improve their ability to ask pointed questions that will help them choose appropriate writing strategies. As teachers, the meta-rhetorical triangle can help us offer the kinds of assignment details students really need in order to succeed in our classes. It can also help us remember the kinds of challenges students face so that we can respond to their missteps not with irritation, but with compassion and patience.

References

Flavell, J.H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new era cognitive development inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.

Rapp, C. (2010). Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of

philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/


Pausing Mid-Stride: Mining Metacognitive Interruptions In the Classroom

By Amy Ratto Parks, Ph.d., University of Montana

Metacognitive interventions are often the subject of research in educational psychology because researchers are curious about how these planned, curricular changes might impact the development of metacognitive skills over time. However, as a researcher in the fields of metacognition and rhetoric and composition, I am sometimes struck by the fact that the planned nature of empirical research makes it difficult for us to take advantage of important kairic moments in learning.

The rhetorical term kairic, taken from the Greek concept of kairos, generally represents a fortuitous window in time in which to take action toward a purpose. In terms of learning, kairic moments are those perfect little slivers in which we might suddenly gain insight into our own or our students’ learning. In the classroom, I like to think of these kairic moments as metacognitive interruptions rather than interventions because they aren’t planned ahead of time. Instead, the “interruptions” arise out of the authentic context of learning. Metacognitive interruptions are kairic moments in which we, as teachers, might be able to briefly access a point in which the student’s metacognitive strategies have either served or not served them well.

A few days ago I experienced a very typical teaching moment that turned out to be an excellent example of a fruitful metacognitive interruption: I asked the students to take out their homework and the moment I began asking discussion questions rooted in the assignment, I sensed that something was off. I saw them looking at each other’s papers and whispering across the tables, so I asked what was going on. One brave student said, “I think a bunch of us did the homework wrong.”

They were supposed to have completed a short analysis of a peer-reviewed article titled, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth” (Baumgartner & Morris, 2014). I got out the assignment sheet and asked the brave student, Rasa*, to read it aloud. She said, “For Tuesday, September 15. Read The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations…. oh wait. I see what happened. I read the other Jon Stewart piece in the book.” Another student jumped in and said, “I just analyzed the whole show” and a third said, “I analyzed Jon Stewart.”

In that moment, I experienced two conflicting internal reactions. The teacher in me was annoyed. How could this simple set of directions have caused confusion? And how far was this confusion going to set us back? If only half of the class had done the work, the rest of my class plan was unlikely to go well. However, the researcher in me was fascinated. How, indeed, had this simple set of instructions caused confusion? All of these students had completed a homework assignment, so they weren’t just trying to “get out of work.” Plus, they also seemed earnestly unsure about what had gone wrong.

The researcher in me won out. I decided to let the class plan go and I began to dig into the situation. By a show of hands I saw that 12 of the 22 students had done the correct assignment and 10 had completed some customized, new version of the homework. I asked them all to pause for a moment and engage in a metacognitive activity: they were to think back to moment they read the assignment and ask themselves, where did I get mixed up?

Rasa said that she just remembered me saying something about The Daily Show in class, and when she looked in the table of contents, she saw a different article, “Political Satire and Postmodern Irony in the Age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart” (Colletta, 2014), and read it instead. Other students said that they must not have read closely enough, but then another student said something interesting. She said, “I did read the correct essay, but it sounded like it was going to be too hard to analyze and I figured that you hadn’t meant for this to be so hard, so I just analyzed the show.” Other students nodded in agreement. I asked the group to raise their hands if had read the correct essay. Many hands went up. Then I asked if they thought that the analysis they chose to do was easier than the one I assigned. All of them raised their hands.

Again, I was fascinated. In this very short conversation I had just watched rich, theoretical research play out before me. First, here was an example of the direct effect of power browsing (Kandra, Harden, & Babbra, 2012) mistakenly employed in the academic classroom. Power browsing is a relatively recently coined term that describes “skimming and scanning through text, looking for key words, and jumping from source to source” (Kandra et al., 2012).  Power browsing can be a powerful overviewing strategy (Afflerbach & Cho, 2010) in an online reading environment where a wide variety of stimuli compete for the reader’s attention. Research shows that strong readers of non-electronic texts also employ pre-reading or skimming strategies (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009), however, when readers mistakenly power browse in academic settings, it may result in “in missed opportunities or incomplete knowledge” (Kandra et al., 2012, par. 18). About metacognition and reading strategies, Afflerbach and Cho (2010) write, “the good strategy user is always aware of the context of reading” (p. 206); clearly, some of my students had forgotten their reading context. Some of the students knew immediately that they hadn’t thoroughly read the assignment. As soon as I described the term “power browse” their faces lit up. “Yes!” said, Rasa, “that’s exactly what I did!” Here was metacognition in action.

Second, as students described the reasoning behind choosing to read the assigned essay, but analyze something unassigned, I heard them offering a practical example of Flower and Hayes’ (1981/2011) discussion of goal-setting in the writing process. Flower and Hayes (1981/2011) said that writing includes, “not only the rhetorical situation and audience which prompts one to write, it also includes the writer’s own goals in writing” (p. 259). They went on to say that although some writers are able to “juggle all of these demands” others “frequently reduce this large set of restraints to a radically simplified problem” (p. 259). Flower and Hayes allow that this can sometimes cause problems, but they emphasize that “people only solve the problems they set for themselves” (p. 259).

Although I had previously seen many instances of students “simplifying” larger writing assignments in my classroom, I had never before had a chance to talk with students about what had happened in the moment when they realized something hadn’t worked. But here, they had just openly explained to me that the assignment had seemed too difficult, so they had recalibrated, or “simplified” it into something they thought they could do well and/or accomplish during their given timeframe.

This metacognitive interruption provided an opportunity to “catch” students in the moment when their learning strategies had gone awry, but my alertness to the kairic moment only came as a result of my own metacognitive skills: when it became clear that the students had not completed the work correctly, I paused before reacting and that pause allowed me to be alert to a possible metacognitive learning opportunity. When I began to reflect on this class period, I realized that my own alertness came as a result of my belief in the importance of teachers being metacognitive professionals so that we can interject learning into the moment of processing.

There is yet one more reason to mine these metacognitive interruptions: they provide authentic opportunities to teach students about metacognition and learning. The scene I described here could have had a very different outcome. It can be easy to see student behavior in a negative light. When students misunderstand something we thought we’d made clear, we sometimes make judgments about them being “lazy” or “careless” or “belligerent.” In this scenario it seems like it would have been justifiable to have gotten frustrated and lectured the students about slowing down, paying attention to details, and doing their homework correctly.

Instead, I was able to model the kind of cognitive work I would actually want to teach them: we slowed down and studied the mistake in a way that led the class to a conversation about how our minds work when we learn. Rather than including a seemingly-unrelated lecture on “metacognition in learning” I had a chance to teach them in response to a real moment of misplaced metacognitive strategy. Our 15-minute metacognitive interruption did not turn out to be a “delay” in the class plan, but an opening into a kind of learning that might sometimes just have to happen when the moment presents itself.

References

Baumgartner, J., & Morris, J., (2014). The Daily Show effect: Candidate evaluations, efficacy, and American youth. In C. Cucinella (Ed.), Funny. Southlake, Fountainhead Press. (Reprinted from American Politics Journal, 34(3), (2006), pp.341-67).

Colletta, L. (2014). Political satire and postmodern irony in the age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. In C. Cucinella (Ed.), Funny. Southlake, Fountainhead Press. (Reprinted from The Journal of Popular Culture, 42(5), (2009), pp. 856-74).

Dunlosky, J., & Metcalfe, J. (2009). Metacognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. (2011). A cognitive process theory of writing. In V. Villanueva & K. Arola (Eds.), Cross-talk in comp theory: A reader, (3rd ed.), (pp. 253-277). Urbana, IL: NCTE. (Reprinted from College Composition and Communication, 32(4), (Dec., 1981), pp. 365-387).

Kandra, K. L., Harden, M., & Babbra, A. (2012). Power browsing: Empirical evidence at the college level. National Social Science Journal, 2, article 4. Retrieved from http://www.nssa.us/tech_journal/volume_2-2/vol2-2_article4.htm

Waters, H. S., & Schneider, W., (Eds.). (2010). Metacognition, strategy use, and instruction. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

* Names have been changed to protect the students’ privacy.


Negotiating Chaos: Metacognition in the First-Year Writing Classroom

by Amy Ratto Parks, Composition Coordinator/Interim Director of Composition, University of Montana

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Although the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes, 1986) debuted long before our current first-year college students were born, the combined sentiment of the film remains relevant to them. If we combined Ferris’ sense of exuberant freedom with Cameron’s grave awareness of personal responsibility, and added Sloane’s blasé ennui we might see an accurate portrait of a typical first-year student’s internal landscape. Many of our students are thrilled to have broken out of the confines of high school but are worried about not being able to succeed in college, so they arrive in our classrooms slumped over their phones or behind computer screens, trying to seem coolly disengaged.

The life of the traditional first-year student is rife with negotiations against chaos. Even if we remove the non-academic adjustments of living away from home, their lives are full of confusion. All students, even the most successful, will likely find their learning identities challenged: what if all of their previous academic problem-solving strategies are inadequate for the new set of college-level tasks?

In the first-year writing classroom, we see vivid examples of this adjustment period play out every year. Metacognitive activities like critical reflective writing help students orient themselves because they require students to pause, assess the task at hand, and assess their strategies for meeting the demands of the task. Writing studies researchers know that reflection benefits writers (Yancey, 1998) and portfolio assessment, common in first-year program across the country, emphasizes reflection as a major component of the course (Reynolds & Rice, 2006). In addition, outcomes written by influential educational bodies such as National Council of Teacher’s of English (ncte.org), The Common Core State Standards Initiative (corestandards.org), and Council of Writing Program Administrators (wpacouncil.org) emphasize the importance of metacognitive skills and demonstrate a shared belief in its importance.

But students aren’t necessarily on board. It is the rare student who has engaged in critical reflection in the academic setting. Instead, many aren’t sure how to handle it. Is it busy work from the teacher? Are they supposed to reveal their deep, inner feelings or is it a cursory overview? Is it going to be graded? What if they give a “wrong” reflection? And, according to one group of students I had, “isn’t this, like, for junior high kids?” In this last question we again see the developing learner identity. The students were essentially wondering, “does this reflective work make us little kids or grown ups?”

If we want new college students to engage in the kind of reflective work that will help them develop transferable metacognitive skills, we need to be thoughtful about how we integrate it into the coursework. Intentionality is important because there are a number of ways teachers might accidentally perpetuate these student mindsets. In order to get the most from reflective activities in class, keep the following ideas in mind:

  1. Talk openly with students about metacognition. If we want students to become aware of their learning, then the first thing to do is draw their attention to it. We should explain to students why they might care about metacognitive skills, as well as the benefits of investing themselves in the work. If we explain that reflection is one kind of metacognitive activity that helps us retrieve, sort, and choose problem-solving strategies, then reflection ceases to be “junior high” work and instead becomes a scholarly, collegiate behavior.
  2. Design very specific reflective prompts. When in doubt, err on the side of more structure. Questions like “what did you think about the writing assignment” seem like they would open the door to many responses; actually they allow students to answer without critically examining their writing or research decisions. Instead, design prompts that require students to critically consider their work. For example, “Describe one writing choice you made in this essay. What was the impact of your decision?”
  3. Integrate reflection throughout the semester. Ask students to reflect mid-way through the processes of drafting, research, and writing. If we wait until they finish an essay they learn that reflection is simply a concluding activity. If they reflect mid-process they become aware of their ability to assess and revise their strategies more than once. Also, reflection is a metacognitive habit of mind (Tarricone, 2011; Yancey, 1998) and habits only come to us through repeated activity.

These three strategies are a very basic beginning to integrating metacognitive activities into a curriculum. Not only do they help students evaluate the effectiveness of their attempts at problem solving, but they can also direct the students’ attention toward the strategies they’ve already brought to the class, thereby creating a sense of control over their learning. In the first-year writing classroom, where students are distracted and worried about life circumstance and learner identity, the sense of control gained from metacognitive work is especially important.

 

References

Chinich, M. (Producer), & Hughes, J.H. (Director). (1986). Ferris Beuller’s day off.[Motion picture]. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Reynolds, N., & Rice, R. (2006). Portfolio teaching: A guide to instructors. Boston, MA: Bedford St, Martin’s.

Tarricone, P. (2011). The taxonomy of metacognition. New York: Psychology Press.

Yancey, K.B. (1998). Reflection in the writing classroom. Logan: Utah State University Press.

(2013). First-year writing: What good does it do? Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/nctefiles/resources/journals/cc/0232-nov2013/cc0232policy.pdf

(2014). Frameworks for success in postsecondary writing. Retrieved from http://wpacouncil.org/framework

(2014). English language arts standards. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/