By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D.

What does it take to become an exceptional college teacher? As many of us have learned, there’s much more to the art and science of teaching than merely knowing the content. Still, every year, several new faculty members begin teaching with the false assertion that solely learning more about their subject will lead to success in the classroom. Instead, metacognition about their development as a teacher could help propel them into their new roles with greater ease. Below is an appeal for new faculty to embrace metacognition about their instruction by understanding their developmental path with college teaching.

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Dear New Faculty,

Congratulations on starting your new role as a college teacher! You’ve worked hard to get to this point, spending years in class and writing that thesis or dissertation. Now you get to share all of that knowledge with aspiring students. Your passion will hopefully convert several of them into majoring in your discipline or even becoming your research prodigies. Your optimism is contagious and inspiring.

Despite the fact that you now hold an advanced degree, your learning is not over. In fact, the journey to becoming an effective teacher has just begun. Before you step into that classroom, take a strategic pause to become metacognitive about your teaching, not just your content. You must now design a course that is meaningful for your students. Sure, you can simply use the materials provided by the textbook publisher, especially those well-designed PowerPoint slides, but did you know college teaching requires so much more? Did you know there are developmental stages for becoming an effective college teacher?

Akerlind (2007) shares brilliant insights about progressing from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered approach. In order to focus on student learning, faculty need to become aware of how they are teaching and begin to adapt their instruction to best meet the needs of their students. In other words, effective college faculty engage in metacognition about their instruction through awareness of teaching strategies, reflection about their practice, and self-regulation of teaching methods based on student learning needs. To this end, Akerlind asserts that college teachers move through the following developmental stages:

If these stages hold true, what does this mean for you? As Akerlind shares, new teachers often expend most of their energies on understanding their disciplinary content really well. You may spend great effort reading the textbook and researching the topics as much as possible. In all likelihood, much of your class time will be spent lecturing or presenting information (perhaps using those textbook slides), a very teacher-centered style. In reality, if you take this approach, you may learn more than your students this year because you spent greater time and energy mastering the material than they did.

Over time, however, you may discover that students are not participating in class like you want, or you may notice dwindling attendance. Student evaluations might even reflect dissatisfaction with your teaching style. Don’t be dismayed; don’t give up. You will begin to shift into Akerlind’s next developmental stage by considering alternative methods for content delivery. You will move toward focusing on how to teach rather than what to teach, especially now that you feel more comfortable with the content of the course. During this stage, you will gain greater metacognition about your teaching.

Through trial and error, you will begin to explore and experiment with a variety of teaching strategies, increasing your toolbox of techniques from which to use. Trying these new strategies will not be sufficient, though. You will need to select evidence-based strategies drawn from the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) literature, and you will need to reflect on how well the new methods worked (also called reflective practice). Through reflection, you will begin to see which teaching techniques fit your personal style and subject matter. You will also begin to seek feedback, particularly from students, about how well these new strategies are being received.

Ultimately, though, you will discover that student satisfaction and snazzy teaching techniques fall flat if your students aren’t learning from the course. As Akerlind claims, you will move into the final developmental stage by designing your instruction and curriculum to be singularly focused on learning outcomes. You will search for a balance between being liked as a teacher to challenging students to transform their thinking. You may even embrace this positive restlessness and seek continuous improvement with your teaching each semester.

So why should you care about these stages of college teaching development? Because perhaps seeing your teaching as a journey and not a fixed goal will help you to be patient with yourself as you try new techniques and begin to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps metacognition about your future development will help you to progress more quickly through these stages to focusing on student learning rather than your instruction style. Go ahead and acknowledge that your first semester or two may be focused heavily on understanding the content at hand, but over time, try to embrace metacognitive instruction by leveraging knowledge about teaching and intentional awareness in the classroom to move toward more sophisticated methods for delivering that content. Become reflective practitioners who care about student feedback and continuous improvement, but eventually shift your focus to improving student learning outcomes.

The journey to becoming an effective college teacher will not happen overnight, even with this new metacognition you have, but rest assured that it will be rewarding and meaningful. In Bain’s (2004) pivotal work, What the Best College Teachers Do, you will discover that it could take up to 10 years to become an effective faculty member. However, maintaining metacognition about these stages of development will likely put you on target sooner, working toward a learner-centered approach to teaching. Good luck!

Resources:

Akerlind, G.S. (2007). Constraints on academics’ potential for developing as a teacher. Studies in Higher Education, 32(1): 21-37. doi: 10.1080/03075070601099416

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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

Higher education should prepare students for citizenship, yet this is a difficult task in this fractious political climate. Partisanship is at an all-time high in the United States and the electoral contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is unlikely to ease those tensions. The summer of 2016 has also been marked by polarized responses to videos of police brutality; #alllivesmatter and #blacklivesmatter share videos and display the structures of American society in starkly different terms. Students developing as citizens need habits of mind to help them evaluate the messy and propagandistic political world. Judging politically is a reflective, metacognitive process, not just aimed at political facts, but also values and ethical commitments, and in response to the pluralistic values of others. It is metacognitive because it requires a shift from one’s own reflections to the imagined reflections of others and a dialogue between these reflections. Here, I’ll discuss what is metacognitive about political judgment, give a (brief) nod to the work of Hannah Arendt, and offer some ideas for the classroom and remaining questions.

One difficulty in developing political judgment is our tendency to assign higher credibility to information that is easier for us to process, perhaps because we have heard it often, it fits into our ideology, or tells a familiar and coherent story (Schwartz, N. 2015). Thus information silos, as on social media where one may have many friends sharing the same stories or perspectives, can make metacognitive judgement difficult (Johnson et. all 2009). Political ideology can limit evaluation of information or policy positions, stopping the metacognitive process of thinking about our thinking about politics, and instead replacing it with the ease of confirmation bias.

Yet, if there is a way out of the political echo chamber, it seems likely to involve reflection and the ability to notice and evaluate that reflection. Indeed, Chick, Karnahan and Caris (2009) found that metacognitive reflection that was sensitive to emotion and affect helped students understand and respond to racism by providing distance to examine their own emotional responses. Mezirow (2003) frames this as “learning that transforms problematic frames of reference—sets of fixed assumptions and expectations (habits of mind, meaning perspectives, mindsets)—to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change” (58). He links this transformative learning to Jurgen Habermas’ discourse ethics, arguing that the goal of adult education is to prepare citizens for the critical reflective work both of collective problem solving and deliberative discourse.

Habermas’ discourse ethics are not the only approach to understanding how citizens develop politically in a plural world; indeed, one alternative theorist of political discourse and action is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Arendt, political theorist, wrote popular books on totalitarianism, political action and American politics and controversially covered the Eichmann trials, during which she developed her famous idea of “the banality of evil.” Slightly less well known is her unique work on political judgment, as she died before completing it. However, she provides a unique framework for thinking through reflective judgment as a mental “two-in-one.”

Arendt (1989) adapts Kantian aesthetic judgment to the political and social world, exploring how to evaluate new phenomenon when one does not have an existing concept or category under which it can be explained. The solution is a redefined “common sense” which, for Arendt, is “the intuitive feeling for worldliness” that allows us to share the world with pluralistic others (Schwartz 2015). Arendt’s common sense is not community norms— agreeing with those who post on our Facebook wall—although it is formed in part by the “company we keep” both in books and in person, in discourse with whom we form our ideas of what common standards of judgment are.

This orienting common sense requires metacognitive consideration of both our individual perspectives and those of pluralistic others. These positions are often in dynamic tension with each other, producing cognitive dissonance. The faculty of imagination allows us to move, mentally, outside ourselves to consider the status of others, although she is well-aware we are still always ourselves. Imagining the perspectives of others as well as our own is “enlarged mentality;” it does not replace the partial view we have from our own subject position, nor is it a universal “view from nowhere.” Instead, it allows us to reason via internal dialogue which, in the unfinished The Life of the Mind, she calls this the “two-in-one” of thinking.

Developing Arendtian metacognitive reflective judgment is a difficult task, given the barriers to imagination. However, consider the question of how to respond to a video, like that taken of Philando Castile, where a person is killed by police. After our immediate reaction and interpretation, we can improve this judgment by considering the perspectives of others, not as an additive process, but as an exercise in enlarged mentality, playing the positions off each other. As Arendt notes, our judgments are not “universally valid” because they cannot “extend further than those others in whose place the judging person has put himself” (Beiner et. all 2001). But certainly an attempt to think from the position others prompts us to consider the sources of our judgments and gather information on the perspectives of those others—it demands that we think through police brutality from a non-binary perspective, as the two-in-one is really many and one.

Arendt’s notion of the “two-in-one” is useful for framing the importance of student practices of self-dialogue and reflection prior to or even instead of deliberative contestation in the classroom. We might practice skills and reflective activities, building up to full-scale deliberation (Stephens et all. 2013), or include reflective practice in unexpected places, like law school (Casey). We can also adapt what we know about changing deeply held beliefs to prompt better reflection on standpoints and our thinking. Framing new information in non-challenging language or affirming student self-worth can help with their consideration of identity challenging ideas (Hardisy, Johnson, & Weber, 2010). My students often write on a big question prior to class, and then engage various materials that relate to this big question, and then revisit and revise their paper as a dialogue with several of these perspectives. We also often do “think-alouds” in class with a partner or small group to discuss which voices are present in our internal dialogue and how they relate to our world in common.

There are still deep ethical and epistemological questions about Arendt’s reflective judgment; for example, can we reason from the imagined position of others if our knowledge of their perspective is lacking? Arendt herself was harshly, and I think rightly, criticized for her lack of such knowledge when she critiqued the actions of the NAACP and black families at Little Rock in 1957. Perhaps meta-cognition about the pluralistic political world requires diverse knowledge about the actual viewpoints of others—knowledge often lacking in the racially and politically segregated U.S. If we want prepare our students for citizenship, we need to challenge them to “go visiting” the viewpoints of others and provide the resource t make this possible. Although political divisions and ideologies make two-in-one thinking difficult, cultivating a metacognitive process for political judgment is worthy educational goal.

References

Arendt, Hannah, and Ronald Beiner. (1989). Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beiner, Ronald, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, Charles Larmore, Onora O’Neill, George Kateb, Robert J. Dostal et al. Judgment, imagination, and politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.

Casey, Timothy. 2014. Reflective Practice in Legal Education: The Stages of Reflection. Clinical Law Review 20:317.

Chick, Nancy L.; Karis, Terri; and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009) “Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and

Learning: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 16. Available at: http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol3/iss1/16

Hardisty, D. J., Johnson,E.J., & Weber, E.U.   (2010). A Dirty Word or a Dirty World? Attribute Framing, Political Affiliation, and Query Theory. Psychological Science, 21, 86-92.

Johnson, T. J., Bichard, S. L., & Zhang, W. (2009). Communication communities or “cyberghettos?’’: A path analysis model examining factors that explain selective exposure to blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15, 60–82

Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative learning as discourse.” Journal of transformative education 1, no. 1 (2003): 58-63.

Murray, T., Stephens, L., Woolf, B. P., Wing, L., Xu, X., & Shrikant, N. (2013). Supporting Social Deliberative Skills Online: The Effects of Reflective Scaffolding Tools. In A. A.

Ozok & P. Zaphiris (Eds.),Online Communities and Social Computing (pp. 313–322). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-39371-6_36

Schwarz, N. (2015). Metacognition. In M. Mikulincer, PR Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 203-229). Washington, DC: APA.”

Schwartz, J. P. (2015). To choose one’s company: Arendt, Kant, and the Political Sixth Sense. European Journal of Political Theory, 1474885115613700. http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885115613700

by Guy A. Boysen, McKednree University (gaboysen@mckednree.edu)

Imagine that you and your colleagues have just retired to the pub for a well-deserved pint at the end of a long week of work in the knowledge factory. After a few refreshing sips, you hear the challenge of “Darts!” Rather than playing the usual game of Cricket or 301, the challenger proposes a new competition but does not bother to share the rules. So, you lob darts at random, sometimes hearing “Nice shot!” and other times “Too bad, mate!” Without a clear target to aim for, however, there is no way for you to improve your performance. You lose, and the next round is on you.

If that sounds frustrating, imagine how students feel when they don’t know what to aim for in their efforts at learning – that is, how they feel in classes without clear learning objectives. Learning objectives refer to statements of what students should be able to do after an educational experience. High-quality learning objectives are clear, measurable, and focused on student outcomes rather than instructional methods (Boysen, 2012). Consider these examples.

• Students in Spanish will be able to ask grammatical questions to solicit various forms of information from Spanish speakers.
• Students who complete library training will be able to identify peer-reviewed journal articles using the EBSCO database.
• Students in Statistics will be able to compute means and standard deviations using hand calculations.
• Readers of this blog will be able to describe the relation between learning objectives and metacognition.

In a straightforward way, learning objectives let students know what they need to know – this is an essential tool for the metacognitive skill of being able to self-assess progress toward educational goals.

Just as you will never win at darts without knowing where to aim, students cannot intentionally evaluate where they are in the learning process without objectives. For example, students in Spanish who are unaware of the learning objective to ask various grammatical questions might mistakenly believe that they are muy bueno with “¿Que pasa?” as their only query. In contrast, students who are aware of the learning objective can more effectively use metacognition by self-assessing their ability to do things like ask for food, directions, the time, or an add/drop slip. Although research is needed to determine if there is a direct link between learning objectives and metacognition, there is longstanding evidence that providing students with learning objectives leads to increased learning (Duell, 1974; Rothkopf & Kaplan, 1972).

Learning objectives clearly have potential as metacognitive tools for helping students assess their own learning, so how do the best college teachers use them? Well, according to An Evidence-Based Guide for College and University Teaching: Developing the Model Teacher (Richmond, Boysen, & Gurung, 2016), there are two fundamental questions that model teachers can say “Yes!” to with regard to learning objectives.

• Do you “articulate specific, measurable learning objectives in your syllabi or other course documents?” (p. 197)

Model teachers know that, for every one of their readings, activities, tests, and papers, students can determine the learning objective and use it to consider whether or not they are achieving the intended goal. The syllabus is an especially important metacognitive tool. It is the place to introduce students to the concepts of metacognition and learning objectives. In fact, you can even use it to establish learning objectives about the development of metacognition itself (see here for more on metacognitive syllabi; Richmond, 2015).

• Do you “provide constructive feedback to students is that is related to their achievement of learning objectives?” (p. 197)

Model teachers recognize that students may be unskilled and unaware (Taraban, 2016), so they frequently offer opportunities for objective evaluation. Evaluations such as quizzes, tests, and rubric scores help to keep students’ self-assessment of learning grounded in reality (see Was, 2014 and Taraban, 2014 for more on feedback). For example, students may be 100% confident in their ability to ask questions in Spanish – that is until an oral examination. Struggling to stammer out a modest “¿Que hora es?” and nothing else should lead students to a clearer awareness of their current abilities.

In summary, don’t let your students lob random intellectual darts at mysterious learning targets. Be a model teacher by providing them with clear learning objectives and feedback on their success so that they can hone their metacognitive skills!

References

Boysen, G. A. (2012). A guide to writing learning objectives for teachers of psychology. Society for the Teaching of Psychology Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology Online. Retrieved from https://legacy.berea.edu/academic-assessment/files/2015/02/Guide-to-Writing-Learning-Objectives-for-Teachers-of-Psychology-Boysen-2012.pdf

Duell, O. P. (1974). Effect of type of objective, level of test questions, and the judged importance of tested materials upon posttest performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 66, 225–323.

Richmond, A. S. (2015, March 6^th). The metacognitive syllabus. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognitive-syllabus/

Richmond, A. S., Boysen, G. A., Gurung, R. A. R. (2016). An evidence-based guide for college and university teaching: Developing the model teacher. Routledge.

Rothkopf, E. Z., & Kaplan, R. (1972). Exploration of the effect of density and specificity of instructional objectives on learning from text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 63, 295–302.

Taraban, R. (2014, December 10^th). Mind the feedback gap. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/mind-the-feedback-gap/

Taraban, R. (2016, April 1st). Unskilled and unaware: A metacognitive bias. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/unskilled-unaware-metacognitive-bias/

Was, C. (2014, August 28th). Testing improves knowledge monitoring. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/testing-improves-knowledge-monitoring/

Aaron S. Richmond, Ph.D.
Metropolitan State University of Denver

In past blogs, I’ve written about topics that focus on the relationship between academic procrastination and metacognition (Richmond, 2016), or different instructional methods to increase your student’s metacognition (Richmond 2015a, 2015b), or even how to use metacognitive theory to improve teaching practices (Richmond, 2014). However, during my morning coffee the other day I was reading a 2016 article in Metacognition in Learning by Foster, Was, Dunlosky, and Isaacson (yes, I am a geek like that). Studying the importance of repeated assessment and feedback, Foster and colleagues found that over the course of a semester sophomore and junior level education psychology students who were tested 13 separate times and provided feedback remained highly overconfident in their knowledge of the material. As many other researchers have concluded, severe overconfidence erodes accurate self-regulation and self-monitoring which can have a severe detrimental effect on student learning. After finishing my coffee, I thought about the potential long-term and pervasive impacts the lack of metacognition these students had and it dawned on me that in IwM we have not discussed when and where metacognitive skills should be taught in the college curriculum. Thus, I choose to focus this blog on potential suggestions/strategies on when and where to introduce teaching metacognitive skills in the college classroom.

When Should We Teach Metacognitive Skills?
First and foremost, as college and university teachers, we need to acknowledge that our students do not come to us from a vacuum and that they already have many developed, albeit sometimes erroneous and ineffective, metacognitive skills. Considering this fact, we need to adapt our metacognitive instruction on an individual student level to best teach our students. Now, to the question: When should we teach metacognitive skills? The answer is—of course ASAP! As one of the goals to metacognitive skills is to transfer across academic domains, introducing it during the first semester of college is imperative.

One of the most notable early interventions for metacognitive skills was done by Ken Kiewra at the University of Nebraska. Kiewra created a class “Academic Success” taught at the sophomore level using his Selection, Organization, Association, and Regulation (SOAR) model (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009). Jairam and Kiewra had modest effects of increasing student learning (e.g., recalling facts and associating relevant information among zoology terms) via these metacognitive skills. However, there are a few areas in which this approach to teaching metacognitive skills can be improved. First, this is not a class that all students were required to take (only education students). Thus, all other academic disciplines could benefit from this class (see more on this below). Second, most of the students who took this course were at the sophomore and junior college level. This course should be a first semester course for all students, rather than midway through the college career.

The final note regarding when we should teach metacognitive skills almost negates or precludes the initial question. That is, the ‘when’ is immediately, but immediately doesn’t mean or suggest once. Rather, metacognitive skills should be taught continuously throughout the college career with increasingly more advanced and effective memory and learning strategies. Just as a student would take an introductory course to a major, why not have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced metacognitive skills course?

Where Should Metacognitive Skills Be Taught?
Obviously, those at IwM, and presumably our readers, would quickly answer this question: EVERYWHERE! That is, metacognitive skills should be taught across the college curriculum. However, there are some academics who believe (a) our students have already learned effective learning strategies (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009), and (b) that metacognitive skills are not part of their curriculum. In response to the first belief, many of our incoming college and university students do not have effective metacognitive skills so it is important that we teach these skills in all different types of academic domains (Jairam & Kiewra, 2009). In response to the second belief, metacognition should be taught across all academic domains. This includes mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, nursing, psychology, anthropology. I will go so far as to suggest that metacognitive skills are tantamount to reading skills as it pertains to the learning process and should be incorporated throughout the curriculum. But herein lies the rub. I have yet to find a current model or research example of infusing metacognitive skill training across the curriculum. For example, in general studies education, why not have a metacognitive student learning objective that cuts across all academic domains. Or in a first-year-success program that is often taught in teams, why not incorporate metacognitive skill training via thematic instruction (e.g., various academic disciplines are asked to center their instruction around a similar topic) among several introductory level classes. That is, teach metacognition in General Psychology, Speech 101, Biology 101, etc. by using a threaded theme (e.g., racism) that requires teachers to teach metacognitive skills to help learn a particular topic. In the end, it is clear that all students in all disciplines could benefit from metacognitive skill training, yet researchers nor teachers have tackled these specific issues.

There Are Always More Questions Than Answers.
I’ve done it again, I’ve written a blog that touches on what I believe to be an important issue in metacognition and higher education that needs far more research. As such, I must wrap up this blog (as I always do) with a few questions/challenges/inspirational ideas.

1. Should metacognition, learning strategies, etc. be taught throughout the curriculum?
   1. If so, how?
2. If not, should they be taught in a self-contained introduction to college course?
   1. Should all college students to be required to take this course?
3. What other models of introducing and teaching metacognitive skills are there that may be more effective than a self-contained course vs. a thematic curriculum approach?
4. Once students have been introduced to metacognitive skills, what is the best method for continuing education of metacognitive skills?

References
Foster, N. L., Was, C. A., Dunlosky, J., & Isaacson, R. M. (2016). Even after thirteen class exams, students are still overconfident: The role of memory for past exam performance in student predictions. Metacognition and Learning, 1-19. doi:10.1007/s11409-016-9158-6

Jairam, D., & Kiewra, K. A. (2009). An investigation of the SOAR study method. Journal of Advanced Academics, 20(4), 602-629.

Richmond, A. S. (2016, February 16th). Are academic procrastinators metacognitively deprived?. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/are-academic-procrastinators-metacognitively-deprived/

Richmond, A. S. (2015a, November 5th). A minute a day keeps the metacognitive doctor away. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/a-minute-a-day-keeps-the-metacognitive-doctor-away/

Richmond, A. S. (2015b, July 20th). How do you increase your students metacognition?. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/how-do-you-increase-your-students-metacognition/

Richmond, S. (2014, August 28th). Meta-teaching: Improve your teaching while improving your student’s metacognition. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/meta-teaching-improve-your-teaching-while-improving-students-metacognition/

by Roman Taraban, PHD, Texas Tech University

“Just Do It” has been a great slogan for selling athletic equipment and has also spawned some humorous spinoffs, like Bart Simpson’s “Can’t someone else just do it?” And is it not how we sometimes solve problems: “Don’t think, just do it?” Although just doing it (or getting someone else to do it) may have some visceral appeal, models for teaching argue against just doing it when it comes to solving problems.

One of the most influential problem-solving models is Polya’s (1957) 4-step model: i) understand the problem, ii) develop a plan, iii) carry out the plan, and iv) look back. On this model, solvers don’t “do it” until the 3^rd step. What is really striking about this model is that it is mostly about critical thinking and metacognitive processing. The principles of understanding the problem, planning one’s approach to solving the problem, and reflecting on the solution after “doing it,” all require critical thinking and metacognition (Draeger, 2015). STEM disciplines have generally embraced the Polya model, suggesting that commitments to metacognitive thinking by researchers and instructors are widespread and well-entrenched. Two disciplines will be considered here to make that point: mathematics and engineering.

In a research study in mathematics, Carlson and Bloom (2005) collected and analyzed the problem solving behaviors of twelve expert mathematicians. The data showed that the mathematicians engaged in metacognitive behaviors and decisions that were organized within a general problem-solving framework consisting of Orienting, Planning, Executing, and Checking. One of the phases, Executing, is where one “does it” – the others are more metacognitive. Researchers have developed comparable models for problem-solving in engineering. These models preface equation-crunching with understanding the problem and planning a solution, and follow up with reflection on the solution. This is exemplified in the six-step McMaster model: Engage, Define the Stated Problem, Explore, Plan, Do It, and Look Back (Woods et al., 1997).

In spite of teachers’ best intentions, might students still just do it? Certainly! An alternative to metacognitive planning before doing, and monitoring, regulating, and reflecting, is to apply a purely rote strategy (Garofalo & Lester, 1985), also termed a “plug and chug” method (Maloney, 2011). Plug and chug in physics and engineering involves a mental search for equations that will solve the problem, but with little conceptual understanding of the nature of the problem, little strategic decision-making, and little metacognitive self-reflection and regulation of the solution process. In disciplines not involving equations, various matching and cut-and-paste strategies could qualify as plug-and-chug. James Stice, a distinguished professor in chemical engineering, described part of his own engineering training (Stice, 1999) that suggests how plug-and-chug may come about:

“When I was an undergraduate student, many of my professors would derive an equation during lecture, and then would proceed to work an example problem. They would outline the situation, invoke the equation, plug in the numbers and arrive at a solution. What they did always seemed very logical and straightforward, I’d get it all down in my notes, and I’d leave the class feeling that I had understood what they had done. Later I often was chagrined to find that I couldn’t work a very similar problem for homework.” (p. 1)

Much of the motivation for research on how experts solve problems, like Carlson and Bloom (2005), has led to developing didactic models for the classroom, like the six-step McMaster model (Woods et al., 1997) in engineering: Engage, Define the Stated Problem, Explore, Plan, Do It, and Look Back. These didactic models have been developed largely in response to the absence of metacognitive thinking among students.

Although teaching methods could account for some of the absence of metacognitive thinking in beginning students, domain-specific knowledge may also be a factor. Few would disagree that domain-specific knowledge plays a key role in successful problem solving. Indeed, Carlson and Bloom attributed the expertise of their mathematicians, in part, to “a large reservoir of well-connected knowledge, heuristics, and facts” (p. 45). Can a novice student readily access domain-related facts, organize information within the problem, muse, imagine, and conjecture over possible strategies, apply heuristics, and effectively monitor progress? Of course not. Obviously, the absence of domain-specific knowledge in beginning students enables and motivates the teaching of domain-specific knowledge. But I would like to argue that the absence of domain-specific knowledge also enables and motivates teaching students metacognitive processes. This may seem illogical, but it’s not. The point is that an absence of domain-specific knowledge provides instructors with a great opportunity to teach the domain-specific knowledge but also how to think about thinking about that knowledge, that is, how to be metacognitive while learning facts and procedures.

Getting students to “Think, then Do It” will require more than working examples for them on the blackboard in order to convey domain-specific knowledge. Instead, within a framework like that provided by Carlson and Bloom, the metacognitive processes at each step of solving the problem should also be modeled. Some students may show metacognitive behaviors early on, and all successful students will eventually catch on. However, to truly be a pedagogical principle, it needs to be part of the learning situation. A model of metacognitive instruction (Scharff, 2015) for the student could be guided by the work on scaffolding metacognitive processes proposed in the seminal work of Brown and Palinscar (1982). The point is to take the domain-specific knowledge that you are trying to convey and to model and scaffold it to students along with the metacognitive decisions and control that go with expert problem solving, and to do it early on in instruction. It is worth mentioning that James Stice, who was taught to plug and chug, became a follower and proponent of the six-step McMaster model as professor of chemical engineering.

There is an old Jack Benny joke. Jack Benny was a comedian known for being a cheapskate. One night a thug stopped him – “Don’t make a move bud, your money or your life.” After a long pause, the thug, clearly annoyed, repeated – “Look bud, I said….Your money or your life.” Jack Benny: “I’m thinking it over.” Just to be fair, sometimes we should just Do It and not think too much about it. When it comes to teaching and learning, though, thinking about thinking is better.

References

Brown, A. L., & Palinscar, A. S. (1982). Inducing strategic learning from texts by means of informed, self-control training. Tech Report No. 262. Urbana: University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading.

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