by Sarah L. Bunnell at Ohio Wesleyan University (slbunnel@owu.edu)

As a developmental psychologist, it is difficult to consider student learning (and my own learning as well) without a strong nod to developmental process. Metacognition, as has been described by many others on this blog and in other venues (e.g., Baxter-Magolda, 1992; Flavell, 1979; Kuhn, 1999; Perry, 1970), requires the cognitive skills of reflection, connection, evaluation, and revision. Metacognitive acts are initially quite cognitively demanding, and like most conscious cognitive processes, require practice to become more automatic or at least less consuming of cognitive resources. In addition to examining how students acquire the tools required for the hard work of metacognition, I have also been interested in whether there are developmental differences in students’ ability to make connections and reflections across the college years.

I recently conducted two examinations of metacognitive development; the first project involved my Introductory Psychology course, which enrolls primarily first year students, and the second project involved my Adolescent Psychology course, which enrolls primarily sophomore-level students. Below, I will provide a brief summary of each study and then discuss what I see as some take-home points and next-steps for inquiry.

In the Introductory Psychology course (n = 45), each student completed a metacognitive portfolio (hosted through the MERLOT website; http://eportfolio.merlot.org/) throughout the semester. In this portfolio, students responded to a series of prompts to reflect on their current thinking about course concepts and the ways in which these concepts play out in their own lives. At the end of the semester, students were asked to review their responses, identify any responses that they would now change, and explain why they would now alter their responses. They were also asked to describe how they thought their thinking had changed over the course of the semester.

Given the large body of work on the learning benefits associated with metacognition, I was not surprised that students who wanted to change a greater number of their responses performed significantly better on the final exam than did students who identified fewer points of change. More surprising, however, was the finding that students who did well on the final exam were significantly more likely to have endorsed changes in their thinking about themselves as opposed to changes in their thinking about others. A year after this class ended, I contacted these same students again, and I asked them to reflect on their thinking at the end of the course relative to their thinking about Psychology and themselves now. Of note, an analysis of these responses indicated that the students who were high performers on the final exam and in the course overall were no longer reporting many self-related metacognitive links. Instead, these students were significantly more likely to say that they now had a greater understanding of others than they did before. Thus, there was a powerful shift over time in the focus of metacognition from self to other.

In my Adolescent Psychology course (n = 35), students conduct a semi-structured interview of an adolescent, transcribe the interview, and then analyze the interview according to developmental theory. This assignment is designed to foster connection and application, and I have compelling evidence indicating that this experience enhances learning. What was less clear to me, however, is whether participating in this course and in the interview paper activity contributes to students’ metacognitive awareness of self? To address this question, I implemented a pre-post test design. On the first day of class, students were asked, “Are you currently an adolescent? Please explain your answer.” To answer this question, one must consider multiple ways in which we may conceptualize adolescence (i.e., age, legal responsibility, physical maturity, financial responsibility); as you can clearly see, the lens we apply to ourselves and others leads to quite varied views of when adolescence ends and adulthood begins! At the end of the term, students were again asked the same question, plus an additional prompt that asked them to reflect on how their thinking about themselves had changed across the semester.

On Day 1, 17 students endorsed currently being an adolescent, 16 students reported no longer being an adolescent, and 2 students said they did not feel that they had enough information to respond. It is important to note that all students in the course were between the ages of 18 and 21 years and as such, all were technically late adolescents. On the last day of class, 21 class members labeled themselves as adolescents, 4 students said that they did not consider themselves to be adolescents, and 5 said that they were an adolescent in some contexts of their life and not others. As an example of a contextual way of thinking, one student said: “I believe that neurologically I am still an adolescent because I am below the age of 25 and therefore do not have a fully developed frontal lobe, which can alter decision making, and from a Piagetian standpoint I believe I am out of adolescence because I have reached the formal operational stage of development and possibly even beyond that. Overall though, I believe that I can’t fully define myself as an adolescent or not because there are so many factors in play.”

I examined these group-level differences in terms of course performance from a number of angles, and two interesting patterns emerged. First, students who adopted a more context-dependent view of self did significantly better on the application-based, cumulative final exam than did students who held an absolute view of self. This first finding is consistent with the work on Marcia Baxter-Magolda (1992), William Perry (1970), and others, which views contextual knowing as a complicated and mature form of meta-knowing. Second, students who changed their view of themselves across the semester conducted significantly more advanced analyses of the interview content relative to those whose view of self did not change. Thus, the students who displayed greater advances in metacognition were better able to apply these reflections and connections to themselves and, in turn, to the lives of others.

Taken together, this work suggests to me that the ability to engage in metacognitive reflection and connection may initially develop in a self-focused way and then, following additional experience and metacognitive skill attainment, extend beyond the self. Please note that I am careful to suggest that the ability of other-related connection emerges following experience and the acquisition of lower-level preparatory skills, rather than merely the passage of time, even though there is clearly a temporal dimension at play. Instead, as Donald Baer warned us, age is at best a proxy for development; at the most extreme, development is “age-irrelevant” (Baer, 1970). Why do students demonstrate improved metacognition across the college years? It is certainly not merely because the days have ticked by. Instead, these advances in thinking, as well as students’ willingness to refine their thinking about the self, are supported and constructed by a range of experiences and challenges that their college experience affords. To understand age- or college-level changes in thinking, therefore, we should focus on the developmental tasks and experiences that support this development. I hope that my lines of inquiry contribute in small part to this process.

References

Baer, D. M. (1970). An age-irrelevant concept of development. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 16, 238-245.

Baxter Magolda, M. B. (1992). Students’ epistemologies and academic experiences: implications for pedagogy, Review of Higher Education, 15, 265-87.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906 – 911.

Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational Researcher, 28, 16-25.

Perry, William G., Jr. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.