Engendering Empathy through Literature with Metacognition

by Dr. Marie-Therese C. Sulit, Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program

“Literature is no one’s private ground. It is common ground.”–Virginia Woolf

“Doce me veritatem”/“Teach Me Truth”—Motto of Mount Saint Mary College

INTRODUCTION: CONSIDERING DISPUTATIO A FORM OF METACOGNITION

As a multicultural practitioner of literature, I draw upon both a contemplative-informed pedagogy to create safe and brave spaces, especially for young adults. Given the common ground that literature provides, it is important that participants feel safe so they can be brave and share with the class. I connect literacy with literature through the reading process as follows:

Basic Literacy, or Reading the Lines: discerning the basic plot of a story on your terms (based on our personal experiences and responses) and articulating the “who, what, when, and where” of that story in our speech and prose
Critical Literacy, or Critically Reading between the Lines: discerning the deeper meaning of the story on its terms and articulating the “how and why” of that story through the background of the story itself and our present historical, literary, and political moment
Multicultural Literacy, or Reading Critically against the Lines: discerning the gaps and omissions of that story on its and our own terms and articulating ways of filling in these gaps and omissions by posing alternative readings

At any stage of the reading process, a student’s engagement with the narrative text can move between emotional reactions and intellectual responses. In an essay, “Reflection Matters: Using Metacognition to Track a Moving Target,” I highlight contemplative pedagogy, which creates a space between one’s emotional reactions and one’s intellectual responses. These reactions and responses inform students’ engagement with literature—may it be a series of spoken or written remarks, difficult and challenging topics, or an emergent potentially controversial set of themes—that, through metacognition, can shift triggers (emotional reactions) into glimmers (intellectual responses) in classroom discussions.

In another essay, “Identity Matters: Creating Brave Spaces through Disputatio and Discernment,” I discuss disputatio, a contemplative practice of rigorous argumentation particular to Dominican colleges and universities, as “[a] method that seeks to resolve difficult questions and controverted issues by finding the truth in each.” The practice of disputatio requires discernment as a means by which multiple and/or disparate perspectives can be brought to light even as it addresses “urgent questions of justice and peace.” At the Mount, pedagogical practices across disciplines are being called upon to explore and investigate so-called “controversial” issues that run the gamut of the “-isms,” e.g. racism and sexism and other forms of oppression. As a teacher of literature, the discernment intrinsic to disputatio, I believe, is a form of metacognition that can be utilized in the classroom in order to gauge students’ connection to a narrative text and peers as well as themselves. There is no better time than the present to engender empathy, the understanding of another perspective, with metacognition to address these opportunities for change in the classroom. Thus, the engenderment of empathy cannot happen without metacognition.

ENGENDERING EMPATHY THROUGH LITERATURE WITH METACOGNITION

The study and analysis of literature not only brings self-examination for all involved as we move through stories, characters, conflicts, and resolutions but also an examination of history, culture and society. In Literature for Young Adults, for example, the relatability of a narrative text opens up the opportunity for young adults to engage in this process of self-examination through the examination of a piece of literature. In providing the common ground to engender empathy, its challenge lies in its inherent predication that another’s experience of pain, even trauma, cannot be our own, and this challenge can happen within a student, among the students in the class, as well as through the characters. In applying these challenges to literature, I draw upon Lou Agosta (2020) who problematizes one’s ability to be open to another, be it a student with another student and/or a student with a character:

RECEPTIVITY, an emotional contagion, happening through an appropriation of one’s experience;
INTERPRETATION, as projecting one’s experience onto another, be it a character or a peer can happen;
RESPONSE, as becoming lost in translation, where gossiping, talking about, or changing the subject can happen;
UNDERSTANDING, where the labelling or categorizing one’s experience can happen.

With Agosta’s four points, the stages of the reading process are akin to listening: students react and respond accordingly, gauging their reactions and responses. He emphasizes that it is one’s ability to truly listen where empathy can either break down and/or break through. Agosta delineates how empathy works:

EMPATHIC RECEPTIVITY: a gracious and generous listening
EMPATHIC INTERPRETATION: the view from “over there”
EMPATHIC RESPONSIVENESS: the “film” of one’s life—be it a character, a peer, and/or one’s self
EMPATHIC UNDERSTANDING: a break-through, rather than a break-down, to possibility—be it literary, personal, and/or communal

In this course, the students and I discussed a student-selected contemporary novel, Girl in Pieces (2016) written by Kathleen Glasgow. In this controversial novel, the protagonist is a young woman, Charlie, homeless and a self-harmer, who, through her fraught relationships with family and friends, journeys towards self-development and self-discovery. Charlie served as a surrogate for the students who, to varying degrees, identify and dis-identify with aspects of this protagonist. I find myself most successful in engendering empathy and having the students develop their metacognition through low-stakes writing assignments—e.g. paragraph experiments for practice in writing effective paragraphs and online discussion forums that allow for reflection in responding to topics raised in the classroom. Examples include Charlie’s struggle to not self-harm, her choice in lovers, and her decision to move from place to place. High-stakes writing assignments, like short response papers, allow for deeper reflection on topics initially expressed in the paragraph experiments and online discussion forums. Examples include discussing aspects of a toxic relationship, the role of art in her coping strategies and healing practices, the plight of homeless teenagers. Students are compelled to choose between an approach to their literary studies that emphasizes participation, which can be challenging yet rewarding when students are still learning how they learn best and why they seek to learn. All of this cannot happen without the development of their metacognition through these classroom discussions and writing exercises.

Working through this novel with the students necessitated metacognitive exercises in exploring the creative, emotional, and intellectual that enabled some students to turn triggers into glimmers and other students to engender empathy for the characters and their peers who felt safe and brave enough to share their vulnerabilities. By studying and analyzing Charlie, her choices, her outcome, we became a rich and enriched community.

CONCLUSION

Through literature, I find that diversifying the course content and ensuring an inclusive pedagogy presents the opportunity for instilling students with a sense of curiosity through the process of exploration and discovery—one that comes with their self-development. For students to become life-long learners seeking truth, we bear the responsibility for the cultivation of statements, actions, behaviors, and practices that bespeaks a fully realized human being. We can and must continue to assist students in the development of new ways of being in this world as it is.

WORKS CITED

Agosta, L. (2020, September 6). Retrieved from Empathy Lessons: https://empathyinthecontextofphilosophy.com/2020/09/06/the-trouble-with-the-trouble-with-empathy/

The Dominican Charism in American Higher Education: A Vision in Service of Truth. Dominican University. 2012.

Woolf, Virginia. “Leaning Tower.” The Moment and Other Essays. HMH Books, 2003.

Building Emotional Regulation and Metacognition through Academic Entrepreneurship

by Traci McCubbin, M.A., Director of the Promise Program, Merrimack College

(Post #3 Integrating Metacognition into Practice Across Campus, Guest Editor Series Edited by Dr. Sarah Benes)

I teach a required academic study skills course for undergraduate students that have been placed on academic probation. Students share a variety of reasons that have led to their academic predicament, including but not limited to: underdeveloped academic and/or study skills, social and emotional difficulties, time management flaws, and economic challenges.

After digging a bit deeper with students, I found a common trend in addition to the reasons they shared: they lacked positive coping strategies for regulating their emotions. These emotions could be related to difficulties experienced both inside and outside of the classroom. For example, I had students report that they had not been able to cope with the crushing emotions of a close friendship ending. They had either stopped attending class or could not focus in class for weeks.

As you may guess, their poor academic performance was hindering their academic confidence, and their mindset was more fixed than growth. This blog post shares my creation of self-regulation and metacognition development activities that parallel steps that might be taken when professionals create a business plan. Hence the course title, Academic Entrepreneurship.

Motivating Question: How could I even begin to teach academic strategies or have students reflect on their metacognition, if I couldn’t address their emotional state?

Drawing on Literature and Personal Experience

To begin to answer this question, I turned to the research and published work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Emotions, Learning & the Brain and Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Immordino-Yang’s (2016) research reveals that emotions must be present for learning to occur and that strong social emotions, both positive and negative, have the power to motivate our decisions and actions including educational decisions and actions (Imordino-Yang, 2016, pp. 107,171). Dweck’s (2006) studies consistently show the positive power of a growth mindset and the disruptive power of a fixed mindset. Growth mindset is the idea that intelligence and abilities can be developed overtime with hard work and persistence, while fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is predetermined or set (Dweck, 2006).

Through my own reflection on my academic journey, I began to understand how my emotions both positively and negatively impacted my learning. During my middle school days, I struggled with math. My mindset was fixed, and I believed that I was not capable of being successful in this subject area. It was as if every time a new concept was taught, I could feel a metal fortress of walls enclose around my brain to prevent any helpful information from penetrating the walls. Despite this struggle, I did finally master fractions and some of the intro to algebra concepts.

As one might expect of a student with a fixed mindset, my frustrations with math and my feelings of defeat followed me from middle school to high school. My high school math teacher started our class off with a review of fractions; immediately, I felt my heart race, my palms get sweaty, and the metal walls beginning to enclose. It was in this moment of panic that I decided to take a few deep breaths, which allowed me to gain clarity. I reminded myself that I already knew how to handle fractions and that I was capable of learning. That moment was life changing, I had adopted a growth mindset. I began to apply this strategy to my fixed mindset areas including but not limited to: running, science, and drumming. Overtime, I began to take more advance math courses and my overall high school GPA began to climb. I have demonstrated both a growth and fixed mindset in different areas of my academic, professional, and personal life. I believe the same must be true for most people as well as for my students.

My personal experiences, combined with the literature, led me to incorporate key components into my study skills course: emotional regulation practices, regular activities to incorporate mindfulness and mindset, and an overarching course theme of entrepreneurship.

Academic Entrepreneurship Class Context

I decided to provide my students with the opportunity to practice coping skills for regulating their emotions, better understand their mindset, and explore the power of growth mindset. Throughout the semester, we opened the start of each class with a 5-minute-or-less mindfulness meditation or a meditative activity such as mindfulness coloring or progressive relaxation. Students were then given time to reflect on the activity and share how they could apply this strategy in their personal lives and/or in the classroom when they felt overwhelmed or highly energized. Mindset was introduced through a series of video clips and case studies. Students were given multiple opportunities throughout the semester to reflect on their mindset and identify opportunities to challenge their mindset.

Concurrent with the self-regulation activities, students were asked to view their academic approach through the lens of an entrepreneur to enhance their metacognitive perspective. The idea is that by building their personal academic business plan, students are empowered to take ownership of their academic experience through a series of metacognitive reflections, exploration of new study skill strategies, and opportunities to practice new and strengthen pre-existing academic skillsets. Students were asked to focus on four areas of a business plan:

Company Descriptions: Students create their description by engaging in activities and reflections designed to help them identify their interests, personal values, previous academic experiences, activities that bring them joy, and areas of struggle.
Projections: Instead of setting financial projections, students are introduced to SMART Goals and set 4-5 goals with benchmarks for tracking their progress. Students are encouraged to set 2 goals related to their academic progress, one for health and wellness, and one for professional discovery.
SWOT Analysis: Students work through motivational interviewing to help each other identify their strengths and successes, areas of weakness, opportunities, and threats. They are also challenged to address their weaknesses and threats by applying their strengths and resources.
Marketing Plan: Through a series of activities and reflections, students create a plan to sell their Academic Success Business by identifying skills that they strengthen over the semester, resources they accessed, strategies they incorporated, and how these steps translate to leadership.

Figure 1. Academic Entrepreneurship Course Process

Concluding Question: Was I able to help my students practice and implement coping skills for managing their emotions, take ownership of their academic experience, develop a growth mindset, and think critically about their own thinking and learning?

Yes, somewhat, and no….the answer is a bit more complicated and dependent on the student.

Students did proactively engage in the mindfulness meditations and activities of their own accord. They always had the option to remain respectfully quiet and not participate in the meditations or activities. When prompted by an anonymous poll in class about their recent meditative experience, the majority of students requested that we allow for longer practices and activities. They also proactively engaged in dialogues on how they could use these techniques during study breaks, stressful parts of a test, or when dealing with their roommates.

Students landed in very different places when it came to taking ownership of their academic experience, development of a growth mindset, and metacognitive thinking. By the end of the semester a few students had fully taken ownership of their academic experience, were thinking critically and questioning their learning approach and actions, were working towards developing a growth mindset, and could identify when a fixed mindset was starting to develop.

The majority of the students made progress in one area and less progress in the other areas, or only made progress in one area. A few did not make progress outside of practicing their emotional regulation activities.

Though results were mixed, I still believe it is important to teach emotional regulation techniques, provide space for practice, and give students the time to explore and understand their mindset and metacognitive perspective. If students are more aware of their emotional state and able to exercise regulation strategies, they will be better equipped for reflecting on their mindset and metacognitive perspective. This understanding will help them implement a potential shift in perspective and targeted strategies for success. Development takes time and cannot always occur in the framework of a semester. I believe the seeds have been planted and can be nurtured by the student when they are ready to tend to their garden.

References

Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2016). Emotions, learning, and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience. W.W.Norton & Company.

Resources

TEDx Manhattan Beach. (2011). Mary Helen Immordino-Yang – Embodied Brains, Social Minds. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RViuTHBIOq8

Trevor Ragan. (2016). Growth Mindset Introduction: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75GFzikmRY0

Trevor Ragan. (2014). Carol Dweck – A Study on Praise and Mindsets. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWv1VdDeoRY#action=share

Learning Philosophies of Teachers and Students: Two Neglected Metacognitive Catalysts for Success

by Dr. Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities (retired)

Hmmm… COVID year… what a trip. If I slept through it, there were nightmares—lots of ’em. Where did I leave off last April (Nuhfer, 2020)? Oh yeah, we ended with a question: “How might teaching students to write their learning philosophies improve their learning?” Well, OK…let’s continue that… by first realizing that professors’ teaching philosophies are their learning philosophies, and those who do write them come to recognize how keeping such a written record enhances success in teaching.

Philosophies are reflective; they record the results of a metacognitive conversation with oneself. The results articulate the plan for practice disclosing what one wants to do, how one chooses to do it, and how to know the chosen practices’ impact. Philosophies focus on learning about process, which is too rarely the stuff of college education, where the emphasis is on learning content—the disciplines’ products. Even “student-centered-learning” structures too seldom involve directly teaching students to be reflective about how to learn.

$Illustration of components (thinking, teaching, learning) in the fractal generator for faculty and students (by Ed Nuhfer)$

Six critical components of a teaching philosophy appeared in the graphic of the fractal generator above (and also shared my April 2020 blog). An informed teaching/learning philosophy considers all six components. Three crucial components describe internal strengths enlisted during learning: affect, levels of thinking, and metacognition, and three more are competencies mainly built from external sources: content, pedagogy, and assessment.

For nearly twenty years, I led week-long faculty development retreats in which each faculty arrived with a written one-page document that they had constructed as their teaching philosophy. A faculty member rarely arrived at a retreat with a written philosophy that addressed more than three of the six components.

Through the retreats, participants revisited and edited their philosophy a bit each day. Our final exercise of the retreat was sharing the revised philosophies in groups and polishing them more for use. No participant left without awareness of the vital role that each of the six components played. Participants’ written philosophies of practice were probably their most valuable tangible takeaway.

Why written philosophies?

Consider the advantage a written plan confers to constructing anything complex. Architectural design requires written blueprints and strategies because the challenge is just too complex to address well by acting spontaneously from what one can carry around in one’s head. Construction contractors avoid working without a written plan because doing so produces disappointing results.

Learning and teaching are challenges as complex as any construction project. A teaching/learning philosophy acts as the equivalent of an architectural design plan and encompasses the big picture of what we intend to do. Students need learning philosophies for the same reason professors need them, but acting spontaneously without any written philosophy is probably the norm in higher education. How many of your students approach learning with a written plan?

The six components that are so essential for professors to consider also confer similar value to students. It really is up to professors to mentor students to craft their first informed learning philosophies. An excellent way to start students toward constructing their personal learning philosophies is to give each a nearly blank paper with the six components’ names at the top.

Beginners must begin to incorporate the six as a checklist by asking self: “Where are awareness of affect, levels of thinking, etc. in my practice?” After they internalize these six through at least a year of practice, they become cognizant of how all six are interconnected, and awareness occurs that developing one component awakens new insights about the others’ roles. Some authors of philosophies later employ visualization and supplement their philosophies with graphics.

Years ago, the fractal generator shown above became my graphical philosophy. I produced fifty articles under the title “Educating in Fractal Patterns…” for The National Teaching and Learning Forum, as that graphic philosophy helped me more deeply understand and grow from my experiences. Those who maintain a written philosophy and reflect on it regularly will almost surely have similar “Aha moments.”

Essential Components

Let’s see how we can help students become reflective and increase their capacity to learn from the six components.

Affect

We can help students to appreciate the importance of affect by reflecting upon whether the affective mode in which they find themselves is “I have to do this” or “I want to do this.” (See assignment shared in Nuhfer 2014.) Wanting to learn enlists more brainpower to drive learning. Finding ways to make learning fun for ourselves, to want to do it—such as making a party of it by studying with others, can become our most valuable asset. Quantitative courses elicit the most negative affective responses from students (Uttl, White, Morin, 2013). Yet, the book I recommend as the most inspirational book ever written to learn to reverse negative feelings for specific content is Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing. A particular quote I like from p. 11 follows: “When some people ask, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’ what they are really asking is ‘When am I ever going to value this?‘”

Pedagogy

Teachers employ “active learning” pedagogies (Univ Wyoming resources) to increase learning through engagement. One principle underlies all “active learning:” the more of the brain invoked during learning, the better the learning. But another principle is seldom addressed: the longer the time spent in learning with significant portions of the brain activated, the greater the understanding.

Students can apply the same principles to enlist more of their brains. Writing to learn along with reading invokes more of the brain than only reading to learn. Revision of written products, multiple revisions, is one of the most powerful learning strategies known, at least as powerful as any modality on the “Active Learning Spectrum” linked above. For developing their learning philosophies, instructors should assign students to write, revise, and record at the end of each revision how doing revision improved their understanding. Learning to enlist active learning by writing to learn for oneself does not require doing a thesis. Simply writing and revising how to solve a word problem or an evaluative assignment offers sufficient capital through which to develop an appreciation for the power of writing to learn.

Content

Writing (Didn’t we just mention its power?) a knowledge survey builds understanding of the course content that faculty quickly appreciate (Nuhfer & Knipp, 2003). Watch these two very short videos to get a sense of what knowledge surveys are and their impact.

Screen shot of Dr. Ed Nuhfer talking about what knowledge surveys are and their benefits — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENW51282Bwk

screenshot of opening slide stating "Faculty reflect on the value of knowledge surveys" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWbw8buSXIo

With each knowledge survey item that a professor writes, they should follow that with the thought, “What do students need to know to respond with understanding?” That will lead to writing several additional items to build the scaffold needed to address the former item. While students lack the expertise to construct course-based knowledge surveys from scratch, instructors can direct students to share in scaffolding their learning. They can let students build a knowledge survey in small pieces by frequent assignments such as: “Given the content we covered today, replace the knowledge survey’s items about that content with your own authored items to address the equivalent content.” An additional brief helpful exercise to help students to build their own learning philosophy can be: “How did writing your own knowledge survey items change your understanding of the content material? Why might writing such items be a useful learning strategy for learning in other subjects and courses?”

Levels of Thinking

We have already covered developmental levels in a prior post (Nuhfer, 2014), and we showed the connection between levels of thinking and affect (Nuhfer, 2018). Nearly all students misperceive becoming educated as learning skills and content. They have heard of “critical thinking” or “higher-order thinking,” but almost none can really articulate what either looks like. They will not know about such developmental levels of thinking unless the faculty teach them. We earlier provided a module with which instructors can do so (Nuhfer & Bhavsar, 2014). If you are unfamiliar with such developmental models and levels of thinking, which is likely, go through the same module for yourself. Then, guide students through it.

Metacognition

Is it surprising that this component should receive a mention on this blog? What would be truly surprising is if any personal learning philosophy sentence was not a product of metacognitive reflection. A written philosophy archives the portions its writer valued that came out of purposefully directed conversations with self. It expresses the current state of the author’s focus at a specific stage of development. It will change with additional experiences and reflections.

Assessment

The assessment portion of the philosophy likely considers three questions. The first is “Did I really practice my philosophy—did I do what I planned to do?” The second is “What happened as a result?” The third is “Based on what I learned from what happened, what will I focus on next?”

When one develops the ability for “fractal thinking,” one is constantly considering what would result if a pattern of action taken at one scale were enacted at different scales. If these three assessment queries give valuable substance to building an individual’s expertise, what might result if we nurtured such happening at the scale of a program or an institution?

For years, I had hoped to convince an institution to replace the practice of using student ratings scores as the highest stakes criterion for the annual review of instructors with professors’ written philosophies instead. Review committees would examine each philosophy and ask correlatives to the three questions above. It seems easy to see why encouraging metacognitive reflection on improving practice offers a superior option to thinking instead of raising student ratings’ scores. Sigh! I’m still hoping for just one institution to try it.

In summary, writing, revisiting, and revising learning philosophies scaffold us to higher proficiency. Addressing the same six components offers professors and students common ground on which to come together to understand learning and the process of becoming educated.

Change Instead of Continuity: Using Metacognition to Enhance Student Motivation for Learning

by Benjamin A. Johnson, Ph.D., Utah Valley University

“New occasions teach new duties”
James Russell Lowell

In 2020, as we start a new decade, continuity appears to have taken a backseat to change. While change rapidly spreads through and disrupts such areas as health (including a viral pandemic), education, culture, economy, and technology, continuity offers stability, knowledge gained from the past on the human condition and peoples’ capacity to flourish. In this current climate of change, the expression, “new occasions teach new duties” resonates well (Lowell, 1890, p. 184) and appears to have a double meaning for our situation: not only do the events or “new occasions,” require us to “teach new duties,” but the “new occasions” can actually teach us “new duties.” As students navigate the many disruptions in our schools and communities, they urgently need professors who encourage metacognitive strategies to assess and enhance student motivation for engagement and learning.

It seems that student resistance and motivation not to engage is often driven by the motivation to maintain continuity, to stay in safe territory, to avoid anxiety. Students are often motivated to do what is familiar, such as engaging in surface approaches to learning: to memorize, recite, or do the minimum. As students advance through their majors, they may become more intrinsically motivated because they see the courses as relevant to their career goals. Even then, they can become overwhelmed at exams, and may have other priorities that push them towards continuity. On the other hand, effective teaching and engaged learning is all about change. Considering the current pandemic and the sudden transition to online and hybrid learning, faculty and students must be metacognitively aware as never before.

A 2-Step Framework for Change

Some students will not come prepared to class, will not engage at a high level with the assignments, and will not take owernship for their own learning. This can be extremely challenging for professors. Rather than staying frustrated, here is a two-step framework a professor could cultivate to enhance student strengths and encourage positive change:

Step 1: Become more broadly aware of student resistance behaviors, including types and contributing factors.

Step 2: Create self-assessment opportunities for students to become more self-aware of their own openness to change.

Step 1: Identifying Student Resistance to Change

The Forms of Student Resistance Matrix (Tolman & Kremling, 2017) below offers insight on how students may reveal their motives for resistance to learning. The matrix categorizes fundamental forms of resistance, each with different emotional foundations. It shows that students in the accommodation/anxiety (“Preserving Self”) column want continuity, education delivered in the way they find comfortable and familiar, while those in the anger/frustration (“Asserting Autonomy”) column seek change and validation.

Once we have identified types of student resistance, we can effectively focus our energy on helping students think metacognitively about their own learning needs and goals, and help them evaluate their own contributions to obstacles to their success (such as use of relatively ineffective learning strategies). As they better understand their own needs and challenges through self-assessment, they are more likely to decrease their resistance to learning.

Forms of Student Resistance Matrix
Adapted from Tolman & Kremling, 2017

Asserting Autonomy
(Seeking Change)

Pushing against external influence
Emotions: anger, frustration, resentment

Preserving Self
(Seeking Continuity)

Trying to accommodate to external influence
Emotions: anxiety, fear

Active Resistance

Arguing or disagreeing with professor in the classroom
Repeatedly asking for the rationale for assignments
Saying they paid for the class and want it taught how they like
Inciting other students to rebel or not collaborate; disrupting class activities
Complaining to higher authority

Repeatedly asking for detailed clarification of grading criteria
Taking over group assignments to ensure an adequate grade
Arguing with the professor over grades received, seeking additional points or consideration
Focus on surface approach to learning

Passive Resistance

Refusing to come to class
Refusing to participate during in-class exercises (does not get into groups, does not comply with assignment tasks)
Does not turn in assignments at all or is consistently late
Complaining about the professor to other students

Expressing concerns about working with others
Avoidance of conflicts and refusing to resolve situations or bring them to the professor’s awareness
Minimal participation in class (withdrawn, doesn’t speak or give feedback, lets others make all decisions)

Step 2: Student Self-Assessment—Helping Students Recognize Stages of Change

Helping students assess their own openess to adopting new behaviors is key to supporting their learning. Self-assessment helps them recognize that their own attitudes and choices shape their educational outcomes and that their learning is not simply a product of their professors’ work. One assessment tool that can help students self-assess and self-regulate is the TTM Learning Survey (Tolman & Kremling, 2017), based on Prochaska and DiClemente’s (1983) Transtheoretical Model (TTM). Most often utilized in clinical settings, TTM theory provides a useful model for understanding a person’s path towards adopting new behaviors. TTM readiness to change stages include precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.

Assigning the TTM-LS along with a Personal Learning Plan (PLP; a reflective follow-up exercise that asks the individual to identify how to improve and to plan for the semester) may help students work metacognitively to identify their readiness to change (Tolman & Kremling, 2017). Part of the PLP requires the student to evaluate their stage of readiness to change and then describe how they can move forward and overcome their own forms of resistance. I have observed that using these instruments two to three times during the semester improves student metacognition, as evidenced by student reflections.

Additionally, by working through these self-reflective activities, students become more intentional or mindful about their own motivation to change, providing them multiple opportunities to think through their own behavior and learning. Though students may advance or step up higher through the stages of change, they may also revert back to a previous stage. Professors should help them view this regression as developmental and invite them to persist.

Surveys and reflective assignments like the TTM-LS and PLP help students think more about why they might not be not willing to adopt new behaviors and help them acknowledge their own reluctance to change their learning strategies (Tolman & Kremling, 2017; Yanqun, 2019).

Using the Forms of Student Resistance matrix above (Tolman & Kremling, 2017), an actively resisting autonomous student (left column) may acknowledge in their PLP that when they become frustrated, they request the professor be available regularly to explain the rationale for assignments. On the other hand, an actively resisting preserving-self (or an anxious) student (right column) might respond with fear to conform to the expectations of the professor while arguing for a better grade. Self-assessment helps the student better understand their own motivations, fears, and goals, so they can then move forward more deliberately.

This focus on intentionality is a core aspect of genuine metacognitive thinking because it can help students accept their own role in learning—understanding that what they choose to do shapes how they learn and that the main responsibility for learning resides with them, not with the professor. Once students begin to recognize their patterns of resistence and strategies for overcoming this obstacle, they will take more ownership over their learning. Assessments like these help students to shift their education from something that is being forced on them externally (by parents, society, employers) to something that they can personally control (Perry, et al., 2019).

Asking Students to Think Metacognitively Requires Change

Due to changes in this pandemic year, we can also invite students to become more metacognitive about:

technology use: their feelings toward new technology used for virtual or hybrid class settings and their level of mastery of that technology
learning on their own (less interaction in the classroom) – what works and what doesn’t
monitoring their own progress and anxieties in this dynamic environment

The more we support their metacognitive skills in these areas, the more willing they may be to intentionally make this shift. For example, as universities phase into more online learning, students who are motivated not to engage in new learning strategies may struggle to adapt. They may resist actively participating in online learning in its many forms. Professors can implement surveys such as the TTM-LS and a PLP to open the door to key conversations about students’ goals, what they hope to achieve from the class, and especially, how they might need to adapt to become successful in the new modality.

Learning in itself is a process of change, and as students use metacognition to accept rather than resist learning as an individual responsibility, their motivation can shift for the better. At its core, metacognition is about being open to seeing new possibilities and being willing to change (moving from the precontemplation to contemplation stage, for instance). As students practice self-assessment, they can accept the need for change and embrace “new duties.”

References

Lowell, J. R. (1890). Poems. Riverside Press. (Original poem published 1844)
Perry, J., Lundie, D., & Golder, G. (2019) Metacognition in schools: What does the literature suggest about the effectiveness of teaching metacognition in schools? Educational Review, 71(4), 483-500.
Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C.C. (1983). Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390-395.
Tolman, A. O., & Kremling, J. (2017). Why students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students. Stylus.
Yanqun, Z. (2019). The Significance and Instruction of Metacognition in Continuing Education. International Forum of Teaching & Studies 15(1), 29-37.

Metacognition and First-Year Students

by Megan Morrissey, Assistant Director of Student Success, Mount Saint Mary College

MY OWN INTRODUCTION TO METACOGNITION

“But, Meg, how am I supposed to remember this stuff?”

I heard this question quite frequently throughout my first year in 2012-2013 as a part-time Academic Coach, a new position for me in higher education. The core values of my job included:

developing holistic relationships with my students
assisting them in feeling more confident as a college student both academically and personally
aiding in their overall transition to college life

Armed and prepared with questions and exercises I thought would help my students open up to me, I used an intake form that posed logistical questions, like their contact information and intended major, as well as questions that spoke to their interests and self-awareness. However, what became apparent to me is that this generation of students was craving skills that would help them retain information in more meaningful ways, and my focus was to support them in becoming more metacognitive.

For my student meetings, my toolkit included ways to learn and many inventories that tested students’ learning styles. Although these strategies might have worked for an initial exam, giving them a good place to start, these were not enough to help them fully understand key concepts they would be seeing over and again, throughout the semester, and the rest of their college career. They used the skills I gave them to cram information and facts in for that first test, and then they would push all of it aside to do the same thing for the next exam, never truly immersing themselves in the material and understanding the concepts themselves.

THE FEAR OF ASKING QUESTIONS

[In high school] “I didn’t have to study. I paid attention and got good grades.”

Prevalent in secondary education, the “teach to the test” mentality that some educators have is understandable. Being evaluated by standardized test scores, teachers and administrators feel the need to educate their students on exactly what to expect. However, what happens when these students get to college and suddenly the answers to the exam are not so black and white? When they need to defend an answer instead of just memorizing a Power Point slide? When professors want them to immerse themselves in the material? What scared my students the most was their faculty encouraging them to ask questions in class and/or share their informed opinions on what they thought about the material.

Coupled with an intimidation of new faculty, many students face a real imposter syndrome coming into college and feel as if they do not truly belong there. My students have told me that they “don’t want to bother their professors” or are afraid of asking “dumb questions” and risk having faculty look at them in a negative way. My students also struggled with figuring out specifically how to word questions to faculty to get the clarification they need. In order to help them with this task, I would ask them in our meetings to explain what they might be having trouble with in class, asking my own questions to ensure I understood what they needed. Then, we would do a role-play:

My students play their professor, and I play the student.
They give me the absolute worst things that they think their faculty might say and I, in turn, show them how to navigate the situation and get their questions answered.
We then switch roles so that they can practice and anticipate their own reactions and responses.

HOW DO HIGH-ACHIEVING STUDENTS DO IT?

The role-playing exercises I used with my students to ease their anxiety in relating to their faculty led me to think more about how other higher achieving students were able to perform at such a caliber. A study from Iowa State University investigated academic achievement, achievement goals and beliefs about learning surrounding study strategies. The researchers concluded that competence, it seems, can be found both through performance, i.e. the results of an exam or quiz, and through reflection in comparing the actual results achieved to their own expectations (Geller et. al., 2018). Four patterns of achievement goals constitute the development of student competence:

They cultivate a personal sense of having learned the material.
They create the greatest link with metacognitive skills.
They monitor their own progress.
They adjust their study habits accordingly.

To achieve more, successful students engaged in metacognition, assessing the work they have already successfully retained, creating questions to more accurately understand the material they have yet to master and adjusting as needed. They also relied on study skills that included self-testing and planning out their study schedules to avoid procrastinating and cramming.

SUPPORTING STUDENTS WITH ANXIETY

In order to address a rise in the number of students with anxiety-related health issues, we deploy a reverse design in developing several strategies to help them cope. I assist them in the following tasks and activities:

creating a structured study schedule, working backwards from when their exam is, breaking down how much material they feel they can handle in a day, and
rehearsing, i.e. going to the actual classroom, when empty, and creating a practice test (using questions from their professors, textbooks and/or the internet), having them sit in their seat, and taking the practice test in the time they’re usually allotted. This activity not only facilitates the comprehension of the test material, but also anticipates the coping mechanisms they will use in case they get anxious, e.g. deep breathing, repeating a mantra they have created, and scanning the test to see what answers they absolutely know. This process of focusing awareness on their state of mind (specifically looking at when, where, how and why their anxiety peaks) and then using that to adjust their behaviors is another form of metacognition.

HOW CAN FACULTY HELP?

“If metacognition is the answer to being a more engaged and high achieving learner, what strategies can be utilized in class to better assist them in engaging in metacognition?”

Instructors can be powerful influencers by incorporating strategies in their courses and explicitly encouraging metacognitive practices. A study done by Wilson and Bai (2010) at the University of Central Florida concluded that educators need to make metacognition a priority in their lessons and demonstrate the flexibility of these learning strategies in order to show students that they need to reflect and think about how they are retaining information. These reflections can include the following:

active discussions and think-alouds
asking students to hand in questions anonymously before class—concepts, ideas, and points-of information—that they may not have understood from the previous lesson and/or homework assignment
incorporating reflective writing at the end of each class session and to guide them in making connections in what they have been learning

CONCLUSION

My students often come into my office during the first few days of their new journey at our institution. Their emotions are raw and they’re terrified of making any type of mistake. In bridging reflective practices with the development of students’ metacognitive skills, the power, for me, lies in asking purposeful, thoughtful questions and, thus, guiding them as they confront their fear of asking questions and learn to ask questions themselves. Metacognitive skills assist them in building self-confidence in and out of the classroom.

WORKS CITED

Geller, Jason, et al. “Study strategies and beliefs about learning as a function of academic achivement and achievement goals.” Memory (2018): 8. Article.

Wilson, Nancy S. and Haiyan Bai. “The relationships and impact of teachers’ metacognitive knowledge and pedagogical understandings of metacognition.” Metacognition Learning (2010): 20. Study.

Reflection Matters: Using Metacognition to Track a Moving Target

INTRODUCTION: A CALL FOR CONTEMPLATIVE PEDAGOGY

“Study: one must truly learn how to do it.”—Fr. Guido Vergauwen, OP

Everyday mitigating factors, such as distractions, pressures, insecurities and anxieties, can become manifest in the teaching-and-learning classroom climate on the parts of both instructors and students and, thus, can exacerbate the challenges that all already face in that place. However, the philosophy and praxis of contemplative pedagogy allows everyone to focus on the present and engage in the moment in order to address whatever needs tending to in that instant.

The practices of contemplative pedagogy creates a space within one’s intellectual and emotional reactions to course content and/or whatever informs one’s engagement therein—be it a spoken or written remark, a difficult topic, or an emerging theme. These practices bridge reflection (or contemplation), as the serious consideration of one’s thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, with metacognition, which highlights the awareness and understanding of one’s thought processes in the development of one’s skills sets. Integrating reflection with metacognition holds the potential in creating a rich teaching-and-learning environment.

AN ANALOGY: TARGET PRACTICE

In order to create and cultivate this kind of climate and culture, I draw upon Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire H. Major’s analogy of target practice, in Learning Assessment Techniques (2015). Here, Barkley and Major differentiate Goals (broader plans) and Objectives (steps, methods, and tools in achieving goals) from Outcomes (the results from the execution and delivery of objectives)—all of which are applicable outside of higher education.

Teaching & Learning Goals: See the target.

Teaching & Learning Objectives: Aim for the target.

Teaching & Learning Outcomes: Hit the target.

While I can establish these determinants for any class in which I find myself, what is essential is that the students articulate their own determinants for any class in which they find themselves with me. Within the first week of classes, I deploy a set of assignments that connect reflection with metacognition:

a questionnaire for creating a climate for teaching and learning that asks the students various questions that account for best and worst practices on the parts of students and instructors;
a set of diagnostic paragraphs that require the students to reflect on their perceptions of self and others, and study habits and lifestyle issues that may affect their course;
guidelines that determine what failure and success looks and feels like from the students’ perspectives.

Here, allow me to extend Barkley and Major’s useful metaphor of target practice in emphasizing that the practice itself anticipates two goals: cultivating a sense of discipline through practice and hitting the target. In her Faculty Focus essay, “Enhancing Learning through Zest, Grit and Sweat,” Lolita Paff applies these terms to the teaching and learning opportunities and practices that inform our pedagogy (November 14, 2018).

zest equates with the cultivation of curiosity;
grit represents the tenacity in meeting a challenge;
sweat embodies the work ethic embodied in the intellectual labor itself.

For instructor and student alike, motivation itself informs zest, grit and sweat as part and parcel of one’s metacognitive reflection (or reflective metacognition) when assessing one’s failure or success in a course.

A TIME FOR CONTEMPLATION: PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY DURING COVID-19

“Listening is an encounter. And an encounter is like a crossroads—our own and that of the person who is listening to us.”—Sr. Jeanne-Marie de Menibus

Throughout the course of a semester, I adopt reflection with metacognition in order to gauge where we are with where we need to be by the end of the semester. On any given day, I check-in with the students to ask the following formative questions:

What works?
What does not work?
What needs to be amended, revised, and/or updated altogether?

However, this past March of 2020, the auspicious timing of COVID-19 with Spring Break necessitated The Pause and The Pivot in adapting our instructional delivery to the virtual arena—Pandemic Pedagogy—across all grade levels in the United States. Here, allow me to borrow the language of public health that guides all of us in this pandemic: the above questions, so typical for me at this juncture in every semester, compelled me to truly cull and glean—triage—what was and was not essential in the course in order to gauge where all of us—students, colleagues, family and friends, and myself—were at that time. Always, first and foremost, the need for authentic communication—a check-in—fosters a mindset that encourages simply asking questions, in a classroom, in a meeting, in a heightened conversation even as it also necessitates a slowing down to hold still and listen in contemplation.

Requisite course evaluations function as a Pandora’s Box of sorts insofar as their usefulness as authentic assessment tools in shaping one’s pedagogy while holding one accountable for their philosophy and praxis. Typically, and to counterbalance course evaluations, I deploy a closing commentary that asks student to reflect upon the course. This reflection, approached as a professional letter to me, runs the gamut of prompts that solicit specific pieces of information: the reading selections, the various assessment tools, e.g. exams (instructor- and student-created), writing assignments (low- and high stakes), and their own thoughts and suggestions for future students.

At the close of this semester, and in emulating practices across other American colleges and universities, I added a few formative questions in order to enhance the processes of metacognitive reflection (or reflective metacognition) in the following:

involvement or engagement
motivation or passion
a literacy skill honed throughout the semester
a new technological, practical, or communicational skill honed (in the virtual classroom)
a practice, an activity, or an idea for me to sustain (in an actual or virtual classroom)

CONCLUSION: THE GREAT PAUSE

How does one protest a problem without first mentioning it?—A Zen Koan

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.—Albert Einstein

In discerning what is and is not essential in a course, in going remote these days, the “business as usual” approach strikes me as intensely odd because The Old Normal was not always working, was not always effective, and was not always … good. Living in The New Normal has exposed the underpinnings and trappings of The Old Normal in such startling ways that for some of us tracking a moving set of targets—the curves of a pandemic, work-at home adjustments, updates in our pedagogical practices through technology—necessitates holding still in contemplation.

WORKS CITED

de Menibus, Jeanne-Marie, OP. “A Contemplative Listens and Teaches.” Towards the Intelligent Use of Liberty: Dominican Approaches in Education. Edited by Gabrielle Kelly, OP, and Kevin Saunders, OP. 2014. 99-102.

Vergauwen, Guido, OP. “The Charism of Study in the Education of Dominicans.” Towards the Intelligent Use of Liberty: Dominican Approaches in Education. Edited by Gabrielle Kelly, OP, and Kevin Saunders, OP. 2014. 89-98.

Connecting Emotional Intelligence with Metacognition

by Gina Burkart, Ed.D., Learning Specialist, Clarke University

Emotional intelligence has been receiving lots of attention in the news. In fact, recent research has shown that higher levels of emotional intelligence can lead to salary increases (Rode, Arthaud-Day, Rmaswami, & Howes, 2017). So what exactly is emotional intelligence? It is the ability to recognize, think about, and regulate how one’s thoughts and emotions are impacting one’s behaviors and habits. These characteristics link it with metacognition because it correlates with our ability to think about what we do, how we do it, and how we think about our own thinking and whether or not we even engage in metacognition.

Nuhfer (2017) also addressed this relationship when he explored how affect governs how we think and feel, and determines how we filter the world and operate—thus controlling our success and failure. Additionally, studies are showing that guiding college students in developing emotional intelligence leads to increases in retention and persistence of college students (Mendez, Aronold, Erjavec, & Lopez, 2018-2019). Likewise, research indicates holistic interventions that focus on non-cognitive factors might make the biggest difference in helping students recover academically (Friedlander, Reid, Shupak, & Cribbie, 2007).

Emotional intelligence and metacognition both can be developed through careful curriculum development that allows space in the classroom for both introspective and group work. This blog post shares some examples of collaborative work with our campus learning center – these efforts help students find productive cognitive and emotional strategies that foster new habits and support their success.

Strategies for Embedding Metacognition Linked with Emotional Intelligence into the Classroom

Embedding emotional intelligence and metacognition into a college classroom might seem overwhelming or be perceived as taking time away from necessary content. However, many strategies can be quickly and easily embedded into existing curriculum and increase learning and efficacy of students. Each of the processes I describe below have components to 1) bring awareness to feelings related to academic performance, 2) identify possible strategies, and 3) support emotional self-regulation in enacting strategies.

Journaling based on the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Model

I have found the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Model to be a useful tool to facilitate metacognition and emotional intelligence throughout the semester. The model guides students in knowing self, choosing self, and giving self to establish what is needed or what feelings are occurring, how the student will respond based on what is needed and how he or she is feeling, and why that is the appropriate action.

This model can be used in a variety of courses to assign an easy 5-minute journal prompt at the beginning of each class period. For example, I have students use What, How, and Why to reflect on and write about how they are feeling (aspect of emotional intelligence) and what they are learning on index cards. I collect them immediately after the 5 minutes has passed. During small group work, I quickly read through the cards and write quick suggestions/feedback upon them and then return the cards to the students. It also helps me keep my pulse on how the class is feeling (instructor emotional intelligence). For example, a student might write:

What Feeling: Not confident in class participation, feel anxious
How Respond: More time spent reading the class assignments before class (My comment to student—Great idea! SQ3R would be an efficient and effective strategy to review the chapter 30 minutes before class)
Why: If I am familiar with the material, I will have confidence and participate. My participation grade and learning of the material will improve.

Identifying and Appropriately Responding to Distorted Thoughts

Because emotions are based on thoughts, and thoughts can be inaccurate, I have found it very helpful to teach students about distorted thoughts and how to correct them. I spend two class periods on this in the college study strategy course that I teach. During week three (the week research shows us students decide to leave college) of the College Study Strategy course, I introduce students to different types of distorted thoughts (e.g. overgeneralization – one negative event is seen as a pattern; comparative thinking – you measure yourself by others’ ability even if that comparison may be inaccurate), ask them to share experiences, and then have them record and counter the experiences throughout the week in a response journal. Additionally, I have them identify in a chart examples of distorted thoughts in characters of stories, shows, or movies they have watched. We then discuss them in class the following week. This approach has also been integrated into the Introduction to Physical Therapy course and the Introduction to Nursing course.

I also facilitate workshops on the topic of distorted thoughts, tailoring the content to the course curriculum. Handout 1 can be a helpful resource for facilitating this with students—and can be incorporated into the Six Second model. Additionally, I assign journal reflections based on student self-identified, distorted thoughts that occur throughout the week (See Handout 2).

Summary

In thinking about how to integrate emotional regulation and metacognition strategies into curriculum, it is helpful to recall that people are intrinsically motivated when they have a deeper understanding of self, one aspect of which is the emotional self. Recent research has shown that students with high levels of intrinsic motivation are more productive, persistent, and have higher levels of emotional wellbeing (Froiland, Oros, Smith, & Hirchert, 2012).

Embedding these types of emotional intelligence and metacognition assignments need not be complex or complicated. The more frequently students engage in the process of thinking about what they are doing and feeling, and make adjustments to their practices based on that thinking, the more likely this will become an automatic practice. Actually, making emotional self-regulation quick and routine will make identification and control of emotions a productive habit for the students and professors. And, ultimately, it will increase learning, persistence and carry over into the students’ personal lives and careers.

References

Friedlander, L..J., et al. (2007) Social support, self-esteem, and stress as predictors of adjustment to university among first-year undergraduates. Journal of College Student development, 48(3), 259-274.

Froiland, J. M., Oros, E., Smith, L. & Hirchert, T. (2012). Intrinsic motivation to learn: The nexus between psychological health and academic success. Contemporary School Psychology, 16, 91-101.

Mendez, S., Arnold, C. Erjavec, P., Lopez, L. (2018-2019). Does emotional intelligence predict persistence among students on academic probation? Journal of Student Affairs, 107-117. https://sahe.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/09/SAHE-journal-2019.pdf#page=54

Rode, J. C., Arthaud-Day, M. L., Ramawami, A., Howes, S. (2017). A time-lagged study of emotional intelligence and salary. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 101, 77-89. Retrieved from https://paperdownload.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/5535-time-lagged-emotional-intelligence-salary.pdf

Being Authentic: Modeling Metacognitive Growth and Connecting with Students

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

Learning takes effort and can feel hard at times. Likewise, learning to manage one’s learning processes better, growing metacognitively, is an effortful process. Because approaches to learning are habitual, deeply ingrained over time, changing them is hard. Metacognitive growth often progresses in fits and starts with cycles improvement and relapse into old habits. This is true for our students and for us as instructors. Remembering this can help us help them better with metacognitive lessons that can guide them throughout their lives.

I often say that teaching students about metacognition and engaging them in their metacognitive growth is one of the most important and authentic things I do academically. I have expertise within my field (Mechanical Engineering, Dynamic Systems and Control) and I am accomplished at applying it to engineering problems. When I engage students in learning this content, I model this expertise. I strive to make my content-focused teaching authentic, but it isn’t authentic in the same way as providing instructional experiences for my students on metacognition. While I may know which disciplinary concepts students will likely struggle with, my struggles with those concepts are a distant memory. However, as I engage my students in metacognitive growth, i.e., changing my habitual approaches to learning, my struggles are concurrent with theirs.

Becoming a student again

For example, I have encountered my metacognitive struggles as I have been learning German, initially as a hobby and now more intentionally as I prepare for a sabbatical in Germany. About a year-and-a-half ago I decided to sign up for a Duolingo account to see if I could resurrect and build on my prior German language experience. I had just signed my children up for accounts to practice Spanish and sensed an opportunity to finally work towards a long-held personal goal – becoming proficient in another language. Armed with my knowledge of metacognition, I wanted to make my practice effective and efficient. I set a modest but good practice goal of two grammar modules per day, and I jumped in. I have been consistent in my daily practice – only missing about three days in 18 months – and I have added some varied strategies to practice German – Duolingo stories (spoken dialogues with text), trying to use basic phrases in my daily life, and trying to read German news stories. However, I have also noticed some metacognitive pitfalls in my language practice, even as I have gotten more serious about it.

I have not engaged in recall practice, despite the pop-up messages reminding me that I should take time after a session to recall new vocabulary and key grammar and usage insights. I also know its value, but I tell myself I just don’t have time. I am avoiding a good strategy and making poor use of my metacognitive knowledge of strategies and tasks.

I also lack a clear learning goal. What does proficient mean? How will I know I have achieved it? What are appropriate incremental goals that build towards proficiency? Admittedly, for most of this time, this has been more of a hobby pursuit, but if I really want to develop the skill, I need more specific, even if still modest, learning goals. This is poor metacognitive planning.

Then there is how I track my progress. I am sad to say I have taken pride in the number of XP points (virtual points within Duolingo) I have accrued and the number of modules I have crossed off. They are easy to count, but this does not really assess my proficiency with the German language accurately. This is poor metacognitive monitoring of my learning.

Within the story modules, I am tentative and find myself relying too much on being able to hover over the words to see the definition before answering the comprehension questions. Why do I find it hard to commit to an answer, right or wrong, and learn from it? It feels hard, but as I tell my students, this is how you know you are learning. I am relying on a lower quality strategy because it feels good.

Acknowledging the Same Struggles

So, each time I bring up metacognition with my students, I am faced with the reality of my struggles with it, as demonstrated by the pitfalls in my German language practice. Thus, I teach about metacognition, not as an expert who has it all figured out, but rather as one who is, perhaps, further along the path. This is humbling. So, what can I do with this struggle? Can I really engage my students in their metacognitive growth if I am struggling with my own metacognitive growth? Yes! But how I go about it matters.

If I ignore talking about metacognition altogether, then I might avoid feeling uncomfortable about my failings with it. But I would not likely grow myself nor help my students grow metacognitively. If I pretend I have it all figured out, then I risk being found-out, losing my credibility, and sabotaging my students’ potential metacognitive growth.

However, if embrace my struggles with metacognition and am honest about them with my students, then I might be able to grow myself while I also help my students. There are at least two mechanisms for positive impact, acknowledging my similarity to my students and providing my students a concrete model of metacognitive growth in practice.

When I accept that I am like my students and my students are like me in struggling with metacognitive practice and growth (e.g., my German language studies), I gain a more complete view of my students. I can no longer view them as just lazy, unmotivated, or lacking in work ethic. Instead I can see sincere effort and a desire to learn and do well in classes, in spite of less effective learning behaviors. When I see my students in this way, I have a better attitude when I interact with them. This enables me to authentically praise the positive aspects of their learning behavior and to more gently challenge the less effective aspects they are relying on. It can move our interaction from a place of discouragement to one of encouragement and can help students to view their ability to grow into the learning challenge before them. When I recognize that my students have similar barriers to metacognitive growth as I do, I am able to be more compassionate and supportive as I help them face the challenges they experience in their learning.

Points of Connection

Sharing my own metacognitive struggles, e.g., with my German language practice, can provide a point of connection with my students. Students can have a hard time identifying with their instructors, viewing us as experts with experiences far removed from theirs. It is heartening to see students warm up to me and talk more openly and honestly about their approaches to learning when I have shared elements of my struggles with learning German. Suddenly, the relational distance between us shrinks because I have a present learning experience, concurrent with theirs, that they can readily identify with. Such authentic connections build trust and a foundation for a relationship, which can lead to further support and processing of their learning experiences.

Beyond forging an authentic connection, I can also constructively model of the effortful and continual path to becoming a more skillful learner, i.e., metacognitive growth. Sharing my critiques of my German language practice can demonstrate metacognitive evaluation of my learning processes and my openness to ongoing refinement. However, metacognitive growth does not stop with recognizing ineffective or less effective learning strategies. It requires doing something about it, enacting a productive change. For example, I could share a more refined and specific goal – such as, wanting to be able to engage in pleasantries and make small talk in German – which also helps direct my practice and how I monitor my progress.

How can this look within a specific class? This winter I have been teaching computer programming, and I have found it useful with a few students to draw analogies between my language practice and working towards proficiency with programming concepts. Becoming conversant in German requires more than just knowing German grammar rules, e.g., declensions for accusative cases. I must practice using it in conversation, that is, applying it. Similarly, to become proficient with programming I must know how to write conditional statements and loops, but I also must know how to apply them in various ways to accomplish a specified task – I have to practice applying the concepts. I was trying to model the need to align learning strategies with specific learning goals.

In summary, if I can identify with my students, I can better help them with their metacognitive growth. It helps me to be more gentle and supportive in my desire to see them grow metacognitively. It can also can help my students connect with me and see that they too can persist in their metacognitive growth when I am forthright with my metacognitive shortcomings. Being authentic matters and it can help me do what I think is the most important teaching that I do, helping my students become better learners. These are enduring lessons that can help them be successful throughout their lives, even if they forget the content that I was teaching!

Creating a Proactive Transition for the College Student with LD (Part lll): An Elevator Pitch and the Two O’s

By Mary L. Hebert, PhD; Campus Director, The Regional Center for Learning Disabilities; Fairleigh Dickinson University

I have submitted earlier posts (Part 1; Part 2) that have addressed the transition for high school seniors with a learning disability (LD). I’d like to further propose two concepts from the counselor corner of my work with students with learning disabilities and executive function challenges as they navigate their new college learning environment: an elevator pitch and the two O’s.

Elevator Pitch spelled out in colored blocks

Points of transition, whether perceived as positive or negative, are typically experienced as stressors just by design of being human. Transitions are potentially more stressful for students who have spent a learning career managing an LD. Anticipatory responses to a transition can include anxiety and concerns about navigating the pace and content of a new academic environment. For a student with an LD, this can feel not just like a change of pace, but rather a frenzied experience without proper preparation.

Metacognition offers an outstanding framework for preparing for this new learning environment. Self-reflection and intrapersonal awareness as far as how the LD has impacted one socially, cognitively and emotionally is an excellent endeavor in order to prepare for the requisite independence of mind and action to tackle the adjustment ahead in college.

Students who have had a documented LD during their k-12 years experience concerns developmentally typical of all new college students:

Will I succeed in this new environment?
Will I make new friends?
How will I manage on my own?

Students with LD, however, sometimes may experience more significant concerns as a result of their prior educational experiences. As these high school seniors transition, they will need to prepare for a new learning environment, one where they are starting everything anew and independently. They will not have the familiar support and structure of a case manager, parents, clearly demarcated schedule encompassing their entire day, or other familiar assistive supports that helped them navigate the terrain of their high school educational experience.

In this post I will focus on two concepts that I have utilized during my time as a counselor for college students with LD. Both of these are transition “tools of mind” that provide a metacognitive orientation to adjustment to college life. The first is the importance of having an Elevator Pitch at the ready upon entry to college. The second is the awareness and reflection on The Two O’s: opportunities and obstacles. As stated in my prior posts, my mission is to support students by helping them prepare, which will ease transition stress and increase readiness. Preparation prevents perspiration!

The Elevator Pitch

We have all heard this expression as it relates to the opportunities in business and ‘selling oneself’ for a position when one does not have much time to pitch their fit for a job. In the case of a student with LD, they will need to be able to independently articulate their needs to relevant others in the college setting. For students with LD it may be challenging to speak in an impromptu fashion with individuals they do not know well. A prepared elevator pitch will help them in such situations.

The elevator pitch becomes particularly important when a student will need to advocate on their own behalf. Self – advocacy skills are significantly associated with success in the college setting. Having a parsimonious, prepared statement of one’s needs at the ready can be advantageous for the student with a LD entering a new learning environment and adjusting to more independent self-advocacy.

An accurate self- assessment or metacognitive reflection of one’s strengths, skills sets and challenges is essential for academic as well as future career selection. Often times, students who have moved through their education with an LD have had to focus significantly on tackling skills sets such as reading, writing, math and other core academic skills. This focus can take away from time spent considering their goals and strengths, which should be the foundation for self-advocacy. Solid self-advocacy improves the likelihood for a gratifying personal and career experience (Palmer and Roessler, 2000).

I suggest that students be proactive and prepare a metacognitive reflection of their LD, characteristics of its impact on their academics, and what they know to be helpful in their educational environment. It is also key for them to become knowledgeable about college-level accommodations and the rights they will have in college to seek out services for their learning needs. It is advantageous to apply metacognition in a way that will foster an opportunity to reflect and prepare a succinct, effective pitch that achieves key goals as they adjust to their new learning environment. These key goals include:

Self Advocacy
Self Awareness
Self Efficacy

I like to think of these three goals as the ultimate selfies! The ability to convey their learning needs and goals to their disability coordinator, a professor, a tutor or another professional in their college environment will be essential to have at the ready. Doing so will decrease stress and increase the ultimate selfies.

Obstacles and Opportunities (the two O’s)

There will be both opportunities and obstacles. Simply and plainly, there is no escaping either for ANY student. Preparing in a metacognitive manner about both these types of eventual experiences will benefit any student but particularly a student with a history of LD. Provide metacognitive reflection prompts by asking these or similar questions of your student:

What have been some successes in your educational career thus far?
What have you learned from these? How have they helped you move ahead in regard to the ultimate selfies?
What have been some obstacles in your educational career thus far?
What have you gained from these challenges? How have they advanced your movement toward your educational goals?

This metacognitive reflection provides the bedrock for continued reflection at the college level. From the counselor’s chair it is a continued dialogue of self-discovery as the student ultimately encounters and reflects on opportunities and obstacles. The reflection prompts also provide a vocabulary to frame experiences that feel elusive (the opportunities) as well as the stressors (the obstacles), and these prompts promote turning the latter into openings for growth. And yes, they contribute to the ultimate selfies.

In conclusion, my wish is that the summer brings forth much needed time for students to relax, and have fun. But, importantly, the summer is also the ideal time to reflect on the path traveled thus far and prepare for the future. Metacognition offers an effective tool to apply to past educational endeavors, pave the way for the next educational transition, and create a foundation for success.

Palmer, C. and Richard T. Roessler (2000). Requesting Classroom Accommodations: Self Advocacy and Conflict Resolution Training for College Students with Disabilities. Journal of Rehabilitation. 66 (3): 38-43

Addressing Student Resistance to Engaging in their Metacognitive Development

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

You may be familiar with the quip,

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Perhaps you can’t, however, my grandfather argued, “but you can put salt in its oats!” We can advise students on the importance of setting specific learning goals and accurately monitoring both their level of understanding and their learning processes. And I believe we should teach them how to be more metacognitive, but we can’t make them do any of it. Nor do I think we should. Students should own their learning. They should experience agency and efficacy in their learning (i.e., they should own their learning). But I can put “salt in their oats!” In this post I want to explore our role, as educators, in encouraging and providing opportunities for students to grow their metacognitive awareness and skills (i.e., our role as purveyors of “learning salt”).

I recently found the book Why Students Resist Learning (Tolman & Kremling, 2017). While written about resistance to learning in general, it is relevant to student resistance to engaging in their metacognitive development. Student resistance is complex with multiple interacting components. In my reading so far I have been challenged by two overarching themes. First, student resistance isn’t just about students. It’s about us, the educators, too. Our interactions with students can exacerbate or ameliorate student resistance. Second, student resistance is a symptom of deeper issues, not a student characteristic itself. For example, a student may be trying to preserve their sense of self and fear admitting a learning deficiency or a student may have had prior experiences that affirm surface approaches to learning and therefore they resist the idea that they need strategies to develop deeper learning.

We, as educators, need to recognize and deal with our role in student resistance to metacognitive development. Our interactions with our students are largely influenced by our beliefs and attitudes about our students. My colleagues and I have sought to address this in the B-ACE framework for giving formative feedback in support of metacognitive development. The ‘B’ represents an attitude of Believing the best about students. When we prepare to give feedback, we are responding to what they have written or said, which may or may not be accurate or complete. Believing the best acknowledges that we have incomplete information and need to reserve judgement. This attitude embodies sincere curiosity and seeks understanding. The remaining letters represent actionable elements of feedback, Affirm-Challenge-Encourage. Implementing our belief in the best about our students, we should seek to authentically affirm positive behaviors and growth, however small. Then explore and seek to understand the broader contexts and details of their statements by asking questions. In this way, you can provide gentle challenge to think more deeply or to discover incongruities between learning goals and behaviors. Finally, close by encouraging them. Let your students know you believe in their abilities to become more skillful learners, with effort and perseverance. If you say it, make sure you mean it. You can also point them to potential strategies to consider. Let’s see how we can implement the B-ACE framework as “learning salt”.

In my teaching, I provide a variety of opportunities for my students to engage in their metacognitive development. At some point I ask something like, “What have you been doing differently since we last talked? How is it helping you be a more skilled and efficient learner?” One common type of response I get from engineering students is exemplified by:

“I am continuing to work practice problems to get ready for exams. I try to work through as many as I can. It works best for me.”

Okay. No change. I’m disappointed. First, I need to make sure I don’t assume they are just memorizing and pattern matching, i.e., relying on surface learning approaches. Or, if they are memorizing and pattern matching, I need to believe it is in honest effort to learn. Further, change is hard and they may be trusting what is familiar and comfortable, even if it isn’t the most effective and efficient. Now I need to ACE the rest of the feedback.

[Affirm] Good! You are taking intentional steps to prepare for your exams. [Challenge] How do you know it works best? What other strategies have you tried? [Encourage] Keep being intentional about your learning. You may want to try recall-and-review, explaining-to-learn, or creating your own problems to measurably test your understanding.

There will be a difference between written feedback and oral feedback, but notice that both include an opening for further interaction and prompt metacognitive reflection. In a face-to-face dialogue, there might be other questions depending on the responses, such as, “How are you working the problems? What will happen if the problem is asked in a way that is different from your practice?” In written feedback, I may want to focus on one question instead of a list, so as not to overwhelm the student with challenge. Notice that these questions are seeking additional information and pointing the student to make connections. Still the student may or may not take my suggestions to try something different. However, I argue this type of response is “saltier” than just settling for this response or telling them directly their approach isn’t as effective, and it may lead to further dialogue later on.

In a recent post, Aaron Richmond questions if well-intentioned metacognitive instruction can, in specific cases, be unethical (Richmond, 2018). John Draeger provides counterpoint in his response, but acknowledges the need to recognize and address possible adverse reactions to metacognitive instruction (Draeger, 2018). The B-ACE feedback framework both encourages student metacognition and is an expression of Ethical Teaching, summarized by Richmond (Richmond, 2018). It acknowledges students’ autonomy in their learning, seeks to avoid harm and promote their well-being, and strives to be unbiased and authentic. Further, it can address adverse reactions, by helping students to discover the deeper issues of their reaction.

In caring for our students, we want to see them grow. They aren’t always ready. Prochaske, Norcross, and DiClemente (1994) delineate six stages of change, and it starts with the lack of awareness and willingness to change. Change takes time an effort. Even so, let’s commit to making interactions with our students “salty”! Let’s gently, quietly, and persistently encourage them in their metacognitive development.

References

Prochaska, J., Norcross, J., & DiClemente, C. (1994). Changing for Good. New York: Harper Collins.

Tolman, A. & Kremling, J. (Eds.). (2017). Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Acknowledgements

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

Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition Part 3: Recognizing Parallel Development of Cognition and Affect

by Dr. Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities (retired)

In Part 1, we showed how the initial views of behavioral scientists toward metacognition and affect led for a time to a view of intellectual development as exclusively cognitive. In Part 2, we showed that established ways of knowing each rest on unique concepts, and gaining a working understanding of any way of knowing requires first becoming aware of its supporting concepts.

In Part 2, we used the way of knowing for reaching ethical decisions to illustrate the practical necessity of understanding the four components of ethics and their relationships to each other. There seems to be no profession in which thought and practice do not involve ethical decisions, so it seems no accident that William Perry chose the title: Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years for his landmark book describing how higher education, when successful, changes students’ abilities to think.

Major ways of knowing, obviously ethics but even heavily objective ways of knowing such as science or quantitative reasoning, require us to commit to decisions that resolve conflicts between what we feel we want to be correct with what new knowledge leads us toward knowing to be correct. When a conflict occurs between feeling and knowing, it often arises from life experiences that we have not critically examined but which new knowledge and/or newly acquired processes of critical examination force us to confront. For part 3, we examine the role of metacognition to help understand how intellectual progress causes us to feel in certain ways as we work to gain a college education.

About a decade ago, I discovered that the Bloom team’s Taxonomy of the Affective Domain mapped so well onto the Perry Model of Intellectual Development (Nuhfer, 2008) that it provided a much-needed map for empowering metacognitive reflection on both affect and cognition. The map, summarized in Figure 1, greatly clarified for me how to better promote metacognitive development in both students and faculty. I hope that readers will find this map equally useful.

The researchers’ named equivalent stages of development appear in Figure 1’s rows, and the affective feelings noted in the middle column were those that I deduced from examining the affective comments of students recorded in Perry’s book and other studies, made within the stages deduced through researchers’ longitudinal interviews. Longitudinal studies were the basis for the Perry stages and also for the studies that followed after Perry (see Journal of Adult Development, 2004).

Figure 1. Parallel development of intellectual and affective capacities through higher education (slightly modified from Nuhfer, 2008). Metacognition must engage with emotions (middle column) if it is to be effective in advancing adult intellectual development. Otherwise, metacognition becomes just an additional tool for increasing absorption of disciplinary content.

When students know that becoming educated involves passing through an established sequence of developmental stages, each with its own defining cognitive and affective traits, they have a map that they can use to discover their present location and to guide them toward what lies ahead on the path to gaining an education. Regarding metacognition’s description as “thinking about thinking,” awareness of the sequential stages with their accompanying emotions allows students to expect, reflect, and then resolve the discomforting affective feelings that arise. Trepidation and even some fear are normal, and they even can serve as important indicators of progress in cognitive growth.

Those who strive to become educated engage in a journey toward the highest Perry Stages of intellectual development through passing through the earlier stages. Achieving resolution of our reactive affective feelings that occur during these transitional stages is often an internal struggle. Metacognition, a reflective internal conversation with self about our thinking, seems indispensable to this growth.

Important Questions when Linking Bloom’s taxonomies and Perry’s stages

Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain (see Scharff, 2017) is one of the best-known contributions to education, but experts debate the degree to which the Bloom cognitive levels are hierarchical, developmental products. In contrast, the developmental character of both the Perry model and the Taxonomy of the Affective Domain is generally accepted. That both address the sequential development of college students explains why the two map better onto one another than do even the two Bloom team’s taxonomies of the cognitive and affective domains.

The map provided by Figure 1 illuminates a possible deficiency of learning design in higher education. Educators consistently refer to Perry’s highest stages of intellectual development (7, 8 & 9 – see Figure 1) as the stages characterized by metacognitive reflection. The lower stages seldom receive that recognition, so why might that be? Is metacognition just not happening in the preceding stages? If so, why not?

If those who have actually engaged in metacognition throughout their intellectual development are just those few who develop metacognitive ability spontaneously on their own, this accounts for its scarcity in the earlier stages and how few achieve the highest stages. Because intellectual and affective development requires passage through a sequence of stages, we instructors can only increase the proportion of those who attain highest-stage reasoning abilities by infusing metacognitive skills into the earlier stages as a part of our instructional design. Such design would shift all students’ perceptions of gaining an education from absorbing content provided by teachers in classrooms toward developing abilities to understand content in concert with developing understanding of self.

Dangerous Passages

Two dangerous passages in the journey through the stages of intellectual development end the educational aspirations of many students to achieve a true education marked with a celebratory graduation. Figure 1 offers a map that reveals the dangerous passages of our journey, where impactful emotions can urge us to give up on our own development. These are places where metacognition informed by only a little research on adult development can provide valuable assistance.

Many lower-division undergraduate students fail to graduate by getting trapped at the lower Perry stages 2 and 3. Stage 2 students typically view the purpose of education as learning facts rather than as experiencing challenges that develop expanded capacities to think. Further, students in Stage 2 often learn that beliefs and childhood teachings that they revere are, upon examination, flawed and perhaps even untrue. This sends them to Stage 3 and the bankrupt belief that all conclusions and arguments are equally valid. From there, educators’ efforts to move students into higher stages of thinking bring forth students’ affective reactions of frustration and bewilderment. These negative feelings can negate students’ trust in teachers and raise students’ doubts about their own abilities. At this stage, gaining relief by giving up can seem an attractive choice.

Another passage takes a similar toll, but this one manifests later, where it produces attrition of nearly half of our brightest students who gained admission to graduate school to achieve doctorates. Most Baccalaureate graduates are only Stage 4 thinkers, and in graduate school, the barrier to completion is the required dissertation, which is a challenging, open-ended Stage 5 project. Stage 5 challenges cannot be addressed by the same approaches that brought much undergraduate success— demonstrating rote knowledge and ability to perform calculations that arrived at uniquely “right answers.” The transition into Perry’s Stage 5 brings proficiency to evaluate conflicting evidence and arrive, not at “right answers,” but at conclusions that are most reasonable after evaluating all of the relevant, conflicting knowledge currently available. This high-attrition passage, not surprisingly, comes again with strong emotions. Powerful negative feelings of personal inadequacy or “imposter syndrome” often accompany the efforts to advance out of Stage 4, and too many graduate students lose confidence and withdraw before they can make the transition. If these distressed students understood the nature of the situation they were in, they likely would persist, trusting that continued perseverance would bring the necessary punctuated transition to Stage 5. With this transition comes the confidence and awareness necessary to engage ambiguous problems, which include dissertations.

In blog column Part 4, we will look at developing the affective quality of academic courage, which allows one to persist through challenges that bring fear and erosion of confidence.

References

Gigerenzer, G. (2007) Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. New York. Penguin.

Journal of Adult Development (2004) Special volume of nine papers on the Perry legacy of cognitive development. Journal of Adult Development (11, 2) 59-161 Germantown NY: Periodicals Service Co.

Nuhfer, E. B. (2008) The Feeling of Learning: Intellectual Development and the Affective Domain: Educating in Fractal Patterns XXV. National Teaching and Learning Forum 18 1 7-11.

Contemplating Contemplative Pedagogy

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

Like many trained in the academy, I am skeptical of “woo”– practices with trappings of scientific import, but lacking empirical evidence. This is despite my recognition that science has always been suffused by power and social hierarchy in the very framing of its questions. In my pedagogical life, this means it has taken me a long time to warm up to “mindfulness,” a powerful, relatively recent trend in education. Mindfulness is sometimes touted as the solution to many serious problems— lack of emotional constraint, student stress and even faculty burnout. Some might wonder if its popularity doesn’t merely adjust us to the difficulties of life in late capitalism, which in the classroom often appear through long days of emotional labor. But, of course, there are branches of mindfulness associated with nearly every culture and major religion on the globe, many with complex histories and practices that have clearly been important for humans long before our fears of robot overlords emerged. Still, I tend towards asking many of my students to come into more contact with the world, not less, as I feared that meditation or the like might do. Contemplation might be good for self-care, I thought— or working through one’s own “shadow self,” just like therapy, but the justice-oriented classroom requires the tools of critique and conflict. Or does it?

My above assumptions were powerfully challenged at the The Center for Contemplative Mind’s Summer Session on Contemplative Learning in August of 2017, where I spent a week exploring the “tree” of contemplative pedagogy and practice, and did more coloring and dancing than at any other academic experience to date. I want to share three important concepts that might be useful for integrating a mindful approach to metacognition into your life or classroom. Ed Nufer has already written on the focus on the “present” that mindfulness brings, and Chris Was asked us to reconsider the relationship between mindfulness and metacognition. It is my hope that these three concepts are a tiny contribution to that reconsideration, and counter the idea that mindfulness practitioners seek to move beyond the self, rather than reflect on their learning.

First, presenter Kakali Bhattacharya shared how mindfulness helps her flourish in the often hostile institutional spaces of academia. Bhattacharya uses the image of a cup overflowing, saying that you must give to others from the overflow and thus must keep your cup full. For her, mindfulness as a method of self-care was coupled with a commitment to “post-oppositional” thinking and politics. Post-oppositionality requires rejecting existing narratives that frame struggles as Machichean battles between good and evil, a move that is difficult in our partisan times. However, this ability to recognize non-absolutes in a political sense may bear dividends in an intellectual one. Drawing on this, I replaced an assignment that had students debate two contrasting positions with one where they tried to reimagine the problem, offer a variety of solutions, or response from a position of intellectual humility about their own stance. While our in-class process was messy, their ultimate papers on the topic were creative and veered away from the same two arguments I’m used to reading.

The second concept, closely related to post-oppositionality, is “negative capability,” an idea taken from John Keats’ correspondence but now popular in psychology and business. Negative capacity names the ability to tolerate uncertainty, or, as Keats says, to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach after fact and reason……”. (Cite Research). This might seem initially a strange concept to link to metacognition— it seems initially to involve not thinking about thinking, or, rather, willingly allowing yourself to think two contradictory things or to dwell in a lack of knowledge or understanding. For Keats, this is a process of imagination preferable to that of thinking, in the technical sense. Keats, as a Romantic, is generally understood as a critic of reason and fan of feeling. His poetic practice involves inhabiting the minds of his characters and even objects; he wrote that he could imagine a billiard ball enjoying “its own roundness, smoothness, volubility and the rapidity of its motion.” Cultivating these spaces of flow, or negative capability, might increase our ability to also reflect on our own learning and thinking, even as we, in those moments, refrain from committing to them or even to our own identity. Certainly an exercise to explore this idea would be easy to devise— although actually inhabiting an object is harder to do. In a class on ecology, imagining oneself as a plant and perhaps writing from that perspective might open up new vistas but also encourage negative capacity as a tendency of mind.

My mindfulness experience also left me wondering about the costs of integrating some of these practices into student learning shorn of their embeddedness into spiritual or cultural traditions, which brings me to the third concept— of avoiding treating mindfulness as a mere means to an end. Meditation is central to buddhism, but also to a variety of indigenous spiritual practices, and I wondered if they would work without this framework. Were they turned into, as one presenter worried, “McMindfulness” practices? One person I met was passionate about the notion that in meditation there is “No path, no wisdom, no gain” — a radical de-instrumentalization of the practice. To fully understand this saying would take a great deal of meditation, but I began to recognize throughout the week that the focus on the inward development that can occur in mindful practice was, paradoxically, likely to bear more fruit if not linked to specific goals or learning objectives from the outside. This realization was very hard to think about integrating in my classrooms— as each day is driven by specific goals linked to broader course objectives. My challenge for this year is to develop the negative capacity I need in order to engage in some of these practices with my students non-instrumentally while also recognizing the benefits research has shown for improving learning, happiness and health. And, I may need a commitment to post-oppositionality to navigate barriers to “woo” in some academic cultures.

Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition Part 2: Going Granular

Ed Nuhfer, California State Universities- retired

In Part 1, we noted that the highest stages of thinking are not merely cognitive, but they require cognitive knowledge and skills with the addition of metacognitive reflection involving affect. We also promised to present some ways to help students increase the capacity for reaching these highest levels of thinking through using metacognition to understand and develop affective reasoning.

Granular components make up a whole shape

This contributed post, Part 2, has three components. The first recognizes that understanding a way of knowing can take two forms, global and granular. The second provides research-based evidence that gaining an understanding of a metadiscipline’s way of knowing (e.g., science) by gaining awareness of the essential interconnections (granular approach) that constitute the metadiscipline is more effective than trying initially to understand the metadiscipline through considering it as a whole (global approach). The third introduces an example of a heavily affective way of knowing—ethics— and its interconnected components.

From describing to understanding

The popular definition of metacognition as “thinking about thinking” invites a universal response: “OK. So, now what do we think about?” No individual invented or discovered any complex way of knowing, such as science or ethics. Instead, these ways of knowing developed over a long time through the collective contributions of many workers. Over centuries, added insights made awareness of new concepts possible, and better understanding allowed an improved global articulation of each specific way of knowing.

In a few years of college education, we strive to produce understanding of bodies of knowledge that took centuries to develop. We believe that an effective sequence of gaining understanding of a metadiscipline usually recapitulates the historical order of its development. This parallel process for understanding a complex way of knowing involves first becoming aware of the essential interconnected concepts. Afterwards, scholars have increased capacity for constructing their global understanding of a way of knowing by learning how each concept contributes to the reasoning process that characterizes that way of knowing. To aid teaching and assessments of major ways of knowing, it is valuable to distinguish how global and granular queries elicit different ways of thinking and understanding.

Global approaches to understanding address complex issues with a single question. Examples are “How do you treat others ethically?” and “How well do you understand science?”

Granular approaches to thinking address the interconnected concepts that enable specific ways of knowing. For example, the Science Literacy Concept Inventory (SLCI) (Nuhfer et al. 2016a) is a granular instrument. It addresses a dozen interconnected concepts that science rests upon through twenty-five multiple-choice challenges. The composite score on all twenty-five items provides the measure of competence to answer the global challenge of “How well do you understand science as a way of knowing?” It achieves this measure without either directly asking participants the global question or asking them to name any of the specific concepts.

An example query from the SLCI follows.

Which of the following statements presents a hypothesis that science can now easily resolve?

Warts can be cured by holding quartz crystals on them daily for a week.
A classmate sitting in the room can see the auras of other students.
Radio City Music Hall in New York is haunted by several spirits.
People with chronic illnesses have them as punishment for past misdeeds.

The query tests for a granular understanding of science as a way of knowing the physical world through testable hypotheses. The query seeks to see if a student can recognize which of the statements is testable and addresses the physical world. All four options present possible hypotheses, but only one option offers a testable hypothesis and addresses physical phenomena. Note that the query tests for understanding, not for a memorized definition of “hypothesis” or “science.” Answers to twenty-five such questions that address a dozen concepts give a highly reliable assessment of understanding science as a way of knowing.

Now comes the rub. Experts can perform effective metacognition of their understanding in direct response to a single complex global question because their understanding has already assimilated the essential granular concepts that underlie science. Their knowing “what to think about” now comes intuitively from long experience. Novices (students) who directly try to address a global question about a complex issue don’t yet have the experiences that enable experts to respond quickly by unconsciously incorporating the most essential granular concepts in their informed response.

Novices need to methodically consider each of the granular concepts as checkpoints before they can reach a well-informed response. With practice in doing so over time, they can internalize the concepts and intuitively employ them more holistically. An early start in recognizing that granular-to-global-understanding process helps to achieve internalizing earlier in one’s career or education. Without instruction, the process will not begin until a challenge makes the need for the skill apparent, and an inept response can prove costly if the challenge involves a high-stakes decision.

Granular disclosure deepens understanding quickly — the evidence from science

As noted, experts have the advantage of experience. However, their traditional educational experiences rarely included metacognitive reflection, so few of our current experts had the privilege of early understanding that might have resulted from undergraduate instruction on how to achieve an understanding of an ambiguous problem through metacognitive reflection on the most relevant underlying checkpoints of a relevant way of knowing. Many experts achieved this only after high-stakes challenges forced them to adopt more appropriate thinking.

If instructors explicitly engaged in relevant metacognitive instruction, might we be able to produce better future experts than exist now? Research says “yes” by showing that minds gain an increased global understanding of science simply from responding to a granular spectrum of queries that address the interconnected concepts that underlie science (Nuhfer et al., 2016b; 2017).

These research measures started with a global query that honestly disclosed the nature of the SLCI and asked students to estimate their anticipated scores. Our current dataset consists of 1576 participants, and the correlation between their estimates from this initial global self-assessment and their actual test scores was r = .28.

Following the global query, participants completed the SLCI knowledge survey. Knowledge surveys are granular self-assessment instruments that direct students to reflect metacognitively on the interconnected, granular components underlying a comprehensive topic. The SLCI contains 25 test items. For this research, participants first rate their competency on each item and then they answer all the questions. The correlation between the cumulative self-assessment on all 25 items on the entire knowledge survey and participants’ demonstrated competence from their score on the SLCI was r = .6. On later postdicted global queries (recorded after taking the knowledge survey and after taking the Inventory), the correlations between the global self-assessed scores and the actual SLCI scores all remained high at between r = .5 and r = .6.

These results offer a valuable insight: students knew no more content about science after taking the knowledge survey than they did before taking it because no instruction or study was involved. However, taking a knowledge survey provided a granular disclosure of what they must “think about” and conveyed a significantly better understanding of the complexity of the global query than did a detailed global description of the query. Improved metacognitive understanding of the challenge relative to one’s immediate competency is not the same thing as improved content knowledge. Rather, the former clarifies to the learner the specific content learning that one needs to get to improve his or her overall competency.

When we decide to teach a complex way of knowing, conveying an understanding of what the knowing involves (i.e., conveying the granular concepts) will contribute to success. Further, metacognitive exercises are more effective than hearing the key points in lectures, because metacognitive reflection is focused interactive engagement with the problem. The focused conversation with self that is the hallmark of metacognition enlists sufficient parts of the brain to build understanding. Listening alone engages relatively little of the brain’s neural network and produces little understanding that can be retained. Metacognitive exercises will be most effective if we build students’ competence through taking a granular approach from the very start. We want to direct our students to think about and internalize the checkpoints rather than to try to answer the global question directly from unexamined feelings.

From science to ethics

Science focuses on cognitive thinking that uses testable evidence. Instructors are most familiar with developing such thinking, which lies within Perry’s stages 4, 5 and 6. Developing highest level thinking abilities, (stages 7, 8 and 9) requires additional components that allow us to go beyond constructing strong, defendable arguments and enter the realm of using our results for making decisions and acting on them. These highest levels of thinking are metacognitive and affective. Reaching them requires that we develop an awareness of how our own affective feelings are an influence on our decisions, and it further requires that we develop capacity for empathy so that we truly understand how our actions impact others.

Like science, ethics constitutes a complex way of knowing, but the latter is a way of knowing that involves more affect. We treat one another ethically because we feel that we should do so, even when competing feelings and pragmatic arguments may exist to do otherwise in our perceived self-interests. Thus, an understanding of ethics requires understanding a different set of interconnected concepts.

The four granular ethical principles or concepts are, beneficence – “do good;” nonmaleficence – “do no harm;” justice – “treat equals as equals,” and autonomy – “respect others’ control over their own lives.” These provide our checkpoints for granular understanding.

To help readers initiate a global understanding of an ethical decision as experienced through a granular approach, I’ve included a short module exercise with this blog entry. Open it; read it. The text is less than 900 words. Afterwards, confront a few of the reflective exercises at the end of the module.

In Part 3, we can pick up our discussion with deeper exploration of the role of affect and metacognition in making ethical decision. Afterwards, we can explore the role of metacognition in other affective dimensions of thinking.

Developing Affective Abilities through Metacognition: Part 1

by Ed Nuhfer, PhD, California State Universities (retired)

Roman Taraban launched such an important topic for our blog on July 20 with “Hate-Inspired Webforums, PTSD, and Metacognition” that it is surely worth extending his discussion further.

Roman noted that groups develop recognizable vocabularies (discourse) and manners of speaking for set purposes. The purpose of developed vocabulary and manner of speech of hate groups is to enlist support and then empower and activate those with dispositions toward bias and bigotry. Activation in hate groups includes intimidation, shaming, shunning, and physical violence. Affect is the ultimate origin of discourse because the desire to promote such discourse is an affective feeling. Like cognitive thinking and psychomotor activity, affect is essential to human life and function. However, affect can guide us to act in ways that are ineffective, toxic, or destructive.

Learning and education are the processes through which we support and advance civilization. The purpose of civilization may be to elevate effective, beneficial actions and to minimize deleterious ones. Through learning and education, we develop frameworks of reasoning and processes for developing beneficial proficiencies. Examples of a psychomotor framework would be a process through which one learns to hunt for food, play a musical instrument, or to produce a painting. Examples of cognitive frameworks would be the logic of language and the use of testing and verification as a way of knowing through which we understand the physical world. An example of an affective framework is ethics—the way of knowing through which we evaluate the nature of feelings that are directing (or attempting to direct), our choices and decisions through which we act.

It is relatively easy to assess when psychomotor efforts are effective and successful. It is more difficult to see how language presents a fallacious argument or when an accepted cognitive perception about the physical world constitutes a misconception. It is most difficult to determine whether an affective feeling is likely to direct us to actions that are beneficial and healthy or toxic and perverse. We observe our affective state through metacognition, which is a purposefully directed internal awareness. Metacognition has an ineffable quality. In contrast, physical action and cognitive reasoning are easier to assess through their immediate products.

The history of education seems marked by an initial focus on the development of effective psychomotor skills needed for survival, technology, and simple arts. Later educational efforts offered an emphasis on written language, literature, increasingly sophisticated arts, and science. We finally are arriving at a time in Western education when an acceptance is dawning that becoming educated should proceed beyond cognitive and psychomotor development to understanding ourselves and our affective traits. This pattern seems inevitable because it is recapitulated on a smaller scale in our development as individuals.

If we are lucky, we start life acquiring the skills needed for our survival and further development. If we are particularly fortunate, we progress to gaining valid knowledge, valuable skills, and capacity for understanding and appreciating the social and natural realms in which we live. Finally, if we are uncommonly privileged through fortune, we can develop wisdom that promotes our living in an expanded awareness of our reality and increased capacity for nurturing and caring well for our natural world and others around us.

Given the progression outlined above, we should expect that metacognition will be our students’ most challenging and least-developed capacity for learning and becoming educated. As educators, we should also expect struggle and resistance, both individually and collectively, against the legitimacy of affective development efforts and metacognition as essential to becoming educated. We have already seen such resistance to these advances.

In hindsight, it now appears that Benjamin Bloom and his team of educators who worked in the 1950s and 60s seemed decades ahead of their contemporaries by recognizing the indispensable importance of the affective domain to the process of becoming educated. The Bloom team’s contribution on affect took many years before its importance was realized. At the time Bloom published his taxonomy of the cognitive domain, he was producing a second volume on the taxonomy of the affective domain (and still later, the psychomotor domain), the established behavioral sciences were focused solely on cognition. These sciences ridiculed affect, dismissed metacognition (see Dunlosky and Metcalf, 2009) and treated both as nonsense that obstructed objective reasoning and cognitive thinking. Bloom’s first volume on the cognitive domain became the most-cited educational reference in history, but the second volume on the affective domain fell into such obscurity that few college professors even know that it existed. The academic realm so de-legitimatized affective feelings that researchers from the 1960s into the early 1990s were actually afraid to study or write about emotions (see Damasio, 1999).

William Perry’s 1960s landmark work (Perry, 1999) was contemporary with Bloom’s research. Perry presented his discovery of distinct stages of adult intellectual development that he derived from analysis of language patterns (discourse) that manifested during interviews that Perry held over several years with groups of students. This longitudinal study found that students changed their thinking and reasoning process during years of becoming educated. Moreover, the interviews revealed that the highest stages went beyond cognitive thinking by incorporating and regulating metacognitive awareness of one’s affective inclinations. This discovery of the nature of highest-level reasoning arrived with awkward timing, given the regard by scholars for affect and emotions. In Perry’s entire book, reference to “affect” occurs only once (in a brief footnote on page 49) and to “emotions” only once (on p. 140). “Feeling” / “feelings” appear thirty-nine times, but mostly in the quotations of statements made by students during interviews. Perry seemed unable to write openly about these aspects, so the three chapters on his three highest stages are conspicuously brief. Today, a close reading of these chapters indicates that he had probably also discovered the development of emotional intelligence in his interviews, but he seems to have understood the dangers that any emphasis on emotion might pose to his larger discovery.

Another landmark book (King and Kitchener, 1992) that followed Perry’s interview approach refused to venture even that far. These authors restricted their investigation of higher intellectual stages to purely cognitive reasoning. However, by 2004 (Journal of Adult Development, 2004) a synthesis revealed that many investigations and classification schemes that followed Perry all mapped to each other and were essentially describing the same stages.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Affective Domain seems to map even better onto the Perry stages than it does to Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, (see Nuhfer, 2008) indicating that building affective capacity is indeed a developmental process. Thus, well-designed higher education curricula can build it, providing instructors design the curricula to produce the highest levels of thinking.

As an added benefit, development of metacognitive awareness is probably the best way to curtail the influence of “hate groups,” whether these be minor cults or mainstream establishment organizations. People with metacognitive awareness can perceive when their affect is getting involved from external attempts to direct their abilities toward beneficent or maleficent ends. In part 2, we’ll consider how teaching any discipline presents an opportunity to push thinking to highest levels through using metacognitive awareness to reflect on ethics, respect, courage, and gratitude.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

Dunlosky, J. and Metcalf, J. (2009). Metacognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Journal of Adult Development (2004). Special volume of nine papers on the Perry legacy of cognitive development. Journal of Adult Development (11, 2) 59-161 Germantown NY: Periodicals Service Co.

King, P. M., and Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing Reflective Judgment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Nuhfer, E. B. (2008). The feeling of learning: Intellectual development and the affective domain: Educating in fractal patterns XXVI. National Teaching and Learning Forum, 18 (1) 7-11.

Perry, W. G. Jr. (1999). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass (a reprint of the original 1968 work with minor updating).

Metacognition and Teacher-Student-Curriculum Relationships

by Steven Fleisher, Ph.D., California State University Channel Islands

I have heard many express that teacher-student relationships have nothing in common with families. But while teacher-student relationships are best described as collegial, at least within higher-education, this author believes that much can be learned from family theories and research. In particular, family research provides insights into how to support the development of trust in this context rather than relationships based principally on compliance. In other words, a classroom “is” a family, whether it’s a good one or a bad one. In this posting, we will explore metacognitive processes involved in building and maintaining stable relationships between students and the curriculum, teachers and the curriculum, and between teachers and students.

Family systems theory (Kerr & Bowen, 1988), though originally developed for clinical practice, offers crucial insights into not only teacher-student relationships but teaching and learning as well (Harrison, 2011). While there are many interlocking principles within family systems theory, we will concentrate on emotional stability, differentiation of self, and triangles.

The above triangle provides a representation for the following relationships: students-curriculum, teacher-curriculum, and teacher-students. Although any effective pedagogy would work for this discussion, we will focus specifically on the usefulness of knowledge surveys in this context (http://elixr.merlot.org/assessment-evaluation/knowledge-surveys/knowledge-surveys2) and their role in building metacognitive self-assessment skills.[1] Thus, what are some of the metacognitive processes involved in the relationships on each leg of our triangle? And, what are some of the metacognitive processes that would support those relationships in becoming increasingly stable?

Student-Curriculum Relationships

Along one leg of the triangle, students would increase the stability of their relationships with the curriculum as a function of becoming ever more aware of their learning processes. Regarding the use of knowledge surveys, students would self-assess their confidence to respond to given challenges, compare those responses with their developed competencies, and follow with reflective exercises to discover and understand any gaps between the two. As their self-assessment accuracy improves, their self-regulation skills would improve as well, i.e., adjusting, modifying, or deepening learning strategies or efforts as needed. So, the more students are aware of competencies in the curriculum and the more aware they are of their progress towards those competencies, the better off students will be.

As part of a course, instructors can also guide students in exploring how the material is useful to them personally. Activities can be designed to support exploration and discovery of ways in which course material relates, for example, to career interests, personal growth, interdisciplinary objectives, fostering of purpose, etc. In so doing, the relationships students have with the material can gain greater stability. Ertmer and Newby (1996) noted that expertise in learning involves becoming “strategic, self-regulated, and reflective”, and by bringing these types of exercises into the course, students are supported in the development of all these competencies.

Teacher-Curriculum Relationships

These relationships involve teachers becoming more aware of their practices, their student’s learning, and the connection between their practices and their student’s learning. In other words, the teacher is trying to ensure fit between student understanding and curriculum. Regarding knowledge surveys, teachers would know they are providing a pedagogical tool that supports learning and offers needed visibility for students.

In addition, once teachers have laid out course content in their knowledge surveys, they can look ahead and anticipate which learning strategies would be the best match for upcoming material. Realizing ahead of time the benefits of, let’s say, using structured group work for a particular learning module, teachers could prepare themselves and their students for that type of activity.

Teacher-Student Relationships

These relationships involve the potential for the development of trust. When trust develops in a classroom, students not only know what the expectations involve but are set more at ease to explore creatively their understanding and ways of understanding the material. For instance, students may well become aware of the genuine and honest help being provided by chosen learning strategies. Knowledge surveys are particularly useful in this regard as students have a roadmap for the course and a tool structured to facilitate the improvement of their learning skills.

Teachers also have an interpersonal role in supporting the development of student trust. Family systems theory (Bowen & Kerr, 1988) holds that we all vary in our levels of self-differentiation, which involves how much we, literally, realize that we are separate from others, especially during emotional conflict. In other words, people vary in their abilities to manage emotional reactivity (founded in anxiety) with being able to use one’s intellect to compose chosen and valued responses. Harrison (2011), in applying these principles in a classroom, noted that when teachers are aware of becoming emotionally reactivity (i.e., defensive), but are also aware of using their intellect, as best as possible, to manage the situation (i.e., remaining thoughtful and unbiased in their interactions with students), they are supporting emotional stability and trust.

Kerr and Bowen (1988) also reported that self-differentiation involves distinguishing between thoughts and feelings. This principle gives us another metacognitive tool. When we are aware, for example, that others do not “make” us feel a certain way (i.e., frustrated), but that it involves also our thinking (i.e., students are just being lazy), this affects our ability to manage reactivity. If we are aware of becoming reactive, and aware of distinguishing thoughts and feelings, we can notice and reframe our thoughts (i.e., students are just doing what they need to do), and validate and own our emotions (i.e., okay I’m frustrated), then we are better positioned to respond in ways that attune to our needs as well as those of our students. In this way, we would increase our level of self-differentiation by moving toward less blaming and more autonomy.

Final Note

Kerr and Bowen (1988) also said that supporting stability along all the relationships represented by our triangle not only increases the emotional stability of the system, but provides a cushion for the naturally arising instabilities along individual legs of the triangle. This presence of this stability also serves to further enhance the impact of effective pedagogies. So, when teachers are aware of maintaining the efficacy of their learning strategies, and are aware of applying the above principles of self-differentiation, i.e. engaging in metacognitive instruction, they are better positioned to be responsive and attuned to the needs of their students, thus supporting stability, trust, and improved learning.

References

Ertmer, P. A. & Newby, T. J. (1996). The expert learner: Strategic, self-regulated, and reflective. Instructional Science, 24(1), 1-24. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/journal/11251

Harrison, V. A. (2011). Live learning: Differentiation of self as the basis for learning. In O.C. Bregman & C. M. White (Eds.), Bringing systems thinking to life: Expanding the horizons for Bowen family systems theory (pp. 75-87). New York, NY: Routledge.

Kerr, M. E. & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Image from: https://www.slideshare.net/heatherpanda/essay-2-for-teaching-course-4

[1] Knowledge surveys are comprised of a detailed listing of all learning outcomes for a course (perhaps 150-250 items). Each item begins with an affective root (“I can…”) followed by a cognitive or ability challenge expressed in measurable terms (“…describe at least three functions of the pituitary gland.”). These surveys provide students with a roadmap for the course and a tool structured for building their confidence and accuracy in learning skills.

Self-assessment and the Affective Quality of Metacognition: Part 1 of 2

Ed Nuhfer, Retired Professor of Geology and Director of Faculty Development and Director of Educational Assessment, enuhfer@earthlink.net, 208-241-5029

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness(1999, New York, Harcourt), Antonio Damasio distinguished two manifestations of the affective domain: emotions (the external experience of others’ affect) and feelings(the internal private experience of one’s own affect). Enacting self-assessment constitutes an internal, private, and introspective metacognitive practice.

Benjamin Bloom recognized the importance of the affective domain’s involvement in successful cognitive learning, but for a time psychologists dismissed the importance of both affect and metacognition on learning (See Damasio, 1999; Dunlosky and Metcalfe, 2009, Metacognition, Los Angeles, Sage). To avoid repeating these mistakes, we should recognize that attempts to develop students’ metacognitive proficiency without recognizing metacognition’s affective qualities are likely to be minimally effective.

In academic self-assessment, an individual must look at a cognitive challenge and accurately decide her/his capability to meet that challenge with present knowledge and resources. Such decisions do not spring only from thinking cognitively about one’s own mental processes. Affirming that “I can” or “I cannot” meet “X” (the cognitive challenge) with current knowledge and resources draws from affective feelings contributed by conscious and unconscious awareness of what is likely to be an accurate decision.

“Blind insight” (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/11/11/0956797614553944) is a new term in the literature of metacognition. It confirms an unconscious awareness that manifests as a feeling that supports sensing the correctness of a decision. “Blind insight” and “metacognitive self-assessment” seem to overlap with one another and with Damasio’s “feelings.”

Research in medical schools confirmed that students’ self-assessment skills remained consistent throughout medical education (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED410296.pdf.) Two hypotheses compete to explain this confirmation. One is that self-assessment skills establish early in life and cannot be improved in college. The other is that self-assessment skill remains fixed in post-secondary education only because it is so rarely taught or developed. The first hypothesis seems contradicted by the evidence supporting brain plasticity, constructivist theories of learning and motivation, metacognition theory, self-efficacy theory (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ815370.pdf), and by experiments that confirm self-assessment as a learnable skill that improves with training (http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf).

Nursing is perhaps the discipline that has most recognized the value of developing intuitive feelings informed by knowledge and experience as part of educating for professional practice.

“At the expert level, the performer no longer relies on an analytical principle (rule, guideline, maxim) to connect her/his understanding of the situation to an appropriate action. The expert nurse, with her/his enormous background of experience, has an intuitive grasp of the situation and zeros in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful possible problem situations. It is very frustrating to try to capture verbal descriptions of expert performance because the expert operates from a deep understanding of the situation, much like the chess master who, when asked why he made a particularly masterful move, will just say, “Because it felt right. It looked good.” (Patricia Benner, 1982, “From novice to expert.” American Journal of Nursing, v82 n3 pp 402-407)

Teaching metacognitive self-assessment should include an aim toward improving students’ ability to clearly recognize the quality of “feels right” regarding whether one’s own ability to meet a challenge with present abilities and resources exists. Developing such capacity requires practice in committing errors and learning from them through metacognitive reflection. In such practice, the value of Knowledge Surveys (see http://profcamp.tripod.com/KS.pdf and http://profcamp.tripod.com/Knipp_Knowledge_Survey.pdf) becomes apparent.

Knowledge Surveys (Access tutorials for constructing knowledge surveys and obtaining downloadable examples at http://elixr.merlot.org/assessment-evaluation/knowledge-surveys/knowledge-surveys2.) consist of about a hundred to two hundred questions/items relevant to course learning objectives. These query individuals to self-assess by rating their present ability to meet a challenge on a three-point multiple-choice scale:

A. I can fully address this item now for graded test purposes.
B. I have partial knowledge that permits me to address at least 50% of this item.
C. I am not yet able to address this item adequately for graded test purposes.

and thereafter to monitor their mastery as the course unfolds.

In Part 2, we will examine why knowledge surveys are such powerful instruments for supporting students’ learning and metacognitive development, ways to properly employ knowledge surveys to induce measurable gains, and we will provide some surprising results obtained from pairing knowledge surveys in conjunction with a standardized assessment measure.

Metacognition for Guiding Students to Awareness of Higher-level Thinking (Part 2)

by Ed Nuhfer (Contact: enuhfer@earthlink.net; 208-241-5029)

Part 1 introduced the nature of adult intellectual development in terms of the stages ascended as one becomes educated. Each stage imparts new abilities that are valuable. This Part 2 reveals why awareness of these stages is important and offers metacognitive exercises through which students can begin to engage with what should be happening to them as they become better thinkers.

A disturbingly tiny contingent of professors in disciplines outside adult education have read the adult developmental research and recognized the importance of Perry’s discovery. Even fewer pass on this awareness directly to their students. Thus, recognition that the main value of a university education does not lie in acquired knowledge of facts and formulae but rather in acquiring higher level thinking abilities remains off the radars of most students.

Given what we know from this research, a potential exists for American higher education’s evolving into a class-based higher educational system, with a few institutions for the privileged supporting curricula that emphasize developing the advanced thinking needed for management and leadership, and a larger group of institutions fielding curricula emphasizing only content and skills for producing graduates destined to be managed. Until students in general (and parents) recognize how these two educational models differ in what they offer in value and advantages for life, they will fail to demand to be taught higher-order thinking. Overcoming this particular kind of ignorance is a struggle that neither individual students nor a free nation can afford to lose.

Teaching Metacognition: Mentoring Students to Higher Levels of Thinking

One way to win this struggle is to bring explicit awareness of what constitutes becoming well educated directly to students, particularly those not enrolled in elite, selective schools. All students should know what is happening to them, which requires understanding the stages of adult intellectual development and the sequence in which they occur offers the explicit framework needed to guide students to do beneficial “thinking about thinking.” (See Part 1, Table 1.) This research-based framework offers the foundation required for understanding the value of higher-level thinking. It offers a map for the journey on which one procures specific abilities by mastering successively higher stages of adult thinking. Through learning to use this framework metacognitively, individuals can start to discover their current stage of intellectual development and determine what they need for achieving the next higher stage.

I have included two exercises for students to show how the research that informs what we should be “thinking about” can be converted into metacognitive components of lessons. These modules have been pilot tested on students in introductory general education and critical thinking courses.

The first, “Module 12 – Events a Learner Can Expect to Experience,” uses the research that defines the Perry stages (Table 1) as a basis for authoring an exercise that guides students through key points to “think about” as they start to reflect upon their own thinking. Instructors can employ the module as an assignment or an in-class exercise, and should modify it as desired. For many students, this will serve as their first exposure to metacognition. If this is the reader’s first introduction to adult intellectual development, work through this module, ideally with a colleague on a lunch break. Start to procure some of the key resources listed in the references for your personal library.

With the exception of Perry Stages 7, 8, and 9, Module 12 largely addresses the cognitive realm. However, when intellectual development occurs successfully, affective or emotional development occurs in parallel as one advances through higher cognitive stages (see Nuhfer, 2008). Metacognition or “thinking about thinking” should extend also to a reflective “thinking about feelings.” Since the 1990s, we have learned that our feelings about our learning–our affective component of thinking– influence how well we can learn. Further, our affective development or “emotional intelligence” determines how well that we can work with others by connecting with the through their feelings, which is a huge determinant in work and life success.

The second “Module 4—Enlisting the Affective Domain” helps students to recognize why the feelings and emotions that occur as one transitions into higher stages are important to consider and to understand. At the higher levels of development, one may even aspire to deeply understand another by acquiring the capacity for experiencing another’s feelings (Carper, 1978; Belenky and others, 1986).

Frequent inclusion of metacognitive components in our assignments is essential for providing students with the practice needed for achieving better thinking. Guiding students in what to “think about” can help students engage in challenges that arise at the finer scales of metadisciplines, disciplines, courses, and lessons. This requires us to go beyond articulating: “What should students learn and how can we assess this?” by extending our planning to specify “What is essential that students should think about, and how can we mentor them into such thinking?”

REFERENCES CITED (additional references are provided in the two exercises furnished)

Arum, R. and Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Belenky, M.F., B.M. Clinchy, N.R. Goldberger, and J.M. Tarule. (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, New York: Basic Books. (Reprinted in 1997).

Carper, B. A. (1978). Fundamental patterns of knowing in nursing. Advances in Nursing Science 1 1 13–24.

Flavell, J. H. (1976). Metacognitive aspects of problem solving. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp. 231–235). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Journal of Adult Development (2004). Special volume of nine papers on the Perry legacy of cognitive development. Journal of Adult Development (11, 2) 59-161 Germantown NY: Periodicals Service Co.

Nuhfer, E. B (2008) The feeling of learning: Intellectual development and the affective domain: Educating in fractal patterns XXVI. National Teaching and Learning Forum, 18 (1) 7-11.

Perry, W. G., Jr. (1999). Forms of intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. (Reprint of the original 1968 1st edition with introduction by L. Knefelkamp). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Metacognition for Guiding Students to Awareness of Higher-level Thinking (Part 1)

by Ed Nuhfer (Contact: enuhfer@earthlink.net; 208-241-5029)

When those unfamiliar with “metacognition” first learn the term, they usually hear: “Metacognition is thinking about thinking.” This is a condensation of John Flavell’s (1976) definition: “Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them…” Flavell’s definition reveals that students cannot engage in metacognition until they first possess a particular kind of knowledge. This reminds us that students do not innately understand what they need to be “thinking about” in the process of “thinking about thinking.” They need explicit guidance.

When students learn in most courses, they engage in a three-component effort toward achieving an education: (1) gaining content knowledge, (2) developing skills (which are usually specific to a discipline), and (3) gaining deeper understanding of the kinds of thinking or reasoning required for mastery of the challenges at hand. The American higher educational system generally does best at helping students achieve the first two. Many students have yet to even realize how these components differ, and few ever receive any instruction on mastering Component 3. Recently, Arum and Roksa (2011) summarized the effectiveness of American undergraduate education in developing students’ capacity for thinking. The record proved dismal and revealed that allowing the first two components to push aside the third produces serious consequences.

This imbalance has persisted for decades. Students often believe that education is primarily about gaining content knowledge—that the major distinction between freshmen and seniors is “Seniors know more facts.” Those who never get past this view will likely acquire a degree without acquiring any significantly increased ability to reason.

We faculty are also products of this imbalanced system, so it is not too surprising to hear so many of us embracing “covering the material” as a primary concern when planning our courses. Truth be told, many of us have so long taught to content and to skills necessary for working within the disciplines that we are less practiced in guiding our students to be reflective on how to improve their thinking. Adding metacognitive components to our assignments and lessons can provide the explicit guidance that students need. However, authoring these components will take many of us into new territory, and we should expect our first efforts to be awkward compared to what we will be authoring after a year of practice. Yet, doing such work and seeing students grow because of our efforts is exciting and very worthwhile. Now is the time to start.

Opportunities for developing metacognitive reflection exist at scales ranging from single-lesson assignments to large-scale considerations. In my first blog for this site, I chose to start with the large-scale considerations of what constitutes development of higher-level thinking skills.

What Research Reveals about Adult Thinking

More than five decades have passed since William Perry distinguished nine stages of thinking that successful adult intellectual development (Table 1) produces. The validity of his developmental model in general seems firmly established (Journal of Adult Development, 2004). Contained within this model is the story of how effective higher education improves students’ abilities to think and respond to challenges. Knowing this story enables us to be explicit in getting students aware of what ought to be happening to them if higher education is actually increasing their capacity for thinking. This research enables us to guide students in what to look for as they engage in the metacognition of understanding their own intellectual development.

Enhanced capacity to think develops over spans of several years. Small but important changes produced at the scale of single quarter or semester-long courses are normally imperceptible to students and instructors alike. Even the researchers who discovered the developmental stages passed through them as students, without realizing the nature of the changes that they were undergoing. For learning that occurs in the shorter period of a college course, it is easier to document measurable changes in learning of disciplinary content and the acquisition of specific skills than it is to assess changes in thinking. Research based on longitudinal studies of interviews with students as they changed over several years finally revealed the nature of these subtle changes and the sequence in which they occur (Table 1).

Table 1: A Summary of Perry’s Stages of Adult Intellectual Development

Stage 1 & 2 thinkers believe that all problems have right and wrong answers, that all answers can be furnished by authority (usually the teacher), and that ambiguity is a needless nuisance that obstructs getting at right answers.

Stage 3 thinkers realize that authority is fallible and does not have good answers for all questions. Thinkers at this stage respond by concluding that all opinions are equally valid and that arguments are just about proponents’ thinking differently. Evidence to the contrary does not change this response.

Stage 4 thinkers recognize that not all challenges have right or wrong answers, but they do not yet recognize frameworks through which to resolve how evidence best supports one among several competing arguments.

Stage 5 thinkers can use evidence. They also accept that evaluations that lead to best solutions can be relative to the context of the situation within which a problem occurs.

Stage 6 thinkers appreciate ambiguity as a legitimate quality of many issues. They can use evidence to explore alternatives. They recognize that the most reasonable answers often depend upon both context and value systems.

Stages 7, 8 and 9 thinkers incorporate metacognitive reflection in their reasoning, and they increasingly perceive how their personal values act alongside context and evidence to influence chosen decisions and actions.

In part 2 of this blog, we will provide metacognitive class exercises that help students to understand what occurs during intellectual development and why they must strive for more than learning content when gaining an education.