Tag: Metacognitive Instruction

Lean Forward, but Do It Metacognitively!

by Lauren Scharff, Ph.D. (U. S. Air Force Academy)

As the Director for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at my institution, a large part of my job description involves helping faculty intentionally explore new approaches and how they impact student learning. In other words – I work with forward-leaning faculty who are ready to try new things. So, I think a lot about how, when, and why faculty members adopt new pedagogies, tools, and activities, and about when, for whom, and in what contexts these new approaches enhance learning. This work dovetails nicely with the development and goals of metacognitive instruction.

As a reminder if you’re relatively new to our site, one of the premises we’ve previously shared here (e.g. Scharff, March 2015) and elsewhere (Scharff and Draeger, NTLF, 2015) is that Metacognitive Instruction involves the intentional and ongoing interaction between awareness and self-regulation, specifically with respect to the pedagogical choices instructors make as they design their lessons and then as they carry them out.

I was happy to see these connections reinforced last month at our 7th Annual SoTL Forum. Dr. Bridget Arend was invited to give a morning workshop and the keynote address. Along with James R. Davis, she is co-author of Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective and Enjoyable College Teaching. In her workshop Bridget dug into how to facilitate critical thinking, promote problem-solving, and support the building of skills (3 of the 7 ways of learning), while in her keynote she focused more strongly on the concept of matching student learning goals with the most effective teaching methods. She went beyond the usual discussion of tips and techniques to explore the underlying purpose, rationale, and best use of these [pedagogical] methods.

Dr. Bridget Arend giving the keynote address at the 7th Annual SoTL Forum at the U. S. Air Force Academy
Dr. Bridget Arend giving the keynote address at the 7th Annual SoTL Forum at the U. S. Air Force Academy

7_Ways_of_Learning
Books such as these can help support metacognitive instruction.

While Bridget did not explicitly use the term “metacognitive instruction,” it struck me that her message of purposeful choice of methods directly supported key aspects of metacognitive instruction, especially those related to awareness of our pedagogical decisions. We (instructors) should not incorporate pedagogies (or new tools or activities) just because they are the ones typically used by our colleagues, or because they are what was “done to us as students and it worked for us,” or because they are the “new, latest-greatest thing” we’ve heard about. Rather, we should carefully review our learning goals and consider how each possible approach might support those goals for our students and our context.

We should also be mindful of other factors that might influence our adoption of new approaches. For example, administrators or institutions often reward faculty who are leading the adoption of new technologies. Sometimes the message seems “the more new technologies incorporated the better” or “out with the old and in with the new” so a program or institution can market itself as being the most cutting edge in education. However, while many of us appreciate being rewarded or showcased for new efforts, we also need to pause to consider whether or not we’re really supporting student learning as well as we could with these practices.

Questions we should ask ourselves before implementation include, How will our new pedagogical approach or a new app really align with the learning goals we have for our students? Will all of our choices complement each other, or might they work at cross-purposes with each other? Realistically, there are a limited number of learning outcomes we can successfully accomplish within a lesson or even across a semester.

As we implement these new approaches and tools, we should ask additional questions. How are they actually impacting aspects of student engagement, attitudes towards learning, and ultimately, the learning itself? How might they be adjusted (either “in the moment” or in future lessons) as we use them in order to better support our learning goals for our students in our context? No group of students is the same, and the context also shifts over time. What worked well in the past might need adjusting or more radically changing in the future.

In sum, we know that no single approach is going to work for all learning goals or all students across all situations. But if we build our awareness of possibilities using resources such as Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning (and many other published papers and texts) to help guide our pedagogical choices; if we carefully attend to how our approaches affect students and student learning; and we if modify our approach based on those observations (and maybe using systematic data if we’re conducting a SoTL research project), then we WILL be more likely to enhance student learning (and our own development as metacognitive instructors).

Thus, lean forward as instructors, but do it metacognitively!

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Davis, James R. & Arend, B. (2013). Facilitating Seven Ways of Learning: A Resource for More Purposeful, Effective and Enjoyable College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, Sterling, VA.

Scharff, L. & Draeger, J. (September, 2015). Thinking about metacognitive instruction. The National Teaching and Learning Forum, 24(5), p. 4-6. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ntlf.2015.24.issue-5/issuetoc


Teaching a new course requires metacognition

by John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

One of the joys of being an academic philosopher is the freedom to explore new ideas. For example, the recent retirement of a colleague left a gap in my department’s usual offerings. I agreed to take over a course on the philosophy of love and sex. While I have written scholarly articles on related topics, I confess that teaching this new material had me feeling the sort of constructive discomfort that I seek to foster in my students (Draeger 2014). As a result, I experienced a heightened sense of awareness concerning what I was doing and why. In particular, I came to believe that teaching a new course requires metacognition.

As I sat down to construct the course, I was guided by the thought that philosophy can help students learn to have careful conversations about ideas that matter. With respect to this new course, I wanted students to learn to ask tough questions. Can we really promise to love someone forever? Can sex ever be meaningless? Is becoming emotionally attached to someone other than your partner worse than sleeping around? Is it possible to love more than one person at the same time or does romantic love require some form of exclusivity? Such questions prompt students to consider whether commonly held beliefs are actually justified. If these views withstand scrutiny, then students have the conceptual resources to offer a proper defense. If not, then students can begin searching for ideas worth having. Such questions can also open up a larger conversation about related concepts (e.g., trust, intimacy, respect, jealousy, loyalty).  Because much of the course material was new to me, I had not always thought through the various permutations and implications of each philosophical position. I often found myself learning “on the fly” along with my students as I reflected on my own assumptions and preconceived ideas in “real time” while the discussion unfolded in front of me.

In an earlier post (Draeger 2015), I argued that “critical thinking involves an awareness of mode of thinking within a domain (e.g., question assumptions about gender, determine the appropriateness of a statistical method), while metacognition involves an awareness of the efficacy of particular strategies for completing that task.” As I reflect on my philosophy of love and sex course, I realize that my heightened awareness contained elements of both critical thinking and metacognition. Because the material was largely new to me, I was more aware of my own critical thinking processes as I engaged in them and more “tuned into” what my students were grappling with (e.g., assumptions about love and sex, related concepts, implications of the view we are considering). I also found myself metacognitively evaluating whether my students were critically engaged and whether my choices were moving the conversation in philosophically fruitful directions. I like to think that this sort of monitoring happens in all of my classes, but I was acutely aware of its importance given that the material was unfamiliar and my discussion prompts were untested. Moreover, I like to think that I never resort to autopilot and that I am always keenly aware of fluid learning environments. However, because the material was so fresh, I could not help but engage in self-regulation. I did not have a reliable stock of examples and responses at my fingertips. Even more than usual, I found myself making intentional changes to my approach based on “in-the-moment” feedback from students (Scharff 2015).

Teaching a new course always rejuvenates me because it reminds me how much I love to learn. As the teacher, however, I was responsible for more than my own learning. Effective teaching requires thinking about the critical thinking processes of all the learners in the room, including my own. It also requires monitoring fluid learning environment and making intentional changes (often in-the-moment changes) if students are to have careful conversations about ideas that matter (e.g., love, sex). While teaching with metacognition is generally a good idea, this semester taught me that teaching a new course requires metacognition.

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References

Draeger, John (2015). “Two forms of ‘thinking about thinking’: metacognition and critical thinking.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/two-forms-of-thinking-about-thinking-metacognition-and-critical-thinking

Draeger, John (2014). “Cultivating a habit of constructive discomfort.” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/cultivating-a-habit-of-constructive-discomfort
Scharff, Lauren (2015). “What do we mean by ‘metacognitive instruction?” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-we-mean-by-metacognitive-instruction/


Pausing Mid-Stride: Mining Metacognitive Interruptions In the Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Meta-Studying: Teaching Metacognitive Strategies to Enhance Student Success

“Elizabeth Yost Hammer, PhD, of Xavier University of Louisiana, discusses why psychology teachers are uniquely positioned not only to teach the content of psychology but also to teach students how to learn. Hammer presents some strategies to teach metacognitive skills in the classroom to enhance learning and improve study skills and encourages teachers to present students with information about Carol Dweck’s model of the “Fixed Intelligence Mindset.””

Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer’s Presentation (45 Minutes)


Metacognition About Course Design: Creating a Paradigm Shift

By Charity S. Peak, Ph.D., U. S. Air Force Academy

Recent studies have sparked a national conversation about the lack of accountability for student learning in higher education. Our Underachieving Colleges (Bok, 2006) and Academically Adrift (Arum & Roksa, 2011) are just two examples of scathing reviews of how colleges are falling short. Increasingly, colleges and universities are being asked to demonstrate their value, particularly during a recession.

The core reason for not achieving greater success is a lack of focus on student learning. Despite all that we know today, institutions continue to concentrate on belongingness, construction, and the almighty research dollar rather than on whether students are graduating with substantial learning gains. Additionally, most faculty believe they are supporting student learning. They can even recite many of the basic learning principles that are foundational to teaching, such as the value of relevance. However, many faculty are unsure about how to apply these principles to their own classes. Like our students, they need sufficient practice and feedback in order to be able to create well-designed courses that improve student learning.

One way to attack this issue is to provide opportunities for metacognition about course design, not merely lesson planning. If metacognition includes thinking about how one performs a skill (Schraw, 1998), then awareness and knowledge about how to design a course are critical for enhancing student learning. Are there clearly articulated learning goals for the course? Do the assessments align with those learning goals? What learning experiences will support student success on those assessments by providing ample practice and feedback?

Jones, Noyd, and Sagendorf (2014) propose institutional course design retreats as a method for creating metacognition about student learning. Through a series of steps and collaboration with peers, faculty might simply set out to design their courses, but often become transformed by the experience. For many years, the authors have facilitated this six-step process for course design, but it is now available for others to use in Building a Pathway for Student Learning: A How-To Guide to Course Design. The book offers a research-based course design process that can be applied to all disciplines and a variety of settings. Step-by-step, faculty walk through designing a course using a series of self-paced workboxes:

  1. Student Learning Factors – How do your students’ characteristics impact their learning?
  2. Learning Goals – What do you want students to know and be able to do as a result of taking your course?
  3. Assessment – How will you know the extent to which students accomplished your learning goals?
  4. Proficiencies – What knowledge, skills, and attitudes will students need to accomplish the learning goals?
  5. Learning Experiences – Which learning experiences (outside and inside class time) support the development of proficiencies and accomplishment of your goals?
  6. Feedback & Improvement – How will students receive useful feedback on their work so they can make the necessary adjustments to accomplish your goals?

The culmination of work is a one-page flow chart of the course – a map to student learning. This flow chart offers a metacognitive pathway through the course for students as well as faculty teaching the course. As with all learning, and perhaps most importantly, faculty gain a new awareness of who should be at the center of their course – the learner! Through metacognition about student learning, faculty are able to intentionally design college experiences that matter rather than passive lectures or fun-but-tangential activities that do not achieve the learning gains we most need in higher education.

Without appropriate support and metacognition, faculty will continue to design courses focused on content rather than learning. While the approach that Jones, Noyd and Sagendorf (2014) use seemingly addresses an instructor’s main goal in preparation of a new semester – finishing the syllabus – faculty become transformed by how to operationalize a learning-centered philosophy, which they will carry with them into all of their lessons. Through a process of metacognition about student learning, faculty begin to experience the paradigm shift about which Barr and Tagg (1995) dreamed twenty years ago.

References:

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (Nov-Dec 1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27(6), 12-26.

Bok, D. (2006). Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jones, S. K., Noyd, R. K., & Sagendorf, K. S. (2014). Building a pathway to student learning: A how-to guide to course design. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26, 113-125.


Metacognitive Development in Professional Educators

Stewart, Cooper and Moulding investigate adult metacognition development, specifically comparing pre-service teachers and practicing teachers. They used the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory and found that metacognition improves significantly with age and with years of teaching experience, but not with gender or level of teaching (Pre-K though post-secondary ed levels).

Stewart, P. W., Cooper. S. S., & Moulding, L. R. (2007). Metacognitive development in professional educators. The Researcher, 21(1), 32-40.


Breaking the Content Mold: The Challenge of Shaping Student Metacognitive Development

by Dr. Lauren Scharff, U. S. Air Force Academy

We all know that it’s difficult to break long-term patterns of behavior, even when we’re genuinely motivated and well intentioned. It becomes significantly more difficult when we are trying to shift behavioral patterns of groups. This is true across a spectrum of situations and behaviors, but in this post I will focus on teachers and students shifting from a focus on content and basic skills to a focus on higher-level thinking and metacognitive skills.

These musing on “breaking the content mold” have become much more salient as I look forward to a new semester and I exchange ideas with colleagues about how we will approach our upcoming classes. I refer to the “content mold” as a way of illustrating how we, both students and teachers, have been shaped, or molded, by many years of prior experiences and expectations. Due to this shaping, the natural default for both groups is to teach or learn in ways that we have been exposed to in the past, especially if those approaches have seemed successful in the past. For many of us, this default is a focus on content and on disciplinary skills closely linked with the content. With conscious effort we can break out of that molded pattern of behavior to encourage interdisciplinary thinking and higher-level thinking skills that transfer beyond our course. However, when things get tough (e.g. when there are time constraints, high cognitive load situations, or pressures to achieve success as portrayed by exam scores), we tend to revert back to the more familiar patterns of behaviors, which for many of us means a focus on content and basic skills, rather than the use of higher-level thinking or metacognitive strategies.

Similarly, in an earlier post on this site, Ed Nuhfer points out that, “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.”

One of the biggest challenges to breaking this molded pattern is that it will be far more likely to be successful if both the teacher and the student are genuinely engaged in the effort. No matter how much effort is put forth by an instructor, if value is not perceived by the student, then little change will occur. Similarly, even if a student has learned the value of higher-level thinking and metacognitive approaches, if a teacher doesn’t seem to value those efforts, then a student will astutely focus on what does seem to be valued by the teacher. A further challenge is that, over the course of a semester, the effort and motivation from both groups might wax and wane in a non-synchronous manner. As I explore these challenges, I will use myself and my less-than-successful efforts last semester as an example.

I taught an upper-level majors course in vision science, and because I have taught this course many times, I knew going in that the material is often unexpectedly challenging to students and most of them find the chapter readings to be difficult. (They contain a lot of brain biology and neural communication topics, and my students are not biology majors). Thus, I decided to build in a low-threat (with a small number of points), intentional, metacognitive reflection assignment for each lesson that had a reading. Students would indicate their level of reading completion (six levels encompassing a thorough reading with annotations, skimming, not at all) and their level of understanding of the material before class. If they had problems with any of the materials, they were supposed to indicate what steps they would take to develop understanding. They would record these and turn them in at mid-semester and at the end of the semester. I had hoped that this regular reflection would prompt their awareness of their reading behaviors and their level of learning from the reading, initiate proactive behaviors if they had poor understanding, and build habits by being completed regularly. I also took time at the start of the semester to explicitly explain why I was incorporating this regular reflection assignment.

Unfortunately, except for a couple of students, I would rate this assignment as a failure. I don’t believe it did any harm, but I also don’t believe that students used it as intended. Rather, I think most of them quickly and superficially answered the questions just so they could turn in their logs at the two required times. This type of reflection is not something that they have been asked to explicitly do in the majority (all?) of their prior courses, and they already had other strategies that seemed to work for their success in other classes For example, more than half way through the semester one student informed me that it was simply easier and faster to come to the teacher’s office and get reading guide answers (or homework problem solutions in other courses), rather than deeply read and try to figure it out on his own. Thus, if he didn’t understand as he skimmed, he didn’t worry about it. This approach wasn’t working well in my course, but up to that point he’d been very successful, so he persisted in using it (although I stopped answering his questions in my office until he could demonstrate that he’d at least tried to figure them out).

In hindsight, I believe that my actions (or lack of them) also fed into the failure. I assumed that students would bring their questions to class if they had them due to their increased awareness of them and the prompt about what they would do to increase their understanding. Thus, if there were no questions (typically the case), I used the class time to connect the readings with related application examples and demonstrations rather than reiterated what was in the readings. The students seemed engaged in class and showed no indication of specific problems with the readings. Their personal application reflection writing assignments (separate from the reading logs) were fantastic. However, their poor exam performance suggested that they weren’t deeply understanding the content, and I instinctively shifted back to my prior content-focused approaches. I also did not take time in class to directly ask them about their understanding of the readings, what parts they found most challenging, and why.

Thus, although I know I wanted to support the development of student metacognitive skills, and my students also seemed accepting of that goal when I introduced it to them at the beginning of the semester, both groups of us quickly reverted to old content-focused habits that had been “successful” in the past. I am not the first to note the challenges of developing metacognitive skills. For example, Case and Gunstone (2002) state the following, “Many … authors have emphasized that metacognitive development is not easy to foster (e.g., Gunstone & Mitchell, 1998; White, 1998). Projects to enhance metacognition need to be long-term, and require a considerable energy input from both teachers and students.”

So, what will I do in the future? My plans are to more regularly and explicitly engage in discussion of the reading reflection prompts (and other metacognitive prompts) during class. By giving class time to such discussion and bringing the metacognitive processes into the open (rather than keeping them private due to completion outside of class), I hope to indicate the value of the processes and more directly support student exploration of new ways of thinking about learning. Importantly, I hope that this more public sharing will also keep me from falling back to a simple content focus when student performance isn’t what I’d like it to be. Ultimately, metacognitive development should enhance student learning, although it is likely to take longer to play out into changed learning behaviors. I need to avoid the “quick fix” of focusing on content. Thus, I plan to shape a new mold for myself and openly display it my students. We’ll all be more likely to succeed if we are “all in” together.

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Nuhfer, E. (15 July 2014). Metacognition for Guiding Students to Awareness of Higher-level Thinking (Part 1). Improve with Metacognition. https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-for-guiding-students-to-awareness-of-higher-level-thinking-part-1/

Case, J. & Gunstone, R. (2002). Metacognitive Development as a Shift in Approach to Learning: An in-depth study. Studies in Higher Education 27(4), p. 459-470. DOI: 10.1080/0307507022000011561

 

 


How Do You Increase Your Student’s Metacognition?

Aaron S. Richmond

Metropolitan State University of Denver

 

How many times has a student come to you and said “I just don’t understand why I did so bad on the test?” or “I knew the correct answer but I thought the question was tricky.” or “I’ve read the chapter 5 times and I still don’t understand what you are talking about in class.”? What did you say or do for these students? Did it prompt you to wonder what you can do to improve your students’ metacognition? I know many of us at Improve with Metacognition (IwM), started pursuing research on metacognition because of these very experiences. As such, I have compiled a summary of some of the awesome resources IwM bloggers have posted (see below). These instructional strategies can be generally categorized into either self-contained lessons. That is a lesson that can teach some aspect of metacognition in one or two class sessions. Or metacognitive instructional strategies that require an entire semester to teach.

Self-Contained Instructional Strategies

In Stephen Chew’s Blog, Metacognition and Scaffolding Student Learning, he suggests that one way to improve metacognitive awareness is through well-designed review sessions (Chew, 2015). Chew suggests that students would metacogntively benefit by actively participate and incentivize participation in study review sessions. Second, Chew suggests that students should self-test before review so that it is truly a review. Third, have students predict their exam scores based on the review performance and have them reflect on their predictions after the exam.

Ed Nuhfer (2015) describes a way to increase metacognition through role-play. Ed suggests that we can use Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking hats method to train our students to increase their metacognitive literacy. In essence, using this method we can train our students to think in a factual way (white hat), be positive and advocate for specific positions (yellow hat), to be cautious (black hat), recognize all facets of our emotions (red hat), be provocative (green hat), and be reflective and introspective (blue hat). We can do this through several exercises where students get a turn to have different hats.

In David Westmoreland’s (2014) blog, he discusses a classroom exercise to improve metacognition. David created a “metacognitive lab that attempts to answer the question How do you know?” In the lab, he presents students in small groups a handful of “truth” statements (e.g., Eggs are fragile.). Then students must take the statement and justify (on the board) how it is true. Then the class eliminates the justifications if they know them not to be true. Then the students with one another about the process and why the statements were eliminated.

Course Long Instructional Strategies

Chris Was (2014) investigated whether “variable weight-variable difficulty tests” would improve students’ calibration (i.e., knowing when you know something and knowing when you don’t). Chris has his students take several quizzes. In each quiz, students can weight each question for varied amount of points (e.g., question 1 is easy so I will give it 5 points whereas question 4 is hard so I will only give it 2 points). Then students answer whether they believe they got the question correct or not. After each quiz is graded, a teaching assistant goes over the quiz and discusses with the students why they weighted the question the way they did and why the thought they would or would not get the question correct. Was found that this activity caused his students to become better at knowing when they knew or did not know something.

Similarly, Shumacher and Taraban (2015) discussed the use of the testing effect as a method to improve metacognition. They suggest there are mixed results of the testing method as an effective instructional method. That is, when students were repeatedly tested and were exposed to questions on multiple exams, only low achieving students metacognitively benefited.

John Draeger (2015) uses just-in-time teaching in attempt to improve metacognition. John asks students metacognitive prompting questions (e.g., What is the most challenging part of the reading?) prior to class and they submit their answers before coming to class. Although, he has not measured the efficacy of this method, students have responded positively to the process.

Parting Questions to Further this Important Conversation

There are many other instructional methods used to increase student metacognition described throughout IwM that are both self-contained and semester long. Please check them out!

But even considering all of what has been presented in this blog and available on IwM, I couldn’t help but leave you with some unanswered questions that I myself have:

  1. What other instructional strategies have you used to increase student metacognition?
  2. If you were to choose between a self-contained or semester long method, which one would you choose and why? Meaning, what factors would help you determine which method to use? Insructional goals? How closely related to course content? Time commitment? Level of student metacogntive knowledge? Level of course?
  3. Once you have chosen a self-contained or semester long method, how should implementation methods differ? That is, what are the best practices used when implementing a self-contained vs. semester long technique?
  4. Finally, often in the metacognition research in higher education, instructional strategies for improving metacognition are pulled from studies and experiments conducted in k-12 education. Are there any studies, which you can think of, that would be suitable for testing in higher education? If so, how and why?

References

Beziat, T. (2015). Goal monitoring in the classroom. Retrived from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/goal-monitoring-in-the-classroom/

Chew, S. (2015). Metacognition and scaffolding student learning. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-and-scaffolding-student-learning/

Draeger, J. (2015). Using Justin-in-Time assignments to promote metacognition. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/using-just-in-time-assignments-to-promote-metacognition/

Nilson, L. B. (2015). Metacognition and specifications grading: The odd couple? Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-and-specifications-grading-the-odd-couple/

Nuhfer, E. (2015). Developing metacognitive literacy through role play: Edward De Bono’s six thinking hats. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/developing-metacognitive-literacy-through-role-play-edward-de-bonos-six-thinking-hats/

Shumbacher, J., & Traban, R. (2015). To test or not to test: That is the metacognitive question. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/to-test-or-not-to-test-that-is-the-metacognitive-question/

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

Westmoreland, D. (2014). Science and social controversy—A classroom exercise in metacognition. Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/science-and-social-controversy-a-classroom-exercise-in-metacognition/

 


Supports and Barriers to Students’ Metacognitive Development in a Large Intro Chemistry Course

by Ashley Welsh, Postdoctoral Teaching & Learning Fellow, Vantage College

First off, I must admit that this blog posting has been a long time coming. I was fortunate enough to meet both John Draeger and Lauren Scharff at the ISSOTL conference in Quebec City in October of 2014. Their “Improving With Metacognition” (IWM) poster was a beacon for someone such as myself who is engaged with metacognition in both my teaching and research. I was thrilled to know there were individuals creating and contributing to a repository of literature and reflections surrounding metacognition. This past January, John asked me to contribute a blog post to the website, however I thought it best to defer my writing until after the completion of my PhD this past spring. Thus, here I am. Ready to write.

For the past 7 years I have been actively engaged with undergraduate science education and research at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Within my research and teaching, I have become increasingly aware of students’ concerns with developing and adapting the appropriate study habits/strategies for success in their introductory courses. This concern was echoed by several of my colleagues teaching large (300+ students/section) introductory math and science courses.

This growing concern led me to exploring students’ metacognitive development in two sections of a large, second year introductory organic chemistry course for biological science majors (~245 students/section). Across the literature and at UBC, this course has a reputation as a challenging, cumulative course where students often fail to develop meaningful learning strategies and fall behind in the course (Grove & Bretz, 2012; Lynch & Trujillo, 2011; Zhao et al., 2014). As a result of its reputation, the instructor with whom I was working designed several formative assessments (e.g. bi-weekly in-class quizzes, written reflections), scaffolded in-class activities (e.g. targeted study strategy readings and discussion), and workshops to improve students’ learning strategies. That is, to improve their ability to control, monitor, evaluate, and plan their learning processes (Anderson & Nashon, 2007; Thomas, 2012). Despite students’ high completion of these targeted activities/homework, many still seemed to be struggling with how to study effectively. As such, we were curious to understand the barriers and supports for students’ metacognitive development in this particular course.

My research adopted an interpretive case study approach (Creswell, 2009; Stake, 1995) with data being collected via a pre/post metacognitive instrument, a student feedback survey, classroom observations, and student interviews. At this point in time I will not get into the nitty gritty details of my thesis, but instead, will draw on a few of the main observations/themes that emerged from my work.

  1. High stakes assessments may overshadow resources designed for metacognitive development: Within this course, students’ placed considerable emphasis on high stakes assessment as a means for studying, learning, and reflection. Despite students perceiving the formative assessment measures (e.g. in-class quizzes, homework assignments, targeted study strategy activities) as useful to their learning, the majority of them attributed the midterm and final examinations as driving their studying and behaviours. The examinations were worth roughly 75% of students’ grades and as such, students expressed being more concerned with their performance on these high stakes assessments than with their own study strategies. Students indicated that because the formative activities and workshops were only worth about 15% of their grade, they rarely reflected back on these resources or implemented the advised learning strategies. While these resources were designed to provide ongoing feedback on students’ learning strategies and performance, students mentioned that their performance on the first midterm exam was the primary crossroad at which they would explicitly reflect upon their learning strategies. As one student mentioned, “The midterm is the first major point at which you realize you didn’t understand things”. Unfortunately this was often too late in the semester for most students to effectively change their strategies.
  1. The majority of students reported difficulty implementing metacognitive strategies for enhanced learning: While many students were aware of their weaknesses and lack of concentration when studying, they still struggled with effectively monitoring, evaluating and planning their learning. One student mentioned that “while I do study hard, I don’t think I study smart”. Even when students were aware of their issues, implementing change was difficult as they weren’t exactly sure what to do. Despite the instructor modeling effective strategies and providing multiple opportunities for students to reflect on their learning, several students had difficulty with acknowledging, recognizing, or implementing this advice. Students unanimously praised the efforts of the instructor and the multiple resources she created to support their learning, but outside of class, students often struggled with staying on task or changing their behaviours/attitudes. Some students mentioned they were more concerned with getting a question right than with understanding the problem solving process or with implementing the appropriate strategies for learning. The majority of students I spoke to indicated that throughout their education they had rarely received explicit advice about how to study and some even mentioned that despite writing down the advice they received in class, they were “far too lazy to change”. With learning strategies not taking a primary role in their previous and current education, it’s not surprising that most students found it difficult to implement appropriate strategies for learning.
  1. Students emphasized the importance of gaining awareness of oneself as a learner and seeking help from others: While students acknowledged that the demanding course material and high-stakes assessments were barriers to their learning, they also noted the critical influence that their own strategies and abilities as learners had on their experience and performance. Some students viewed their own stubbornness or personal issues as reasons why they were “too lazy to change” or more likely to “stick with what I already know. Like memorizing and cramming”. When asked to provide advice for incoming students, all of the students I interviewed (n=26) mentioned the necessity for students to “know yourself and what suits you best. And change it – experiment with it. Know how you study. Know that.” This comment was echoed by several students who emphasized the need for every student to be aware of their weaknesses as learners and to actively and immediately seek help from others when concerned or confused. Students who exhibited effective learning strategies were more likely to attend office hours, to create study groups, and to implement and evaluate the instructor’s study advice. Furthermore, these students could explicitly articulate the strategies they used for studying and could identify which course resources were most influential to their learning approaches.

The three themes described above are only a snapshot of some of the issues unveiled within my doctoral research. They have led me to consider more research that could explore:

  • How increasing the weight (percentage of the final grade) of the formative assessment/activities relative to the high-stakes examinations might impact students’ learning strategies/behaviours;
  • How to appropriately shift students’ fixations on grades to that of understanding and learning;
  • How we might better support students in seeing value in activities, resources, or low-stakes assessment that have been designed to support them as metacognitive, confident learners; and
  • How we might achieve these assessment and learning goals in large, introductory science courses.

I look forward to any comments/questions you have on this topic!

-Ashley

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Anderson, D., & Nashon, S. (2007). Predators of knowledge construction: Interpreting students’ metacognition in an amusement park physics program. Science Education, 91(2), 298-320. doi: 10.1002/sce.20176

Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Grove, N. P., & Bretz, S. L. (2012). A continuum of learning: from rote memorization to meaningful learning in organic chemistry. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 13, 201-208.

Lynch, D. J., & Trujillo, H. (2011). Motivational beliefs and learning strategies in organic chemistry. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 9(1351- 1365).

Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Thomas, G. (2012). Metacognition in science education: Past, present, and future considerations. In B. J. Fraser, K. Tobin & C. J. McRobbie (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Science Education (pp. 131-144): Springer International Handbooks of Education.

Zhao, N., Wardeska, J. G., McGuire, S. Y., & Cook, E. (2014). Metacognition: An effective tool to promote success in college science learning. Journal of College Science Teaching, 43(4), 48-54.


To Test or Not to Test: That is the Metacognitive Question

by John Schumacher & Roman Taraban at Texas Tech University

In prepping for upcoming classes, we are typically interested in how to best structure the class to promote the most effective learning. Applying best-practices recommendations in the literature, we try to implement active learning strategies that go beyond simple lecturing. One such strategy that has been found to be effective from research is the use of testing. The inference to draw from the research literature is quite simple: test students frequently, informally, and creatively, over and above standard course tests, like a mid-term and final. Testing is a useful assessment tool, but research has shown that it is also a learning tool that has been found to promote learning above and beyond simply rereading material (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a). This is called the testing effect. In controlled studies, researchers have shown testing effects with a variety of materials, including expository texts and multimedia presentations (e.g., Carrier & Pashler, 1992; Huff, Davis, & Meade, 2013; Johnson & Mayer, 2009; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b). Testing has been found to increase learning when implemented in a classroom setting (McDaniel, Anderson, Derbish, & Morrisette, 2007) and is a useful learning tool for people of all ages (Meyer & Logan, 2013). The theoretical explanation for the benefits of testing is that testing strengthens retrieval paths to the stored information in memory more so than simply rereading the material. Therefore, later on a person can more effectively recover the information from memory.

Although implementing testing and other active learning strategies in the classroom is useful in guiding and scaffolding student learning, it is important that we develop an understanding of when and for whom these strategies are most helpful. Specifically, regarding testing, research from our lab and in others is starting to show that testing may not always be as beneficial as past research suggests. Characteristics of the students themselves may nullify or even reverse the benefits of testing. Thus, the first question we address is whether frequent classroom testing will benefit all students. Yet a more pertinent question, which is our second question, is whether frequent testing develops metacognitive practices in students. We will discuss these in turn.

In a formal study of the testing effect, or in an informal test in any classroom, one needs two conditions, a control condition in which participants study the material on their own for a fixed amount of time, and an experimental condition in which participants study and are tested over the material, for instance, in a Study-Test-Study-Test format. Both groups spend an equal amount of time either simply studying or studying and testing. All participants take a final recall test over the material. Through a series of testing-effect studies incorporating expository texts as the learning material, we have produced a consistent grade-point average (GPA) by testing-effect interaction. This means that the benefits of testing (i.e., better later retrieval of information) depend on students’ GPAs! A closer look at this interaction showed us that students with low GPAs benefited most from the implementation of testing whereas mid to high GPA students benefited just as much by simply studying the material.

While at this preliminary stage it is difficult to ascertain why exactly low GPA students benefit from testing in our experiments while others do not, a few observations can be put forth. First, at the end of the experiments, we asked participants to report any strategies they used on their own to help them learn the materials. Metacognitive reading strategies that the participants reported included focusing on specific aspects of the material, segmenting the material into chunks, elaborating on the material, and testing themselves. Second, looking further into the students’ self-reports of metacognitive strategy use, we found that participants in the medium to high GPA range used these strategies often, while low GPA students used them less often. Simply, the self-regulated use of metacognitive strategies was associated with higher GPAs and better recall of the information in the texts that the participants studied. Lower GPA students benefited when the instructor deliberately imposed self-testing.

These results are interesting because they indicate that the classroom implementation of testing may only be beneficial to low achieving students because they either do not have metacognitive strategies at their disposal or are not applying these strategies. High-achieving students may have metacognitive strategies at their disposal and may not need that extra guidance set in place by the instructor.

Another explanation for the GPA and testing-effect interaction may simply be motivation. Researchers have found that GPA correlates with motivation (Mitchell, 1992). It is possible that implementing a learning strategy may be beneficial to low GPA students because it forces them to work with the material. Motivation may also explain why GPA correlated with metacognitive strategy use. Specifically if lower GPA students are less motivated to work with the material it stands to reason that they would be less likely to employ learning strategies that take time and effort.

This leads to our second question: Does frequent testing develop metacognitive skills in students, particularly self-regulated self-testing? This is a puzzle that we cannot answer from the current studies. Higher-GPA students appear to understand the benefits of applying metacognitive strategies and do not appear to need additional coaxing from the experimenter/teacher to apply them. Will imposing self-testing, or any other strategy on lower-GPA students lead them to eventually adopt the use of these strategies on their own? This is an important question and one that deserves future attention.

While testing may be useful for bolstering learning, we suggest that it should not be blindly utilized in the classroom as a learning tool. A consideration of what is being taught and to whom will dictate the effectiveness of testing as a learning tool. As we have suggested, more research also needs to be done to figure out how to bring metacognitive strategies into students’ study behaviors, particularly low-GPA students.

References

Carrier, M., & Pashler, H. (1992). The influence of retrieval on retention. Memory & Cognition,   20(6), 633-642.

Huff, M. J., Davis, S. D., & Meade, M. L. (2013). The effects of initial testing on false recall and             false recognition in the social contagion of memory paradigm. Memory & Cognition, 41(6), 820-831.

Johnson, C. I., & Mayer, R. E. (2009). A testing effect with multimedia learning. Journal of          Educational Psychology, 101(3), 621-629.

McDaniel, M. A., Anderson, J. L., Derbish, M. H., & Morrisette, N. (2007). Testing the testing effect in the classroom. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19(4-5), 494-513.

Meyer, A. D., & Logan, J. M. (2013). Taking the testing effect beyond the college freshman:        Benefits for lifelong learning. Psychology and Aging, 28(1), 142-147.

Mitchell Jr, J. V. (1992). Interrelationships and predictive efficacy for indices of intrinsic,                         extrinsic, and self-assessed motivation for learning. Journal of Research and       Development in Education, 25(3), 149-155.

Roediger, H., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006a). The power of testing memory: Basic research and           implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 181-       210.

Roediger, H., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006b). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests     improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.


Exploring the relationship between awareness, self-regulation, and metacognition

Thinking about thinking, awareness, and self-regulation Share on Xby John Draeger (SUNY Buffalo State)

Recent blog posts have considered the nature of metacognition and metacognitive instruction. Lauren Scharff, for example, defines metacognition as “the intentional and ongoing interaction between awareness and self-regulation” (Scharff, 2015). This post explores the relationship between the elements of this definition.

Scharff observes that a person can recognize that a pedagogical strategy isn’t working without changing her behavior (e.g., someone doesn’t change because she is unaware of alternative strategies) and a person can change her behavior without monitoring its efficacy (e.g., someone tries a technique that she heard about in a workshop without thinking through whether the technique makes sense within a particular learning environment). Scharff argues that a person engaging in metacognition will change her behavior when she recognizes that a change is needed. She will be intentional about when and how to make that change. And she will continue the new behavior only if there’s reason to believe that it is the achieving the desired result. Metacognition, therefore, can be found in the interaction between awareness and self-regulated action. Moreover, because learning environments are fluid, the interaction between awareness and self-regulation must be ongoing. This suggests that awareness and self-regulation are necessary for metacognition.

In response, I offered what might seem to be a contrary view (Draeger, 2015). I argued that the term ‘metacognition’ is vague in two ways. First, it is composed of overlapping sub-elements. Second, each of these sub-elements falls along a continuum. For example, metacognitive instructors can be more (or less) intentional, more (or less) informed about evidence-based practice, more (or less) likely to have alternative strategies ready to hand, and more (or less) nimble with regards to when and how to shift strategies based on their “in the moment” awareness of student need. Sub-elements are neither individually necessary nor jointly sufficient for a full characterization of metacognition. Rather, a practice is metacognitive if it has “enough” of the sub-elements and they are far “enough” along the various continua.

Scharff helpfully suggests that metacognition must involve both awareness and action. I would add that awareness can be divided into sub-elements (e.g., reflection, mindfulness, self-monitoring, self-knowledge) and behavior can be divided into sub-elements (e.g., self-regulation, collective actions, institutional mandates). While I suspect that no one of the sub-elements is individually necessary for metacognition, Scharff has correctly identified two broad clusters of elements that are required for metacognition.

As I continue to think through the relationship between awareness and self-regulation, I am reminded of an analogy between physical exercise and intellectual growth. As I have said in a previous post, I am a gym rat. Among other things, I swim several times a week. A few years ago, however, I noticed that my stroke needed refinement. So, I contacted a swimming instructor. She found a handful of areas where I could improve, including my kick and the angle of my arms. As I worked on these items, it was often helpful to focus on my kick without worrying about the angle of my arms and vice versa. With time and effort, I got gradually better. Because my kick had been atrocious, focusing on that one area resulted in dramatic improvement. Because my arm angle hadn’t been all that bad, improvements were far less dramatic. Working on my kick and my arm angle combined to make me a better swimmer. Separating the various elements of my stroke allowed me to identify areas for improvement and allowed me to tackle my problem areas without feeling overwhelmed. However, even after working on the parts, I found that I still needed to put it together. Eventually, I found a swim rhythm that brought elements into alignment.

Likewise, it is often useful to separate elements of our pedagogical practice (e.g., awareness, self-regulation) because separation allows us identify and target areas in need of improvement. If a person knows what she is doing isn’t working but doesn’t know what else to do, then she might focus on identifying alternative strategies. If a person knows of alternative strategies but does not know when or how to use them, then she might focus on her “in the moment awareness” and her ability to shift to new strategies as needed during class. Focusing on the one element can give a person something concrete to work on without feeling overwhelmed by all the other moving parts. The separation is useful, but it is also somewhat artificial. By analogy, my kick and my arm angle are elements of my swim stroke, but they are also part of an interrelated process. While it is important to improve the parts, the ultimate goal is finding a way to integrate the changes into an effective whole. Metacognitive instructors seek to become more explicit, more intentional, more informed about evidence-based practice, and better able to make “in the moment” adjustments. Focusing on each of these elements can improve practice. Separating these elements can be useful, but somewhat artificial because the ultimate goal is finding a way to integrate these elements into an effective whole.

References

Draeger, John (2015). “So what if ‘metacognition’ is vague!” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/so-what-if-metacognition-is-vague/

Scharff, Lauren (2015). “What do we mean by ‘metacognitive instruction?” Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/what-do-we-mean-by-metacognitive-instruction/

 


What Do We Mean by “Metacognitive Instruction”?

by Lauren Scharff (U.S. Air Force Academy*) 

Many of you are probably aware of the collaborative, multi-institutional metacognitive instruction research project that we initiated through the Improve with Metacognition site.  This project has been invigorating for me on many levels. First, through the process of developing the proposal, I was mentally energized. Several of us had long, thoughtful conversations about what we meant when we used the term “metacognitive instruction” and how these ideas about instruction “mapped” to the concept of “metacognitive learning.”  These discussions were extensions of some early blog post explorations, What do we mean when we say “Improve with metacognition”? (Part 1 and Part 2). Second, my involvement in the project led me to (once again) examine my own instruction. Part of this self-examination happened as a natural consequence of the discussions, but also it’s happening in an ongoing manner as I participate in the study as an intervention participant. Good stuff!

For this post, I’d like to share a bit more about our wrangling with what we meant by metacognitive instruction as we developed the project, and I invite you to respond and share your thoughts too.

Through our discussions, we ultimately settled on the following description of metacognitive instruction:

Metacognitive instructors are aware of what they are doing and why. Before each lesson, they have explicitly considered student learning goals and multiple strategies for achieving those goals.  During the lesson, they actively monitor the effectiveness of those strategies and student progress towards learning goals.  Through this pre-lesson strategizing and during lesson monitoring awareness, a key component of metacognition, is developed; however, awareness is not sufficient for metacognition.  Metacognitive instructors also engage in self-regulation. They have the ability to make “in-the-moment”, intentional changes to their instruction during the lesson based on a situational awareness of student engagement and achievement of the learning objectives — this creates a responsive and customized learning experience for the student.

One of the questions we pondered (and we’d love to hear your thoughts on this point), is how these different constructs were related and / or were distinct. We came to the conclusion that there is a difference between reflective teaching, self-regulated teaching, and metacognitive instruction/teaching.

More specifically, a person can reflect and become aware of their actions and their consequences, but at the same time not self-regulate to modify behaviors and change consequences, especially in the moment. A person can also self-regulate / try a new approach / be intentional in one’s choice of actions, but not be tuned in / aware of how it’s going at the moment with respect to the success of the effort. (For example, an instructor might commit to a new pedagogical approach because she learned about it from a colleague. She can implement that new approach despite some personal discomfort due to changing pedagogical strategies, but without conscious and intentional awareness of how well it fits her lesson objectives or how well it’s working in the moment to facilitate her students’ learning.) Metacognition combines the awareness and self-regulation pieces and increases the likelihood of successfully accomplishing the process (teaching, learning, or other process).

Thus, compared to other writings we’ve seen, we are more explicitly proposing that metacognition is the intentional and ongoing interaction between awareness and self-regulation. Others have generally made this claim about metacognitive learning without using the terms as explicitly. For example, “Simply possessing knowledge about one’s cognitive strengths or weaknesses and the nature of the task without actively utilizing this information to oversee learning is not metacognitive.” (Livingston, 1997). But, in other articles on metacognition and on self-regulated learning, it seems like perhaps the metacognitive part is the “thinking or awareness” part and the self-regulation is separate.

What do you think?

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Livingston, J. A. (1997). Metacognition: An Overview. Unpublished manuscript, State University of New York at Buffalo. http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/cep564/metacog.htm

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Thinking about How Faculty Learn about Learning

By Cynthia Desrochers, California State University Northridge

Lately, two contradictory adages have kept me up nights:  “K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid” (U.S. Navy) and “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” (H.L. Mencken).  Which is it?  Experts have a wealth of well-organized, conditionalized, and easily retrievable knowledge in their fields (Bradford, et al., 2000).  This may result in experts skipping over steps when they teach a skill that has become automatic to them.  But where does this practice leave our novice learners who need to be taught each small step—almost in slow motion—to begin to grasp a new skill?

I have just completed co-facilitating five of ten scheduled faculty learning community (FLC) seminars in a yearlong Five GEARS for Activating Learning FLC.  As a result of this experience, my takeaway note to self now reads in BOLD caps:  (1) keep it simple in the early stages of learning and (2) model the entire process and share my thinking out loud—no secrets hidden behind the curtains!

The Backstory

The Five Gears for Activating Learning project at California State University, Northridge, began in fall 2012. It was my idea, and I asked seven university-wide faculty leaders to join me in a grassroots effort. Our goals were to improve student learning from inside the classroom (vs. policy modifications), promote faculty use of the current research on learning, provide a lens for judging the efficacy of various teaching strategies (e.g., the flipped classroom), and develop a common vocabulary for use campuswide (e.g., personnel communications).  Support for this project came from the University Provost and the dean of the Michael D. Eisner College of Education in the form of reassigned time for me and 3-unit buyouts for each of the eight FLC members, spread over the entire academic year, 2014-15.

We read as a focus book How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (Ambrose, et al., 2010). We condensed Ambrose’s seven principles to five GEARS, one of which is Developing Mastery, which we defined as deep learning, reflection, and self-direction—critical elements of metacognition and the focus of this blog site.

On Keeping It Simple

I have been in education for forty-five years, yet I’m having many light-bulb moments with this FLC group – I’m learning something new, or reorganizing prior knowledge, or having increased clarity.  Hence, I’ve given a lot of thought to the conflict between keeping it simple and omitting some important elements versus sharing more complex definitions and relationships and overwhelming our FLC members. My rationale for choosing simple: If I am still learning about how learning works, how can I expect new faculty—who teach Political Science, Business Law, Research Applications, and African Americans in Film, all without benefit of a teaching credential—to process some eighty years of research on learning in two semesters?

In opting for the K.I.S.S. approach, we have developed a number of activities and tools that scaffold learning to use the five GEARS in our teaching; moreover, each activity or tool models explicitly with faculty some practices we are encouraging them to use with their students.  This includes (1) reflective writing in the form of learning logs and diaries, (2) an appraisal instrument to self-assess their revised (using the GEARS) spring 2015 course design, and (3) a class-session plan to scaffold their use of the GEARS.  [See the detailed descriptions given in the handout resource posted on this site.] I hope to have some results data regarding their use in my spring blog.

Looking to next semester, our spring FLC projects will likely center around not only teaching the redesigned five GEARS course but also disseminating the five GEARS campuswide.  As a direct result of the Daily Diary that FLC members kept for three weeks on others’ use and misuse of the five GEARS, they want to share our work.  [See handout for further description of the Daily Diaries.] Dissemination possibilities include campus student tour guides, colleagues who teach a common course, Freshman Seminar instructors, librarians, and the Career Center personnel.  If another adage is true, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn” (Benjamin Franklin), our FLC faculty will likely move of their own accord along the continuum from a simple to complex understanding of the five GEARS in their efforts to teach the five GEARS to others on campus.

A Word about GEARS

Why is this blog not focusing solely on the metacognition gear, which we call Developing Mastery? The simple answer is that learning is so intertwined that all the GEARS likely support metacognition in some way.  However, any one of the activities or tools we have employed can be modified to limit the scope to your definition of metacognition.  Our postcard below shows all five GEARS:

5_GEARS_postcard


Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI): The 5 Perspectives

There are a lot of free surveys/inventories “out there” for all sorts of things, most often related to some aspect of personality. If you use them in a reflective manner, they can help you better understand yourself – your . The TPI (also free) offers a chance for you to reflect on your teaching perspectives (one aspect of metacognitive instruction). The TPI suggests 5 perspectives: Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing, and Social Reform.

http://www.teachingperspectives.com/tpi/


Despite Good Intentions, More is Not Always Better

by Lauren Scharff, U.S. Air Force Academy*

A recent post to the PSYCHTEACH listserv got me thinking about my own evolution as a teacher trying my best to help the almost inevitable small cluster of students who struggled in my courses, often despite claiming to “have studied for hours.” The post asked “Have any of you developed a handout on study tips/skills that you give to your students after the first exam?” A wide variety of responses were submitted, all of which reflected genuinely good intentions by the teachers.

However, based on my ongoing exploration of metacognition and human learning, I believe that, despite the good intentions, some of the recommendations will not consistently lead to the desired results. Importantly, these recommendations actually seem quite intuitive and reasonable on the surface, which leads to their appeal and continued use. Most of those that fall into this less ideal category do so because they imply that “More is Better.”

For example, one respondent shared, “I did correlations of their test scores with their attendance so far, the number of online quizzes they have taken so far, and the combined number of these two things. [All correlations were positive ranging from 0.35 to 0.57.] So I get to show them how their behaviors really are related to their scores…”

This approach suggests several things that all seem intuitively positive: online quizzes are a good way to study and attending class will help them learn. I love the empowerment of students by pointing out how their choice of behaviors can impact their learning! However, the message that more quizzes and simple attendance will lead to better grades does not capture the true complexity of learning.

Another respondent shared a pre-post quiz reflection assignment in which some of the questions asked about how much of the required reading was completed and how many hours were put into studying. Other questions asked about the use of chapter outcomes when reading and studying, the student’s expected grade on the quiz, and an open-ended question requesting a summary of study approaches.

This pre-post quiz approach seems positive for many reasons. Students are forced to think about and acknowledge levels and types of effort that they put into studying for the quizzes. There is a clear suggestion that using the learning outcomes to direct their studying would be a positive strategy. They are asked to predict their grades, which might help them link their studying efforts with predicted grades. These types of activities are actually good first steps at helping students become more metacognitive (aware and thoughtful) about their studying. Yea!

However, a theme running through the questions seems to be, again, “more is better.” More hours. More reading. The hidden danger is that students may not know how to effectively use the learning outcomes, how to read, how to effectively engage during class, how to best take advantage of practice quizzes to promote self-monitoring of learning, or what to do during those many hours of studying.

Thus, the recommended study strategies may work well for some students, but not all, due to differences in how students implement the strategies. Therefore, even a moderately high correlation between taking practice quizzes and exam performance might mask the fact that there are subgroups for which the results are less positive.

For example, Kontur and Terry (2013) found the following in a core Physics course, “On average, completing many homework problems correlated to better exam scores only for students with high physics aptitude. Low aptitude physics students had a negative correlation between exam performance and completing homework; the more homework problems they did, the worse their performance was on exams.”

I’m sure you’re all familiar with students who seem to go through “all the right motions” but who still struggle, become frustrated, and sometimes give up or develop self-doubt about their abilities. Telling students to do more of what they’re already doing if it’s not effective will actually be more harmful.

This is where many teachers feel uncomfortable because they are clearly working outside their disciplines. Teaching students how to read or how to effectively take notes in class, or how to self-monitor their own learning and adjust study strategies to different types of learning expectations is not their area of expertise. Most teachers somehow figured out how to do these things well on their own, or they wouldn’t be teachers now. However, they may never have thought about the underlying processes of what they do when they read or study that allowed them to be successful. They also feel pressures to cover the disciplinary content and focus on the actual course material rather than learning skills. Unfortunately, covering material does little good if the students forget most of the content anyway. Teaching them skills (e.g., metacognitive study habits) offers the prospect of retaining more of the disciplinary content that is covered.

The good news is that there are more and more resources available for both teachers and students (check out the resources on this website). A couple great resources specifically mentioned by the listserv respondents are the How to Get the Most out of Studying videos by Stephen Chew at Samford University and the short reading (great to share with both faculty and students) called The Six Hour D… and How to Avoid it by Dewey (1997). Both of these highlighted resources focus on metacognitive learning strategies.

This reflection on the different recommendations is not meant to belittle the well-intentioned teachers. However, by openly discussing these common suggestions, and linking to what we know of metacognition, I believe we can increase their positive impact. Share your thoughts, favorite study suggestions and metacognitive activities by using the comments link below, or submitting them under the Teaching Strategies tab on this website.

References

Dewey, R. (1997, February 12) The “6 hour D” and how to avoid it. [Online]. Available: http://www.psywww.com/discuss/chap00/6hourd.htm.

Kontur, F. & Terry, N. The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course. Cornell Physics Library Physics Education. arXiv:1305.2213

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Faculty Metacognition of Verbal Questioning

by Charity Peak, U.S. Air Force Academy*

Few faculty would argue that teaching requires asking questions of students, but rarely do instructors consider the what, how, or why of their verbal questioning behavior.  Without metacognition of questioning strategies, this foundational instructional technique can be wasted on habit rather than design.

Faculty question students for a variety of reasons.  Surprisingly, most faculty use verbal questioning as a classroom management technique.  This might look something like a machine gun approach, firing question after question in multiple directions in an effort to keep the class engaged.  See a student dozing? Fire!  Someone checking Facebook? Fire!  Some researchers estimate that teachers ask as many as 120 questions per hour—a question every 30 seconds (Vogler, 2005)!While this strategy may keep students on their toes, it does not necessarily aid student learning.  Often these questions are low level cognitive questions, requiring mainly recall of factual knowledge.  If teachers wish to develop deeper levels of thinking, they must stimulate their students’ own evaluation of the content rather than merely requesting regurgitation of the basics.

At the other end of the spectrum is a master teacher’s approach to instruction that utilizes a specific questioning taxonomy proven to be effective for a variety of disciplines.  Rather than using the run-and-gun approach, this faculty member masterfully leads students from one point to another through a series of thoughtfully derived questions.  He or she might start with the big picture and lead to a specific point or, in contrast, begin with minutia but guide students to one main relevant theme by the end of class.  Watching these instructors in action is often humbling.  However, even these most masterful teachers are often not cognitively aware of the strategies they are using.  They have figured out what works over time, but they likely can’t point to a specific methodology they were using to support their instruction.  Rather than shooting in the dark over many years, faculty would be wise to understand the metacognition behind verbal questioning if they wish to be effective in creating higher order thinking in their students.

Moving beyond simple recall in questioning is certainly good advice for creating more opportunities in thinking, but it’s easier said than done.  Faculty often report feeling uncomfortable trying new questioning strategies.  Asking higher order thinking questions for application, analysis, and synthesis often creates extensive dead air time in the classroom.  More difficult questions require more time to think, often in silence.  Also, students are reluctant to change the very well-established classroom culture of “getting the answer right.”  Based on years of classroom experience, students will often fire answers back, playing the game of “Guess what’s in the teacher’s head.”

Despite these cultural norms, it is possible through metacognition to improve verbal questioning.  Some scholars argue that faculty should understand some of the basic questioning taxonomies that exist and how they influence learning.  For example, asking open-ended versus closed-ended questions will alter the cognitive level of thinking and response (Rothstein & Santana, 2011).  Open-ended questions tend to achieve thinking which is higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Students are required to generate thoughtful answers to questions as opposed to firing one to three word facts.  For example, instead of asking, “What is an adverb?” faculty might ask students to apply their learning by identifying an adverb in a sentence or even creating their own sentences using adverbs.  Better yet, The Right Question Institute (Rothstein & Santana, 2011) encourages faculty to get students to ask their own questions rather than teachers doing all the work.  After all, the person generating the questions is arguably the person who is learning the most.

Other scholars suggest that faculty should consider the sequencing and patterns that are possible when asking questions (Vogler, 2005).  For example, cognitive psychologists often suggest a funneling or convergent questioning technique, which leads students from big picture to details because it mirrors the cognitive functioning of the brain.  However, depending on the subject area, faculty may find success in guiding students from narrow to broad thinking (divergent) by first asking low-level, general questions followed by higher-level, specific questions.  Some disciplines lend themselves to using a circular path to force critical thinking in students.  This pattern asks a series of questions which eventually lead back to the initial position or question (e.g., “What is justice?”).  While students often find these patterns frustrating, it emphasizes to students the value of thinking rather than correctly identifying the right answer.

Ultimately, though, faculty would be wise to spend less energy on the exact strategy they plan to use and instead focus on the main goals of their questioning.  In Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011), the authors propose that the purpose of questioning is really to make our students’ thinking visible by understanding our own expert-level thinking—aka metacognition.   To do this, the authors suggest that instead of complex taxonomies and patterns, we should focus our efforts on three main purposes for questioning in our classes:

  1. Modeling our interest in the ideas being explored
  2. Helping students to construct understanding
  3. Facilitating the illumination of students’ own thinking to themselves (i.e., metacognition)

By asking authentic questions – that is, questions to which the teacher does not already know the answer or to which there are not predetermined answers – instructors create a classroom culture that feels intellectually engaging, fosters a community of inquiry, and allows students to see teachers as learners (31).  Faculty must frame learning as a complex communal activity rather than the process of merely accumulating information.  Thoughtful questioning creates this classroom climate of inquiry, but only if faculty are metacognitive about their purpose and approach to using this critical pedagogical strategy.  Without metacognition, faculty risk relying on the machine gun approach to questioning, wasting valuable class time on recall of factual information rather than elevating and revealing students’ thinking.

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rothstein, D., and Santana, L. (2011). Make just one change: Teach students to ask their own questions. Boston: Harvard Education Press.

Vogler, K. E. (2005). Improve your verbal questioning. The Clearing House, 79(2): 98-103.

 

* Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U. S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U. S. Govt.


Using metacognitive awareness to facilitate healthy engagement with moral issues

By John Draeger, SUNY Buffalo State

As the new semester begins, I am again looking out on a classroom full of students eager to discuss “hot button” moral issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, hate-speech, same-sex marriage, drug legalization). In an earlier post entitled, “Using metacognition to uncover the substructure of moral issues,” I argued that metacognitive awareness can help students move beyond media pundit drivel and towards a more careful consideration of moral issues. In “Cultivating the habit of constructive discomfort”, I argued that learning requires cultivating a certain healthy discomfort (much like the discomfort often associated with vigorous exercise) and it is metacognitive awareness that keeps us within our own “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky 1978). This post considers some of the sources of discomfort that threaten to undermine the discussion of moral issues.

Confronting “hot button” moral issues can be difficult because each of us brings our own complicated history to the conversation (replete with hang ups and blind spots). Based on my many years of teaching moral philosophy, I offer the following list of items that I found seem to derail discussion. The list is by no means exhaustive and whether these are the elements most likely to impede engagement is ultimately an empirical question that the needs to be answered. However, I argue that all of us (instructors, students, those outside the classroom) need to be aware of our own sources of discomfort with moral matters if we hope to move beyond them and towards a healthy engagement with these important issues.

Sources of discomfort: 

(1) Entrenched beliefs— some moral issues are difficult to consider because they force us to confront our foundational values.  For example, those from a wide variety of religious traditions can find it difficult to be completely open-minded to the possibility that abortion and same-sex marriage could be permissible. While they can summarize a particular position on the issue (e.g., for a particular course assignment), many find it difficult to move beyond a “bookish” articulation of the problem towards a genuine consideration of the issues because it threatens to undermine other firmly held beliefs (e.g., religious teachings).

(2) Peer pressure — many students find it difficult to swim against the current of peer opinion. When discussing sex, for example, students want to avoid being seen as either too prudish or too perverted. Sometimes students have views that fall outside the range of perceived acceptability but they refuse to voice them for fear of social disapproval. Other times, it doesn’t even occur them to consider anything outside the norm. In both cases, peer pressure can undermine full consideration of the issues.

(3) Self-interest — shifts in moral position require changes in our behavior. For example, “buying into” arguments for animal rights might demand that we change our eating habits. Often, it is easy to discount these arguments, not because they lack merit, but because we do not want to make the lifestyle changes that might be required if we became convinced by the argument.

(4) “Afraid of looking in the mirror” — discussions of moral issues can reveal uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Discussions of racial and gender discrimination, for example, can make us uncomfortable when we realize that we (or those we love) have attitudes and behaviors are insensitive and even hurtful.

(5) Ripple effects — because moral issues are interrelated, modifying our view on one issue can send ripple effects through our entire conceptual system.  For example, a discussion of euthanasia might lead us to the conclusion the quality life is important and even that some lives are no longer worth living (e.g., extreme pain without the prospect of relief). If true, then we might come to believe that it be better if some people were never born (e.g., extreme pain without the prospect of relief). Thus, thinking carefully about euthanasia might change our view of abortion. Likewise, becoming convinced by arguments for individual freedom in one area (e.g., free speech) can lead us to rethink our views in other areas (e.g., drug legalization, abortion, hate speech). However, if a student senses that a ripple might turn into a tidal wave, they often disengage.

In each case, becoming aware of the sources for our discomfort can help us move beyond a superficial consideration of the issues. In particular, asking a series of metacognitive questions can help uncover whether the discomfort is healthy (e.g., struggle with unfamiliar or difficult material) or unhealthy (e.g., blocked by entrenched beliefs, peer pressure, self-interest, or an inability to look in the mirror).

Questions we might ask our students (or even ourselves):

  • To what extent is my thinking on particular issue being influenced by my firmly held beliefs, the views of my peers, self-interest, a reluctance to take an honest look in the mirror, or concerns about the need revise my entire ethical system?
  • Am I taking the moral issue under consideration seriously? Why or why not?
  • Would I be willing to change my stance if the argument was compelling? Why or why not?
  • Is there something about the view that I cannot bring myself to consider? If so, what?

While awareness of our various blind spots and areas of discomfort will not automatically improve the quality of discussion, it can pave the way for a more meaningful consideration of the issues. As such, metacognitive awareness can facilitate healthy engagement with moral issues.

Reference:

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Promoting Student Metacognition

by Kimberly D. Tanner

This article starts out with two student scenarios with which many faculty will easily resonate (one student with poor and one with good learning skills), and which help make the case for the need to incorporate metacognitive development in college courses. Kimberly then shares some activities and a very comprehensive list of questions that instructors might ask students to answer regarding the planning, monitoring and evaluating of their own learning. While Kimberly makes a point of teaching metacognition within the disciplines, these questions are all generic enough to be used in any discipline. Of note in this article, there is a section that discusses metacognitive instruction, and includes a series of questions that faculty should ask of themselves as they plan, monitor and evaluate their teaching.

CBE—Life Sciences Education; Vol. 11, 113–120, Summer 2012

https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033