In the first post of “The Evolution of Metacognition in Biological Sciences” guest series, Dr. Bob Boyd reflects on 2018 faculty retreat where Biology faculty rejected responsibility for teaching metacognition in their courses. He also shares where and how Biology’s journey to learning improvement around metacognition began.
By Robert Boyd, Professor of Biological Sciences and former Undergraduate Program Officer for Department of Biological Sciences (DBS). Currently, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Sciences and Mathematics
My most memorable moment regarding metacognition occurred at a departmental faculty retreat in August 2018, right before the start of Fall Semester. Before this retreat, our departmental Curriculum Committee had created an “aspirational” curriculum map that purported to show which required courses addressed our brand-new list of eight or nine Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for each of the three majors in our department.
The Massacre
Metacognition, our new SLO 6, was selected as being a part of every required course. At the retreat, breakout groups were assigned to discuss and describe some aspects of several SLOs (one SLO per group, including a group assigned to “metacognition”) and put their ideas on a flipchart. When all the breakout groups reported, the metacognition group presented a blank flipchart page and said that they had been unable to decide what metacognition was.
Later during the retreat, when we discussed our “aspirational” curriculum map to convert it into a map that showed which SLOs were actually addressed in our core classes, almost all the checkmarks for metacognition were removed from the map. We asked faculty to place Post Its over the SLOs that they didn’t feel like their courses needed to address. In my mind, that retreat was a metacognition massacre. It showed that we needed to do some serious work to define that SLO as well as decide how to integrate it and measure it in our curricula.
Image 1: Biology’s ideal curriculum map presented at the 2018 Retreat. Faculty used slips of pink paper to indicate rejection of an SLO they didn’t think their individual course (left hand column) addressed. SLO 6, metacognition, was almost entirely stricken from the curriculum.
This blog series will present my department’s work on metacognition, mainly focusing on how we have proceeded since the memorable metacognition massacre at that faculty retreat. But I want to take some time now to set the stage by describing my department and some of our work prior to that retreat.
Setting the Stage for the Metacognition Massacre
Auburn University is a land-grant school with about 30,000 students, and has recently achieved the status of a Carnegie R1 institution (meaning that research is an important part of our mission). My department of 43 faculty is a Biological Sciences department, and our courses are vital to the university’s educational mission as well. As evidence of this, in an academic year we teach about 45,000 student credit hours.
This new outcome effort began in January 2016, when one of our faculty, Jason Bond, became Chair and encouraged us to review our curricula, something that had not been done since 2008. Coincidentally, also in January 2016, our department was invited to participate in an NSF-funded Institute at Wofford College in South Carolina designed to help us begin the process of reviewing and revamping our programs.
In June 2016, a small departmental team attended the retreat which was focused on a report by the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) on undergraduate biology education in the US. The report, entitled “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action” (referred to as V&C below) and available from this link (https://live-visionandchange.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/aaas-VISchange-web1113.pdf), pointed out that undergraduate biology education needed reform and the workshop involved assessing our department and its curricula.The assessment used a rubric that listed “Student Metacognitive Skills” as one of the ten elements evaluated, with an exemplary department described as “Instructors regularly integrate practice of effective metacognitive strategies within assignments. Most students become adept at reflecting upon, and improving, their own learning and coaching their peers.”
To begin the work of moving as a department from having no outcomes related to metacognition to one that placed it squarely in the SLOs for all of our programs, we held a retreat in 2017 which focused on High Impact Practices (HIPs). This retreat was facilitated by two nationally known educational leaders: Dr. Ellen Goldey (Dean, Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University) and Dr. April Hill (Chair, Department of Biology, University of Richmond). Faculty engagement at this event was strong and led us to begin the work of formally committing to a curriculum that would address metacognition as an outcome of our undergraduate programs.
In the spring of 2018, we held faculty meetings to introduce V&C concepts and ask the faculty in each of our three majors to evaluate our programs. In every case we decided we were at a “Beginning” stage. According to the V&C rubric, this means “Rarely are students encouraged to reflect on their learning strategies and skills. Study strategies, when discussed, may not be specifically geared to STEM learning or the particular student’s needs.” These meeting led to the 2018 Faculty Retreat described earlier which showed us how challenging it would be for us to understand and embrace our metacognition SLO.
Citations Brewer, C. A., & Smith, D. (2011). Vision and change in undergraduate biology education: a call to action. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC.
