assignment 3 metacognitive reading report

Center for Teaching

Metacognition.

Thinking about One’s Thinking |   Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One’s Thinking

Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).  In How People Learn , the National Academy of Sciences’ synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a “‘metacognitive’ approach to instruction” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18).

Metacognitive practices increase students’ abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991).  They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter : they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts.  When Pintrich (2002) asserts that “Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them” (p. 222), notice the students must “know about” these strategies, not just practice them.  As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a “ conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]” (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc.  A key element is recognizing the limit of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to “actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence” (2003).  They found that “people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence,” lacking “insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills.”  They identified this pattern across domains—from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters’ knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians’ knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84).  In short, “if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong” (p. 85).  This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities—to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them—is needed in many contexts.

Putting Metacognition into Practice

In “ Promoting Student Metacognition ,” Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):

• Preassessments—Encouraging Students to Examine Their Current Thinking: “What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?”

• Retrospective Postassessments—Pushing Students to Recognize Conceptual Change: “Before this course, I thought evolution was… Now I think that evolution is ….” or “How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?”
• Reflective Journals—Providing a Forum in Which Students Monitor Their Own Thinking: “What about my exam preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?”

Next are recommendations for developing a “classroom culture grounded in metacognition” (p. 116-118):

• Giving Students License to Identify Confusions within the Classroom Culture:  ask students what they find confusing, acknowledge the difficulties
• Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work: integrate short reflection (oral or written) that ask students what they found challenging or what questions arose during an assignment/exam/project
• Metacognitive Modeling by the Instructor for Students: model the thinking processes involved in your field and sought in your course by being explicit about “how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you are done” (p. 118)

To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:

• Questions for students to ask themselves as they plan, monitor, and evaluate their thinking within four learning contexts—in class, assignments, quizzes/exams, and the course as a whole (p. 115)
• Prompts for integrating metacognition into discussions of pairs during clicker activities, assignments, and quiz or exam preparation (p. 117)
• Questions to help faculty metacognitively assess their own teaching (p. 119)

Weimer’s “ Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference ” (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students’ metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills:

“[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only ‘What are you learning?’ but ‘How are you learning?’ We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches. ” (emphasis added)

She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into “ cognitively passive ” (“I previewed the reading before class,” “I came to class,” “I read the assigned text,” “I highlighted the text,” et al) and “ cognitively active study behaviors ” (“I asked myself: ‘How does it work?’ and ‘Why does it work this way?’” “I wrote my own study questions,” “I fit all the facts into a bigger picture,” “I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered,” et al) .  The specific focus of Stanger-Hall’s study is tangential to this discussion, 1 but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett’s advice (2013) by assigning “exam wrappers,” which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like.

As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be “designed according to a knowledge construction approach,” or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, “and it needs to take place over an extended period of time” (Zohar & David, p. 187).  This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates’ and make more informed choices, and render learning “less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students ‘get’ and learn and others struggle and don’t learn” (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223).

• What to Expect (when reading philosophy)
• The Ultimate Goal (of reading philosophy)
• Basic Good Reading Behaviors
• Important Background Information, or discipline- and course-specific reading practices, such as “reading for enlightenment” rather than information, and “problem-based classes” rather than historical or figure-based classes
• A Three-Part Reading Process (pre-reading, understanding, and evaluating)
• Flagging, or annotating the reading
• Linear vs. Dialogical Writing (Philosophical writing is rarely straightforward but instead “a monologue that contains a dialogue” [p. 365].)

What would such a handout look like for your discipline?

Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts . Salvatori and Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle.  Their “difficulty paper” assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9).  Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses.  In “ Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses ” (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations.  The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to “clear the obstacles and move away from” oversimplified thinking about race and racism ”to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms” (p. 14).

Ultimately, metacognition requires students to “externalize mental events” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what’s required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes.

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1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam.

• Adams, Maurianne, Bell, Lee Ann, and Griffin, Pat. (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook . New York: Routledge.
• Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school . Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
• Baker, Linda, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading.  In Paul David Pearson, Michael L. Kamil, Rebecca Barr, & Peter Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of research in reading: Volume III (pp. 353–395).  New York: Longman.
• Brown, Ann L. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer, (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 453-482). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Chick, Nancy, Karis, Terri, and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009). Learning from their own learning: how metacognitive and meta-affective reflections enhance learning in race-related courses . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1). 1-28.
• Commander, Nannette Evans, and Valeri-Gold, Marie. (2001). The learning portfolio: A valuable tool for increasing metacognitive awareness . The Learning Assistance Review, 6 (2), 5-18.
• Concepción, David. (2004). Reading philosophy with background knowledge and metacognition . Teaching Philosophy , 27 (4). 351-368.
• Dunning, David, Johnson, Kerri, Ehrlinger, Joyce, and Kruger, Justin. (2003) Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence . Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12 (3). 83-87.
• Flavell,  John H. (1985). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Hatano, Giyoo and Inagaki, Kayoko. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In Harold Stevenson, Azuma, Horishi, and Hakuta, Kinji (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan, New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Helms, Janet E. (1995). An update of Helms’ white and people of color racial identity models . In J.G. Ponterotto, Joseph G., Casas, Manuel, Suzuki, Lisa A., and Alexander, Charlene M. (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (pp. 181-198) . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Lovett, Marsha C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In Matthew Kaplan, Naomi Silver, Danielle LaVague-Manty, and Deborah Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy . Sterling, VA: Stylus.
• Palincsar, Annemarie Sullivan, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities . Cognition and Instruction, 1 (2). 117-175.
• Pintrich, Paul R. (2002). The Role of metacognitive knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing . Theory into Practice, 41 (4). 219-225.
• Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty . New York: Pearson-Longman.
• Scardamalia, Marlene, Bereiter, Carl, and Steinbach, Rosanne. (1984). Teachability of reflective processes in written composition . Cognitive Science , 8, 173-190.
• Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1991). On mathematics as sense making: An informal attack on the fortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In James F. Voss, David N. Perkins, and Judith W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311-344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Stanger-Hall, Kathrin F. (2012). Multiple-choice exams: An obstacle for higher-level thinking in introductory science classes . Cell Biology Education—Life Sciences Education, 11(3), 294-306.
• Tanner, Kimberly D.  (2012). Promoting student metacognition . CBE—Life Sciences Education, 11, 113-120.
• Weimer, Maryellen.  (2012, November 19). Deep learning vs. surface learning: Getting students to understand the difference . Retrieved from the Teaching Professor Blog from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/deep-learning-vs-surface-learning-getting-students-to-understand-the-difference/ .
• Zohar, Anat, and David, Adi Ben. (2009). Paving a clear path in a thick forest: a conceptual analysis of a metacognitive component . Metacognition Learning , 4 , 177-195.

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The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

Metacognition.

• Teaching Resources
• Classroom Practices

Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking or identifying one’s cognitive process (Lovett, 2008) and is a reflective skill that is necessary for creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. Students often perform metacognitive work in writing classes by reflecting on their writing process or development, or in STEM courses by reflecting on course design projects.

Within the classroom, teaching metacognitive practices enhances student learning outcomes (Tanner, 2012) and helps students to have a more complete understanding of what they learned and how (Brownlee, Purdie, & Boulton-Lewis, 2001).

As with most skills, it takes time and practice to become fluent in metacognition. To encourage students to engage in reflective activities, instructors can intentionally include brief and effective metacognitive strategies in their courses. This can be done through explicitly modeling metacognitive practices, for example, by making your thinking and reflection process explicit and/or using any of the activities outlined below (primarily adapted from Major, Harris, and Zakrajsek, 2015).

One of my favorite practices to enhance student metacognition is to have them write themselves a letter "from the future," as if it were the end of the class. They use the prompt, "I met my academic goals for this course because … " We then review this letter at the middle and at the end of the semester. I think this helps them remember why they are doing what they are doing and helps them focus on their goals.

Planning, monitoring, and evaluation prompts all highlight different aspects of a student’s thought process by illuminating how they approach a task or activity. For example, asking a student to plan and evaluate their goals on a writing assignment or problem set allows them to understand their motivation and its connection with the task. Below are example prompts from Schraw (2001):

• What is the nature of my task?
• What is my goal?
• What information /strategies do I need?
• How much time/resources will I need?
• Do I understand what I’m doing?
• Does the task make sense?
• Am I reaching my goals?
• Do I need to make changes?
• Have I reached my goal?
• What worked/did not work?
• What would I do differently?

For more detail,  Tanner (2012)  adapts these prompts for specific activities (e.g., class session, active learning task, or exam). To help students think consciously about their learning, you can ask a series of metacognitive prompts as part of an assignment and ask students to respond to them using the comment feature in Microsoft Word (LaVaque-Manty & Evans, 2013).

These are activities that prompt students to write a reflection to an open-ended question or statement such as “What was the muddiest point of today’s lesson?”; “Today I learned…”; or “A question I have is…” These may be asked in or outside of class and only take a couple of minutes to write. Asking students to reflect on what they learned gives them the opportunity to assess their current understanding and determine the significance of content. These short reflections also allow instructors to gauge student understanding of the material at a particular moment in time.

This activity is typically a short pre-, post- reflection that "wraps around" an existing assessment or learning opportunity (e.g., homework assignment, exam, or lecture). For example, you could assign an exam wrapper that asks students about their study strategies, preparation, or study goals. After returning exams, ask students to identify how these study strategies worked. An example of a pre-lecture wrapper may include pointing out to students effective listening or note-taking skills. A post-lecture wrapper asks students to write down three important ideas from the lecture followed by presenting them with the desired takeaways, which gives students an opportunity to check their alignment (Lovett, 2008). Using wrappers is one way to help students be more reflective when they approach assessment and learning opportunities, identify areas in their learning they can improve, and invite students to think about pedagogical decisions behind curricular tasks.  

This structured assessment provides students with the opportunity to reflect, monitor, and evaluate their thinking and approach to learning. When creating a self-assessment for students, focus on what aspects of their learning you want them to assess. This may include their preparation, implementation, or evaluation of a task. Advantages of self-assessment include increasing self-efficacy, improved motivation to persist through the content or course, and an opportunity to identify gaps in knowledge in order to create a plan to move forward. Examples of reflection prompts include:

• Describe your preparation and work process
• Describe your goals or what you hope to achieve (e.g., work product)
• Evaluate your performance
• Provide areas for future improvement
• Describe your next steps

Similar to self-assessment, group-assessment benefits students by asking them to reflect, monitor, and evaluate their role and relationships within a group. This can be done formally through a prescribed form or worksheet, or informally by asking students at the end of a group activity to reflect on the whole group experience. Some advantages to a group-assessment include increased autonomy and accountability for students, and it also provides a feedback mechanism for the instructor to gauge group dynamics and if groupings need to change in the future. Asking students to be a participant in a group assessment has the potential to increase participation among all members.

Asking students to focus a short memoir, or a first-person account of an experience, on a learning experience provides them an opportunity to reflect on the connections between course content and their personal lives. This is an activity that can be done once or as a series throughout a course. This activity includes a prompt or goal to direct their thinking, such as, “In a 140-character memoir, summarize your experience with the course content.” This is a familiar activity to students who engage with social media such as Twitter or Facebook.

An elevator pitch asks students to convey information to a general audience in a short amount of time, for example, as long as it takes to ride an elevator. This activity can take on the form of a role play with one person persuading another “stakeholder” to take action from a brief conversation. If students are prepared, they will have reflected on what they have learned and convey the crucial parts of an idea or activity (e.g. research project or writing assignment) to the “stakeholder.” This activity requires a student to reflect and integrate concepts and ideas in a concise way.

This is an activity that involves students writing in a log at the beginning and end of class. Similar to a minute reflection paper, an instructor may ask questions that relate to the particular course. For example, “What is one idea that interested you today and why?” or “How would you explain a concept covered today in your own words?” A template may also be used for consistency, for example, asking students:

• What I did and why
• What did I learn
• How will I use it
• Questions I still have about it
• Resources I will use

A learning log has many functions. It is a way for students to track changes in their thinking, provide them with moments of reflection and action, and serve as a form of self-assessment. A learning or reading log provides useful feedback for instructors to gauge student learning in order to be adaptive with their instruction.

This activity is an effective way to invite students to engage with content and peers. It consists of presenting a controversial statement to students who then must analyze and determine their opinion on that statement. This is followed by a visible representation of that opinion. Students might be asked to move to particular corners of the room that correspond with designated options, taking steps across the room, or simply raising their hands. Advantages of this activity include actively engaging students in critically thinking and communicating ideas/opinions, synthesizing and incorporating multiple perspectives, and demonstrating a comprehension of topics through justification.

An example of promoting metacognition throughout a course is given by Robert Ward, a visiting lecturer in English.

I've built the Academic Essay class on the act of reflection - on sight, on hearing, on feeling - that develops through close reading and writing practices. To enable students to acquire reflective critical skills, I assign a series of metawriting essays, in both notebook and print forms. The students use these essays to consider the decisions they took in their major thematic writing.

These reflective practices are a great way to help students be aware of how they approach problems, writing tasks, projects, concepts, etc. Practices that require students to communicate complex ideas with one another provide them the opportunity to improve and refine their thinking. 

If you would like to discuss strategies for promoting metacognition in your own classroom, please contact the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning for a consultation:  [email protected]

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Brownlee, J., Purdie, N., & Boulton-Lewis, G. (2001). Changing epistemological beliefs in pre-service teacher education students.  Teaching in higher education ,  6 (2), 247-268.

LaVaque-Manty, M., & Evans, E. M. (2013). Implementing metacognitive interventions in disciplinary writing classes. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVaque-Manty, & D. Meizlish (Eds.),  Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy  (122-146). Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Lovett, M. C. (2008).  Teaching metacognition  [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from  http://web.uri.edu/teach/files/Metacognition-ELI.pdf

Major, C. H., Harris, M. S., & Zakrajsek, T. (2015).  Teaching for learning: 101 intentionally designed educational activities to put students on the path to success . Routledge.

Schraw, G. (2001). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. In H. J. Hartman (Ed.),  Metacognition in learning and instruction  (pp. 3-16). Springer Netherlands.

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition.  CBE-Life Sciences Education ,  11 (2), 113-120. Available:  http://www.lifescied.org/content/11/2/113.full