Implications for Instruction
Much metacognition research has focused on childhood development. Even so, metacognitive skills, such as evaluating one's own knowledge in a learning task and monitoring one's approach in order to alter it as needed, are equally important in the higher-education setting. Teaching metacognitive skills in higher education, however, poses a two-fold challenge: not being "content," metacognitive skills are not likely to be part of the curriculum, and even the initial metacognitive step of task assessment may not be easy or natural for college-level students (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). One approach to confront this challenge on both fronts is to engage in teaching methods in which metacognitive strategies are first modeled by the teacher and are then practiced by the students. After discussion and feedback, this method should foster eventual metacognitive self-prompting without teacher intervention (NRC, 2000). Even though for experts in a given academic field metacognitive skills can transfer outside of their disciplinary domain, teaching these skills to non-expert students is more effective when done in the context of specific domain knowledge, especially when students appreciate there are different ways to attain new knowledge and apply it to problem solving (e.g., Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris 2004). Context-specific instruction also leads to better transfer of metacognitive skills than when taught generically, in isolation (NRC, 2000). Further, whennot taking students' metacognition into account, implementation of other research-based pedagogies, such as active learning strategies, can create environments that are expressly "active" but neglect "learning" (Tanner, 2012).
Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, and Afflerbach (2006) identified three research-based principles for effective metacognitive instruction: motivating learners regarding the usefulness of metacognitive learning activities so they exert the perceived required initial "extra effort"; teaching metacognition in the context of disciplinary content matter; and ongoing instruction to maintain students' metacognitive practices. As with any pedagogical intervention, teachers must take care not to overload students with complexity that might inhibit implementation of higher-level metacognitive functions, nor to under-load them with simple tasks that are successfully completable without engaging in metacognition at the start.
Good pedagogy indicates providing tasks that range in complexity, paced and scaffolded appropriately for the students (McCormick 2003, and references therein).
Explicit Instruction: Metacognitive Prompting
Explicit prompting methods such as those of Schoenfeld (1985) and Hoffmana and Spatariu (2008) mentioned above provide a solid, research-driven place for instructors to start. Although framed specifically for problem solving, these methods are easily generalized to most types of learning task. For example, writing can be seen as essentially a problem-solving task in monitoring and revision so as to create a final text that corresponds to the "intended text" (McCormick, 2003). Explicit metacognitive interventions have been shown to robustly improve students' comprehension of written material as well as their general academic performance, particularly when deliberate practice across different texts and contexts is included (McNamara, 2011). Metacognition can also be effective in process-oriented instructional methods such as inquiry-based learning (Schraw, Crippen, & Hartley 2006). Finally, case-based teaching is inherently problem-focused, and fosters metacognition by putting students vicariously in the subjects' position; cases are authentic, and provide the "next best thing to being there" (Gallucci, 2006).
Schoenfeld's prompting technique in particular brought out the usefulness of students exploring and evaluating different approaches, the effect of students self-assessing their progress, and the importance of modeling, scaffolding, and repetitive and reflective feedback in small- and full-group settings (NRC,
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2000). Hoffmana and Spatariu's prompting method, although developed outside the classroom, provides instructors with even more fine-grained tools in all of these areas.
The IMPROVE method provides an even more highly structured framework for instructors, with some indication that its explicit metacognitive guidance can help students with the transfer of reasoning skills outside a specific context (Kramarski, 2008). The instructor models metacognitive self-questioning prior to attempting any direct analysis or solution when introducing new concepts. The four categories of questions include:
1. Comprehension (What is the task about?)
2. Connection (What are the similarities/differences between this task and ones you have performed in the past?)
3. Strategic (What are the strategies/tactics/principles needed to solve the task, and why?) 4. Reflection (What am I doing right now? Why am I doing it? Does the result make sense? Can I
solve it differently?)
Note that the reflection questions are intentionally phrased in the first person, it order to set the expectation of ongoing self-assessment. Redish (2003) identified self-reflective questions such as those that check the plausibility of an intermediate or final result and the thinking behind it as being especially key.
Going beyond explicit modeling, instructional practices that foster metacognition and increase students’
transfer of learning include focusing on sense-making, defining learning goals, self-assessment, and reflection about what approaches were more or less optimal for a given task (NRC, 2000). Tanner (2012) suggests several metacognitive learning activities:
• Preassessments that prompt students to examine their initial thinking — e.g., an initial "What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?" self-question along with explicit metacognitive prompts to guide students' planning.
• Muddiest Point responses (a specific type of minute paper) to questions such as "What was most confusing to me about the material being explored in class today?" This not only engenders reflection on understanding, it sets the norm that confusion is the beginning of learning and is to be expected.
• Reflective Journals for self-monitoring, for example, low-stakes writing assignments on "What about my exam preparation [or other learning task] 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?"
• Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work with questions such as "What was most challenging to you about this assignment?" or "What questions arose during your work on this assignment that you had not considered before?" Diagramming or concept mapping (see, for example, Novak & Canas, 2008) can be assigned to similar effect.
Coil, Wenderoth, Cunningham, and Dirks (2010) described the value of simply having undergraduates complete a low-stakes pre-test combining several of the above ideas. When given explicit metacognitive instruction, a pre-test should help students both recognize any lacking skills as well as address the tendency to over-estimate performance.
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Metacognitive Instruction for Teachers
The metacognition of teachers themselves can be considered from two perspectives: their ability to teach metacognition ("meta-instruction", to coin a term), and their own metacognitive behavior regarding their teaching practice. In general, teachers come into the profession with a "rich pedagogical understanding of metacognition", but this awareness may not be exhibited in their practice, perhaps due to the conflicting pressures of good pedagogy on one hand and mandated curricula or content coverage on the other (Wilson & Bai, 2010). In a science teaching-skills workshop, Zohar (1999) found that in-service teachers were able to teach higher-order thinking skills intuitively and procedurally, but were not able toverbalize specifically metacognitive aspects of those skills (e.g., declarative
metacognitive knowledge) unless they themselves were also explicitly instructed in such aspects. And Tanner (2012) concluded that "cultivating a metacognitive lens toward one's teaching does not appear to automatically or easily transfer" (p. 118) from the deep metacognition that university faculty apply to their own research. He suggested that teachers might pose self-analytical questions such as: "What assumptions do I hold about students? To what extent do I have evidence for those assumptions? Why do I make the instructional decisions that I make? What do I know about teaching? What would I like to learn? What am I confused about?"
It may be that teaching, inherently a social activity in addition to an academic one, calls for unique metacognitive "moves" regarding the practice of being an instructor. Lin, Schwartz, and Hatano (2005) argued that classroom teaching is manifestly fluid, long-timescale and context-dependent, yet successful metacognitive interventions have tended to target short-term problems that have well-defined optimal solution procedures, and thus have focused on intra-problem skills and not on longer-term, inter-task reflection. In addition, individual teachers tend to dismiss examples of novel approaches regardless of evidence of effectiveness if they do not identify with the example's situational context, unless they have been primed with a metacognitive intervention to foster receptiveness to new ways of teaching. To this end, Lin et al. (2005) tested an "adaptive metacognition" technique with pre-service teachers, calling on their different backgrounds to provide multiple perspectives regarding an apparently familiar situation in order to expand their thinking about alternatives and so avoid dismissing a possible teaching moment as "typical" and thus uninteresting. They found that participants in the group exposed to the adaptive technique ended up asking metacognitive questions (e.g., "How/Why" or "If/Then") in their own teaching twice as often as the control group, who more frequently asked only "What" or ""Yes or No"-type questions.
Metacognitive Processes Made Explicit: Instructional Interventions
In many classroom studies metacognitive training coupled with peer- or cooperative-learning techniques has been shown to be especially effective for increasing younger students' flexible use of mathematical and writing knowledge (for examples see Kramarski & Mevarech, 2003, or Yarrow & Topping, 2001).
At the university level, two computer science courses provided examples of successful metacognitive interventions in cooperative or collaborative environments. McInerney, McInerney, and Marsh (1997) ran a controlled study in their mandatoryIntroduction to Computers course, dividing students randomly into traditional direct-instruction (control group) and metacognitive/cooperative (metacognitive group) sections. In addition to the structured class work, the metacognitive group was prompted with general self-regulatory questions including:
1. What did I learn this week in my computing class?
2. With what did I have difficulty this week?
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3. What types of things can I do to deal with this difficulty?
4. What specific action(s) am I going to take this week to solve any difficulties?
Although the two groups performed equally well on a practical test, the metacognitive/cooperative group significantly outperformed the traditional group in more conceptual assessments such as a research report — but only when the metacognitive intervention was introduced from thebeginning of instruction and not only towards the end. The gains were largest for those students in the cooperative group who had the lowest initial self-ratings of computer competency.4
A more holistic course-based intervention study was Volet's (1991) introductory programming course, which featured two independently-chosen sections. Students in the control section had the option of making use of tutoring sessions and opportunities for group work, and were encouraged to write algorithms by hand before starting to code (even though few did so), but students in the experimental section were expressly required to do all those things and also participated in a peer support network that included coaching in making problem-solving processes explicit. Again, students in the control section learned as much factual knowledge as did those in the experimental section (as measured on an exam), but the experimental group did significantly better in applying knowledge to new problems.
Even more tellingly, a greater proportion of students from the experimental section passed thenext advanced course compared to the control students, and with better grades.
Metacognitive Processes Made Explicit: Constructing Student-learning Groups
Even without a specifically metacognitive intervention on the instructor’s part, small-group work has many advantages in making metacognitive functioning explicit in the context of interpersonal group interactions. Group (and peer) work manifestly involves students comparing different strategies and solution methods — even bringing to light the possibility of alternative strategies — and requires students to continuously verbalize their thinking and thus to subject it to more explicit checks of comprehension (Garfield, 1993). Following are two specific instructional techniques illustrating the functionality of metacognition in a group setting.
In an overview of best practices for setting up task-based student groups, Sarkisian (1997) provided several prompts that essentially build metacognitive awareness and regulation of group process and progress into the procedural structure, such as:
• Can discussions be managed differently so all can participate? Are people listening to each other and allowing for different kinds of contributions?
• Are all members accomplishing the work expected of them? Is there anything group members can do to help those experiencing difficulty?
• Is outside help needed to solve any problems?
• Who has dealt with this kind of problem before?
4McInerney et al. (1997) also measured students' anxiety levels towards computer learning and their own compentence with computers and found that for students with the initially highest anxiety, levels dropped more for students in the direct-instruction group than for those in the cooperative one despite the greater learning gains exhibited by the cooperative group. For students with low levels of initial anxiety, levels in the cooperative group remained lower than those in the direct-instruction group.
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• What are the pluses of that approach? The minuses?
• We have two basic choices. Let's brainstorm. First let's look at the advantages of the first choice, then the disadvantages.
• Let's try ranking these ideas in priority order.
Sarkisian's list addresses some of the more common issues regarding group-metacognitive functioning:
floundering, digressions and tangents, getting stuck , and rushing to work before sufficient planning has been accomplished. Giving students experience in dealing with issues of awareness and regulation in the group setting, and linking it to their own personal cognitive learning habits is one way to build robust metacognitive training into students' experiences without taking “extra time” away from other instruction.
In their specific instructional technique “Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning", the National Institute for Science Education (NISE, 1997) recommended giving students several minutes to compose content-specific questions for their group and provided many prompts to guide thinking, several of which again manifestly lead to metacognitive thinking, including:
• How does _______ relate to what I've learned before?
• What is another way to look at _______ ?
• What is a new example of _______ ?
• What would happen if _______ ?
• What are the implications of _______ ?
• Why is _______ important?
Later in the group-work process, NISE (1997) suggested “Think-Pair-Square”, a variation on the traditional think-pair-share method in which after first discussing strategies as a pair, two pairs of students combine so that they can compare the different approaches they came up with.
Looking beyond prompts, elements that make for effective cooperative learning include: requiring groups to report to the full class about their confusions and differing opinions; requiring all group members to participate and to be open to, andconstructively critical of, differing approaches and views;
teaching students how to ask each other clarification questions; and providing specific places for groups to discuss the group’s functioning, what is working well and what can be improved (Tanner, Chatman, &
Allen, 2003). The literature on assigning roles within groups is in broad agreement regarding assigning members with useful functions (Garfield, 1993; Sarkisian, 1997; Tanner et al., 2003; Center for Faculty Excellence, U. of North Carolina, 2006), all of which can be seen to map onto an individual’s
metacognitive functioning:
• a facilitator to guide discussion;
• a timekeeper/moderator to stay on task;
• a coordinator to seek out needed information;
• a seeker to challenge the group to explore other approaches;
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• a reporter to check that all individual and group tasks are being done and to record/report on them;
• a checker/clarifier to verify group members’ understanding of the task, intermediate concepts, and each other’s contributions;
• an elaborator to connect with prior learning;
• a summarizer to bring together the group’s progress towards the task at critical junctures; and
• an observer/questioner to examine what can be learned from the group’s functioning.
Some of the roles may be combined or rotated depending on group size, task, and timeframe — several of them are only relevant at specific points in the group process — but it is crucial to note that the roles are procedural in order to make for effective group functioning, and are not based on individual student skill or intellect.
Conclusion Conclusion
Although this chapter deals with metacognitive awareness and functioning on a technical and skill-based level, as a concept, metacognition gets to the very core of our — and our students' — mindful existence as learners and actors in a tangible world. Further, Zull (2011) stated that personal discovery, including the learning of new knowledge and skills, directly leads to a feeling of joy, and it is expressly metacognitive to be aware of having learned and thus to experience the joy. Whether our fundamental instructional goals are based in our students' personal discovery or in a more applied aspect of their newly-gained knowledge, being part of a student's joy of learning will always be a primary (and highly metacognitive) motivation for the teacher as well.
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