November 23, 2009
Toward a Metacurriculum on Metacognition
By Karl R. Wirth, Macalester College
This is an exhilarating time in higher education. I think there might be a movement afoot, and it is metacognition. Few faculty could claim familiarity with this important learning concept even just a few years ago. Yet, today, metacognition is breathing new life into conversations about teaching and learning. It might also provide the common thread needed to help us transcend disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
A Grand Convergence
Interest in metacognition seems to be growing exponentially. Beginning with How People Learn (Bransford et al., 2000), a metacognitive approach to teaching was identified as one of three core learning principles. In 2002 the AAC&U Greater Expectations panel report recommended that “colleges and universities place new emphasis on helping college students become intentional learners” who are purposeful, self-aware, and self-directing. This past year saw two different workshops on metacognition in the upper Midwest region alone. The first was hosted by On The Cutting Edge (NSF-funded) and brought together faculty from the sciences, psychology, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences to explore the implications of metacognition for teaching and learning. The second, described by John Ottenhoff in his early November Liblog post , was the ACM-Teagle Collegium on Student Learning.
Last January while attending a meeting for representatives of Teagle Foundation "Collegia on Student Learning” in New York, I was struck by how many of the projects from other institutions also had a significant metacognitive focus to them. Most recently I returned from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, which hosted a day-long session that included twenty-two papers on metacognition and self-regulation in the geosciences. That metacognition has already made such inroads into the language and work of faculty seems remarkable and exhilarating.
A Metacurriculum on Metacognition
If an important goal of higher education is to help students become intentional learners, then our curricula should align with those aims. Instruction about metacognitive knowledge and skills need not displace disciplinary content but can instead be used to support content learning (Lovett, 2008).
Toward this goal, I have been working with several others (Dexter Perkins, University of North Dakota, and Fahima Aziz, Hamline University) to design more metacognition into my courses. Together with Dexter Perkins, I wrote a document on Learning to Learn that introduces students to learning and thinking (e.g., goals of higher education, Bloom’s taxonomy, critical thinking, intellectual development, metacognition). Students in our courses submit reflections on each of their reading assignments. We also use a variety of journal activities to encourage students to reflect on the goals for their learning, the strategies they are using, and ways to improve their learning. Students use knowledge surveys to guide their learning and to improve their monitoring and self-assessment skills. They also complete reflective “wrappers” on their completed exams and papers to better understand how they might improve them. Our students largely report that they enjoy these activities. Importantly, as faculty, we have also learned a lot about our students thinking and learning.
Reading, Reflecting, and Relating
Faculty commonly complain that students don’t read before coming to class, or that when students do read, they do not read deeply. Recent technological developments (e.g., digital books) and the increasing availability of textbook rentals also portend significant changes in the ways that students interact with texts. Because reading is a very metacognitive activity, and because learning from texts plays such a key role in college success, and throughout life, reading seems like an important focus for learning interventions.
Ever since first learning of reading reflections from a mathematics colleague (David Bressoud) at Macalester, I have been very interested in helping students improve their reading skills. Participation in the ACM-Teagle Collegium on Student Learning has given me that opportunity and support to do this more systematically. Together with Fahima Aziz (Hamline University), I am collecting and analyzing data related to student reading and learning in all my courses. After each reading assignment, students submit reflections online via a learning management system. In each reflection, students summarize the important concepts of the reading and describe what was interesting, surprising, or confusing to them. The reflections are not graded, but students earn credit for submissions that demonstrate significant reflection. The reflections can be used by the instructor just before class for ‘just-in-time’ planning of classroom activities.
We find that students in courses with reading reflections report much higher rates of reading before class (90% compared with 35% in courses without reflections). Students in reading reflection courses also report using a wider range of strategies during pre-reading, reading, and post-reading. Although reading reflections constitute only a small fraction (5-10%) of the total points awarded in our courses, they are excellent predictors of final course grades (r > 0.73; p<0.001). Reading reflection scores also provide an “early warning system” to help instructors recognize under-performing students in their courses. We are currently developing rubrics and analyzing student’s reflections to better understand their learning and metacognitive growth.
Metacognition is no longer just in the realm of emerging cognitive science. It’s becoming a key tool and goal for educators in all disciplines at all levels. Making students metacognitively aware makes a difference, and the evidence is mounting that teaching students how to think about their thinking can transform our teaching and student learning.
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