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ATL skills

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However, we must be cautious not to overstate the impact metacognition can have on learning. Like mindsets, metacognition is sometimes revered as an easy fix, when in fact there are of course many factors affecting learning. Teaching metacognitive strategies can also be challenging for the educator. On the other hand, metacognition is disregarded by some who fear it is simply the latest buzzword in the teaching profession.

Modelling metacognitive strategies through thinking aloud helps students learn techniques

Showing learners examples of metacognitive thinking, through thinking aloud, is one of the key recommendations for enhancing metacognition. There are three key phases in metacognition: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Each of these phases can be modelled by the teacher or parent who is helping the learner, demonstrating how to approach a problem verbally. This can be done through asking a series of questions.

During the planning phase, before starting on the task, questions address how previous work relates to the current work, how best to start the task at hand, and how the goal can be achieved. The aim here is to increase awareness of different strategies, and to help students choose a strategy and draw on prior work.

"What seems to be important is that metacognitive strategies are taught explicitly and in relation to specific tasks."

In the monitoring stage, while the task is underway, a teacher might ask whether the current approach is working, and what can be improved, in order to encourage students to change their strategy if necessary. After the task has finished, during the evaluation stage, questions relate to whether or not the goal was reached and what would be better next time.

These are just examples of the kinds of questions that can guide and encourage metacognitive thinking. The EEF website contains many more examples and a detailed description of how they can be used in the classroom. What seems to be important is that metacognitive strategies are taught explicitly and in relation to specific tasks, as opposed to in an abstract manner where learning skills are taught without being applied to real tasks.

"Encouraging metacognition doesn't require expensive specialist equipment, and is thought to have its biggest impact on disadvantaged students."

Metacognition is a particularly appealing target for improving learning because it doesn't require expensive specialist equipment, and is thought to have its biggest impact on disadvantaged students. There is a good evidence base, and there are great resources freely available online to support teachers and parents. If metacognition is the latest buzzword in teaching, then it's for good reason.

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However, we must be cautious not to overstate the impact metacognition can have on learning. Like mindsets, metacognition is sometimes revered as an easy fix, when in fact there are of course many factors affecting learning. Teaching metacognitive strategies can also be challenging for the educator.

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Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One's Thinking

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

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?"

The Muddiest Point-Giving Students Practice in Identifying Confusions: "What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?"

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).

Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is "not generic" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students' abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she's thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción's " Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition " (2004) includes his detailed "How to Read Philosophy" handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:

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.
References

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.

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.

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.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty. New York: Pearson-Longman.

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.

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/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Nancy Chick Print Version Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice Thinking about One's Thinking Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess...

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What students are saying...

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ATL explicit and implicit - Additional resources

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ATL explicit and implicit - Additional resources

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This website might help you with Learning engagements 1 and 2

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ATL - Approaches to Learning - The Art of Learning

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changing the world - one child at a time

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