Becoming a Thinking Thinker Metacognition Self Reflection

Teachers College Record Volume 111, Number 8, August 2009, pp. 1997–2020Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University0161-4681

Becoming a Thinking Thinker:Metacognition, Self-Reflection, andClassroom Practice

DARIC DESAUTEL

Millsmont Academy

Background/Context: Metacognition has been a subject of study for cognitive theorists,behaviorists, educators, and others. The term metacognition has traditionally and simplybeen defined as “thinking about thinking,” yet it describes a complex process that can resultin a nuanced understanding of oneself as a thinker and a learner. Metacognition (as aprocess) and metacognitive knowledge (as a product) are seen as important components ofcognitive development and signs of intellectual maturity. The development of metacognitiveknowledge is not, however, reserved for adult learners. Robust metacognitive knowledge canhelp young students consciously apply learning strategies, develop effective work habits, andassess their own performance.Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore what practices lead to successful self-reflection and promote metacognitive development in young learners. The author believesthat elementary students who are aware of their tasks and have knowledge of themselves aslearners will more effectively apply learning strategies, develop effective work habits, andgenerally enjoy a richer learning experience. In the interest of best classroom practices, theauthor has selected activities and routines that complement the existing curriculum andinstructional program.Setting: This study was conducted in an urban elementary school.Participants: This study was conducted by a classroom teacher with his second-grade stu-dents. These students include English language learners of a range of ethnicities, studentswho receive special education services, and general education students.Research Design: This action research study was designed as a qualitative case study. Afterassessing student metacognitive knowledge with a survey of reading strategies, the authorbegan a course of instruction in skills and habits that he believed might promote self-reflec-tion and metacognition. These skills and habits included directed goal-setting, the use of

1998 Teachers College Record

language prompts to articulate mental events, posttask written self-reflections, and posttaskoral conversations. Data collected following this instruction consisted of observations of stu-dent interactions, written records of students’ conferences along with the academic goals theyset on a weekly basis, and the written products of reflective journal writing and posttask self-reflections.

My experience of becoming enthralled with the mental lives of my stu-dents may be typical of enthusiastic first-year teachers (and, it is hoped,veterans). It seems that I spent nearly every free minute with col-leagues—other first-year teachers—talking about our students, sharingthe remarkable learning connections they made, relating stories abouttheir particular academic identities, and considering their individuallearning behaviors. We shared a sense of awe and a deep interest in theways that the young minds with whom we worked made meaning, even aswe accepted responsibility for the role that we, as educators, played inthat process. Toward the end of my first year in the classroom, I realized,however, that although I had spent many hours discussing the mentallives of my young elementary students with fellow teachers, I had rarelydiscussed the matter with my students themselves. In fact, apart from ask-ing the type of “How did you know that?” questions that I felt, intuitively,should be part of a learning experience, I had done little to make thelearning process explicit to my students. In particular, I had not devotednearly as much energy to increasing their self-awareness and agency aslearners as I had to thinking about it.This inattention, although perhaps forgivable in a teacher’s first year,

was unfortunate, particularly because I had an ongoing example of thefruitful benefits of explicitly self-reflective practices all around me duringmy initial year as a teacher. These practices were designed to activelyinvolve learners in the learning process by asking them to consider andassess their own thinking, and they constituted an integral part of oureducation and training as teachers. During our teacher preparation, I,along with many of my first-year colleagues, benefited from these prac-tices, which our instructors identified as self-reflective or metacognitive.Thus, when I finally began to research the topic of self-reflection andmetacognition in the elementary classroom, it came as little surprise tofind that these areas had already been embraced by research on teachingteachers (Bean & Zulich, 1989; Garmon, 2001; Weinstein, 1989).My inquiry stands, in many ways, as an attempt to recreate the same

robustly self-reflective, self-directed learning in my own classroom that Iexperienced with my colleagues during those first years as teachers-in-training. Specifically, I wanted to explore what practices lead to

Metacognition, Self-Reflection, and Classroom Practice 1999

successful self-reflection and promote metacognitive development inyoung learners.This inquiry has grown from my interest in the mental lives and

processes of young students and has been shaped by observations, bothformal and informal, that were made in my years as a teacher. In partic-ular, as I began to develop a modest discourse with my second-grade stu-dents, I noticed a demarcation between those who could talk about theirown mental activities with a degree of familiarity and awareness, andthose who could not. I informally observed that this delineation seemedto extend laterally to other skills, such as the ability to self-assess, the abil-ity to help other students, and success with personal narrative writingexperiences. Finally, this project is rooted in the belief that students whoare aware of and “own” their own cognitive process enrich, and areenriched by, the learning experience.One can imagine the possible results, both at a classroom level and at

an educational policy level, that recognition of the centrality of self-reflection to effective learning might yield. The purpose of this inquirywas to explore some of the results of this orientation in the classroom. Itis hoped, however, that a corresponding emphasis on a policy level willcontinue to be explored, particularly at this time, when the desire forassessment data threatens to reduce the focus of evaluative agencies and,in turn, cripple the classroom learning endeavor. To the extent that prac-tices that develop metacognitive knowledge and enable students tobecome self-directed learners counteract any destructive influence of“teaching to the tests,” they warrant attention.

REVIEWING THE LITERATURE

As stated, the research supporting the use of self-reflective activities in thepreparation of new teachers is established. This research rests on a widebody of literature on the more general subject of metacognition. A fruit-ful and evolving topic, metacognition has been a subject of study for cog-nitive theorists, behaviorists, educators, and others. It has been exploredin frameworks from the technical and theoretical to the practical. In myown preliminary investigative process, I discovered that there is muchroom for contributions from educators on the role of metacognition inthe classroom learning dynamic, and particularly on the practices thatcan contribute to the development of metacognitive skill. I have found ithelpful to organize my study of the available literature into the areas ofdefinitions and theoretical overview, literature that is concerned with the for-mal study of metacognition as a specialization within cognitive research;metacognition and meaning, which deals with metacognition as an element


of the meaning-making process; self-reflection and self-assessment, in whichself-reflection is seen as integral to a regulatory practice that contributesto metacognitive development; and metacognition in the classroom, whichexplores the metacognitive import of preexisting classroom practices andsuggests additional areas for elaboration. It is in this last area that the pre-sent study might seem to be, most modestly, participating.

DEFINITIONS AND THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

Metacognition first surfaced as an element of cognitive research in the1970s. Brown (1975) and Flavell (1976) posited the delineation betweennormal cognitive processes and overarching, reflective functions thatcontrolled those processes and constituted an increased level of self-awareness. The oft-rendered definition of metacognition, “thinkingabout thinking,” echoes Flavell’s (1979) first formulation: “knowledgeand cognition about cognitive phenomena” (p. 906).Numerous scholars have explored the subject and made various contri-

butions to the emerging construction of a taxonomy of metacognition.Flavell’s (1979) initial model identified “metacognitive knowledge” and“metacognitive experiences” as the two components of metacognition (p.906). Brown (1987), building on the clarifications offered by Kluwe’s(1982) use of the term executive processes to describe regulatory behavior,broadened and strengthened the idea of metacognitive experiences byassociating them with the use of metacognitive strategies. These strategieshave received much attention from scholars (see, for example,Borkowski, Carr, Rellinger, & Pressley, 1990; Paris, Wasik, & Westhuizen,1988).Scholars have also pursued the idea of metacognitive knowledge.

Bereiter and Scarmadalia (1983), as well as Paris, Newman, and McVey(1982), treat metacognitive knowledge as constructed, like any other kindof knowledge. More recently, Reynolds, Wade, Trathen, and Lapan(1989) have identified task awareness, strategy awareness, and performanceawareness as components of metacognitive knowledge. The salient themecommon to the wide variety of scholars who have explored metacogni-tion is the idea of a process that happens when individuals consider theirown thinking and use regulatory strategies to reinforce or alter thatthinking. Metacognitive knowledge, a hallmark of metacognition, isknowledge the thinkers have about themselves and may inform both apresent, task-oriented situation and the thinkers’ more global conceptionof themselves as thinkers and learners.


METACOGNITION AND MEANING

As metacognition became an intriguing and valid focus of study amongcognitive theorists, educators began to examine fundamental meaning-making activities in the classroom. A wealth of literature attests to theirdiscovery that metacognition plays an important part in activities asdiverse as recall, comprehension, and evaluation, as well as in criticalthinking skills central to establishing meaning in learning endeavors. Inaddition to the thorough analyses of reading strategies offered by Paris etal. (1988), Schmitt (1990) has found that “metacomprehension strategies[are] characteristic of good comprehenders” (p. 454). This focus, alongwith the continual refinement of reading strategies themselves (as devel-oped, for instance, by Cooper, 1997), has shown that many effective read-ing strategies, such as inferring, self-questioning, monitoring, “fixing,”and summarizing, all contain metacognitive components and requiremetacognitive skill. The self-reflective analysis of these strategies andtheir use produces metacognitive knowledge about the learner. That is,conscious, active, and purposeful employment of metacognitive strate-gies results in the kind of global meaning that Bereiter and Scarmadalia(1983) may have had in mind when they spoke of the “informal self-knowledge that appears to constitute a natural part of intellectual matu-rity” (p. 62).

SELF-REFLECTION AND SELF-ASSESSMENT

Self-reflection is a term that identifies a wide range of activities andprocesses. In addition to its uses in teacher education, self-reflection hasbeen employed in a wide variety of childhood and adolescent educa-tional settings. Schultz and Delisle (1997) and Yancey (1998), among oth-ers, have commented on the encouraging results that reflective activitiessuch as journal writing and directed conversations have had on studentcomprehension of learning experiences. Oftentimes, however, self-reflec-tion seems to be referred to in research as it is employed in classrooms:in a nonprescriptive yet vaguely laudatory way. That is to say, self-reflec-tion is often encouraged both in professional literature and in the class-room, but seldom explored or explained as a phenomenon.What exactly do students do when they self-reflect? Prescott (2001)

identified the process as self-awareness of individual learning styles. It hasbeen my suspicion that self-reflection serves the goal of constructingmetacognitive knowledge by making formerly unconscious, intangible,or reflexive processes or events explicit. Thus, a robustly self-reflectiveexperience would result in a state commensurate with that evoked by


Flavell’s (1971) description of metacognition as an awareness of oneselfas “an actor in his environment, that is, a heightened sense of the ego asan active, deliberate storer and retriever of information” (p. 272).Just as self-reflection may serve the goal of metacognitive knowledge,

self-assessment may facilitate the potentially tricky project of self-reflec-tion. Techniques for encouraging successful student self-assessment, suchas student-generated rubrics, portfolios, contracts, and goal setting, havebeen seen as important tools for further involving students in their ownlearning (Herbert, 2001; Jackson & Larkin, 2002; Yancey, 1998). In addi-tion to inviting students to set their own terms regarding learning and toinvest more fully in their own performance (summative assessment),these practices encourage students to attend to the processes within theirtasks (formative assessment), permit peer-assisted and cooperative learn-ing, and afford unique opportunities for self-commentary and self-reflec-tion. As Carr (2002) wrote, “when students self-evaluate, they step backand reflect on what and how they learn” (p. 195). Here again, however,the link among self-assessment, reflection, and some useful metacogni-tive knowledge is not explicit. It is hoped that by closely examining theprocesses of metacognition as it is facilitated by self-reflective experi-ences, a fuller understanding of these dynamics can be reached.

METACOGNITION IN THE CLASSROOM

As is implied in the discussion of research into reading strategies andreflective practices, metacognition has long been a part of classroomlearning. Ogle (1994) demonstrated that many accepted teaching prac-tices, such as the creation of KWL (What I Know, What I Want to Know,What I Learned) charts and semantic maps and the use of learning jour-nals, have built-in reflective import. Similarly, Opitz (1995) offered goalsetting and self-evaluative techniques that can easily be incorporated intoclassroom learning centers. The findings, particularly the endorsementof practices that produce a visual record of student learning, corroboratethose of Blakey and Spence (1990) in their survey of strategies thatdevelop metacognition. A greater understanding of how students useclassroom practices to reflect on their learning, and thus developmetacognitive knowledge, would permit educators to make predictionsabout the development of metacognition in a wider range of populationsand environments.

A COINVESTIGATIVE INQUIRY

In light of the internal and idiosyncratic nature of metacognition and


self-reflection, as well as the focus I placed on mental processes and theforms of data that they produce, this study was conceived of as a qualita-tive, narrative inquiry. In accordance with my interest in best practices, itwas conducted as action research while I participated fully as a teacher inthe classroom. The methodological intent was to employ explicitly self-reflective activities with a sample set of students in a variety of settings andtasks to determine if and how these activities contribute to the develop-ment of metacognition. I chose four classroom activities: weekly goal set-ting, oral language prompts and practice, posttask written self-reflections,and oral conversations.

CONTEXT OF THE STUDY

This study was conducted in a Queens, New York, public school through-out the 2005–2006 school year. The school has approximately 350 stu-dents in prekindergarten though second grade, making it an EarlyChildhood Center. About three quarters of these students are Hispanic,roughly 12% are Asian/Pacific Islander, and African American and Whitestudents each constitute around 4% of the overall population. Over aquarter of the population have been identified as English language learn-ers, who receive intensive English instruction, and English is a secondlanguage for nearly 80% of the student population as a whole.Additionally, nearly 15% of our students receive special education ser-vices, including speech, occupational, and adaptive physical therapy, aswell as counseling. Our school is in an economically disadvantaged areain New York City, and over three quarters of our students are eligible forfree lunches.Although our young students do not face many of the standardized

tests that other elementary students in New York City do, this school hasattracted a lot of attention for its successful teaching practices. Teachershere have spent a great deal of time and energy studying, practicing, andeventually modeling a literacy curriculum and methodology that wasadopted by the city school system at large in 2003.This instructional methodology promotes explicit strategy instruction,

coupled with teacher modeling, developed through routine independentpractice and small-group support. As I began my 3rd year of practice withthis literacy instruction model, I took note of a now familiar struggle myyoung readers encountered: They had great difficulty understanding theidea of adopting and employing explicit strategies to solve decoding orcomprehension problems when reading. I soon began to suspect that thisdifficulty with consciously adopting specific reading strategies was part ofa larger issue of student investment in the learning process. My theory is


that such an investment is only made when students begin to see them-selves as learners; further, my experience suggests that practices or meth-ods that aim to “trick” students into learning, particularly in earlychildhood education, fail to induce that investment.The method of this study owes a great deal to Bereiter and

Scarmadalia’s (1983) idea of the “coinvestigative” nature of research intometacognition. It also employs some of their suggestions about the rolesof cooperative learning and prescriptive versus descriptive tasks, as well asthe self-reflective and self-evaluative practices referred to elsewhere inthe literature. Following their coinvestigative model, I intended to gatherdata on the interactions that these students had with both the reflectiveor evaluative apparatus and the content itself. These data consisted ofobservations of student interactions, written records of students’ confer-ences along with the academic goals they set on a weekly basis, and thewritten products of reflective journal writing and posttask self-reflections.These data were compared against an informal initial survey of studentmetacognition in the form of early posttask written reflections and a vari-ation on Schmitt’s (1990) Metacomprehension Strategy Index (MSI). Iadapted the MSI to accommodate my second-grade students’ reading lev-els and patience. It consisted of a 12-question multiple-choice survey thatwas designed to measure student familiarity with reading strategies thatincorporate metacognitive skills.This endeavor did not, nor was it expected to, generate quantitative

data. Its strength, and its weakness, perhaps, is its focus on the intangiblemental processes that indicate metacognition. Additionally, the study’sreliance on student testimony and commentary raises issues of interpre-tation while offering intriguing insight into students’ own self-concep-tion. In light of this, I have kept in mind the discussions surroundingissues of validity in action research, such as Karen Watkins’s (1991) exam-ination of how Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) guidelines can strengthenteacher research. Recognition of Elliot’s (1991) recommendationsresulted in my use of a range of different data collection techniques andan awareness of both intended and unintended outcomes. These data,then, will be presented as an anecdotal record of student interactionswith self-reflection, content, and each other. By closely examining theparticular dynamics at work in several classroom practices that arealready encouraged (and indeed that were explicitly taught and, to vary-ing degrees, employed in the classroom at large), it is believed that adeeper understanding of how these practices contribute to the develop-ment of metacognition was reached. To the extent that these practicesmay empower students with the capacity to become mature, self-directedlearners, this aim seems worthwhile.


TEACHING THE SKILLS/SEEING RESULTS

My assumption that students’ metacognitive knowledge can be developedthrough familiarity with self-reflective processes such as goal setting andtracking was incorporated into my planning of content and strategyinstruction during the fall. While the demands of prescriptive, skills- andcontent-based literacy and math curricula compelled me to “sneak” thedevelopment of metacognitive skills into these areas, a greater degree offreedom in the subject of social studies allowed me to incorporate relatedactivities without compromising either content or strategies. An overviewof the instructional plan follows, with a brief description of some of theapparatuses and activities.The instruction I had planned in support of this study was roughly

divided into two units. The first unit was built around the two ideas of self-reflection and conversation and was part of the ongoing effort to developstudents’ ability to engage in more substantive and meaningful conversa-tions (sometimes referred to as “accountable talk” and a key componentof the Institute for Learning’s Principles of Learning; see Institute forLearning, 2007). It was implemented sequentially and augmented withinstruction in self-description, mentalistic vocabulary, and the habit ofthinking about oneself (what we in the classroom came to call “lookingin”). A dominant motif that emerged from this unit was the idea of “themirror.” Some mini-lessons from this unit included “Talking about oth-ers; talking about ourselves,” “Thinking about yourself,” “Writing yourthoughts,” and “Giving directions.” An important component of this unitwas a series of lessons around oral language prompts that we found use-ful in describing the things that happened in our minds while working ona task (what I came to call “mental moves”). These lessons resulted in achart of prompts and phrases. “Ah-ha” meant that the thinker had had arealization; “rewind” described the process of backing up in the train ofthought; “dead end” indicated that the thinker had been stumped or lostan idea; and “what if” meant that the thinker had tried an alternate expla-nation or strategy. Although some of these lessons aimed at transferringawareness from a behavioral or interpersonal realm to an intrapersonalone, or using prescriptive tasks to circumnavigate difficulty with self-descriptive tasks, the common thread to these and the other lessons wasthat they were all oriented toward increasing students’ self-awareness.The second unit was more compact and focused on the concept of

goals and the process of setting, tracking, and meeting them using goal-setting worksheets. Our class used the metaphor of climbing a tree tobetter understand the skill of setting goals. The unit began with a generaldiscussion of the concept of goals and progressed through a set of


mini-lessons in which we examined the ideas of personal and academicgoals, planning to meet goals, and recognizing and evaluating achieve-ment. The six lessons devoted to this instruction resulted in some tangi-ble products and a wealth of intangible discoveries and areas for furtherinquiry. Products included a classroom definition of a goal (“A goal issomething you want to do or be. It can be big or little but has to be spe-cific”), class charts of academic goals, and individual goals sheets withpersonal goals.Areas rich with discovery for further exploration included the idea of

specificity, “realism,” and attainment; for example, I was challenged bythe essential task of teaching my second graders the concept of specificity(“I want to finish Chapter 2”) versus generality (“I want to read a lot”)and the value of setting goals that are not only realistic in the classroomsetting but also whose attainment is verifiable. The common result ofthese lessons was an enriched understanding of the student as agent inthe classroom and of the student’s general self-conception as a learner.This seemed to support the use of “accountable” talk by giving concrete“talking points” for discussion and reflection. Additionally, the use ofgoal-setting sheets provided a routine apparatus to which many studentsresponded. The formalization of this self-reflection seemed to aid inmany students’ ability to make sense of the abstract idea of metacogni-tion. Whereas a Monday morning request to “commence self-reflection”would likely have been met with giggles and blank stares, many studentseagerly anticipated the “goal time” with which we began each week. Theunexpected volume of goal sheets that the students produced confirmedthis for me, and we began posting many of them publicly in the class-room. This formal reflection time became a regular routine and animportant part of our sense of community.

“LOOKING WITHIN”

The phrase looking within came to mind early on when teaching the skillswithin the first unit, and I used it often with the students. As they devel-oped, to varying degrees, an awareness of the process associated with thephrase, it took on new meaning for me as well: I began to “look within”the minds of my students, too.Several students became prominent in my exploration of metacogni-

tion. Initially, I was drawn to investigate the metacognitive knowledge ofthe most verbal students. In this group was a boy named Christopher(whose name, along with all others in this article, has been changed),who was prone to sudden “ah-ha” announcements. Other, quieter stu-dents, however, began to demonstrate similar proclivities when their


conversation was contained within peer groups or other trusted situa-tions. In general, I assumed that oral language development was closelytied to the ability to participate in self-reflective activities leading tometacognitive knowledge but wondered if this correlation was the conse-quence of the centrality of verbal activities in my classroom. Accordingly,I developed a keen interest in the mind of a girl, Vicky, who offered aninteresting developmental case study. Vicky was a very quiet student whorarely contributed to whole-class or large-group discussion but who wasanimated in small groups. Additionally, Vicky’s writing skills were notice-ably more assured than her oral language skills, and she demonstratedpromising descriptive skills. Finally, I included in this set of student casestudies Jose, an energetic and motivated student with strong academicand oral language skills but a tendency to rush through tasks and focusexclusively on project completion.As an aid to my initial, anecdotal, and subjective assessment of these

students, I created and administered a variation on Schmitt’s (1990) MSIas a diagnostic tool (see the appendix). This questionnaire asks studentsto respond to questions about reading comprehension strategies andoffers an assessment of their knowledge and use of those strategies thathave been shown to have metacognitive components. The results of thisquestionnaire (see Table 1) seemed to confirm my initial thoughts onChristopher, Vicky, and Jose.

Christopher performed well on the MSI, selecting 8 of the possible 12strategies indicative of metacomprehension awareness. This suggested tome that his metacognitive development had already begun and that iteither contributed to, or was enhanced by, his use of certain literacystrategies. Vicky, conversely, scored at low level on the MSI. This, coupledwith the knowledge that Vicky’s performance in reading comprehensionassessments was inconsistent and that she occasionally selected strategieson the MSI that were illogical in terms of the phase of reading (i.e.,

Table 1. Results of the Metacomprehension Strategy Index (MSI)


before, during, and after), led me to suspect that Vicky did have emerg-ing metacognitive development but that her literacy comprehensionskills were neither contributing to nor reflecting it. Jose’s high perfor-mance on the MSI seemed to corroborate my impression of his reflective,insightful use of reading strategies. It may be that his desire to finishbooks quickly had inspired him to internalize a number of different read-ing strategies, or that his command of different strategies enabled him toread faster. Overall, the MSI offered a helpful starting point for the pur-poses of this inquiry, as well as some suggestions for future literacy strat-egy instruction.I continued to observe, listen to, and converse with Vicky, Christopher,

and Jose as the course of instruction unfolded, and I noted manyexpected and unexpected connections to my own thoughts on this topic.During the phase devoted to accountable talk and self-reflection, Iencountered an important, although perhaps not surprising, considera-tion for instruction in metacognition and comprehension in general.While Jose (and, to a lesser extent, Christopher) adapted with antici-pated ease to the lessons on talking about our own mental moves, Vickywas unable to contribute significantly to these discussions when theyoccurred in groups of more than four or five students. Initially, I felt com-fortable only in taking this to mean that instruction in, or assessment of,metacognitive skills that relies inordinately on verbal proficiency, orallanguage, or large-group settings was less than ideal. This seems to alignwith theories of multiple intelligences, different learning styles, andinstruction for English language learners.An interesting and accidental anomaly in this pattern of performance

with Vicky was her ability to talk in a larger group, and then later with me,about a literary character who illustrates self-awareness. After readingJamaica Louise James by Amy Hest, Vicky spoke animatedly about the char-acter and identified that “she knows what she wants.” Although time con-straints prevented further exploration of this particular effect, I wouldlike to have “looked within” Vicky’s preference for this particular charac-ter. I can imagine a narrative-based approach to metacognitive knowl-edge being explored with Vicky, based on her higher confidence intextual situations and her inclination character analysis.This second intellectual hallmark was illustrated in another interesting

and somewhat accidental discovery involving both Vicky and Jose. Afterreading aloud from a historical fiction text (Revolutionary War onWednesday by Mary Pope Osborne) that was presented in a cross-curricu-lar unit with both expository and fictional historical texts, I asked stu-dents to share their general responses with partners in conversation. Joseresponded with characteristic enthusiasm to the story, saying, “I liked the


story a lot and it was fun. I like soldiers and that is why it was fun.” Vicky,however, offered a simple, “I didn’t like the story. It was not fun, it wasboring and confusing.” When I asked Vicky to elaborate for me, she haddifficulty telling me much more. When I prompted her to think aboutthe characters and why the story was confusing and boring, however, shehad more to say. She soon stated, “I don’t like books [whose charactersare] mostly boys [or when] the people aren’t like me.” Both students’responses indicated a high level of metacognitive knowledge with regardto their own preferences for literature and how that preference affectstheir comprehension. Jose’s comment suggested that he could make useof the knowledge that his comprehension of literature was affected by hisenthusiasm for the subject matter or content, and Vicky would benefitfrom thinking about her empathic relationship to the characters in abook. These insights seemed to align with the distinctions between taskand strategy awareness delineated by Reynolds et al. (1989) and the rela-tionship between self-awareness and learning styles explored by Prescott(2001).

WRITING ABOUT “I”

In addition to their success in developing oral language and conversa-tional skills, I was eager to see the students grow in their ability to pro-duce written self-reflections. Christopher and Vicky, in particular, hadproduced bland, platitudinous, and undifferentiated self-reflections afterwriting tasks early in the year (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. “I feel happy about my story”: An early posttask written self-reflection from Vicky


After a number of lessons that stressed incorporating our mental lan-guage into written self-reflections, focusing on goals, and rememberingthe experience of the writing process, I began to see more robust self-reflections. Often students merely found new adjectives to describe theircreative, thoughtful, realistic, gripping, surprising, and moving stories.Increasingly, however, the student self-reflections indicated a greaterawareness of the effort and process involved in their writing, as well as aself-referential orientation. Beyond pride in their work, some studentsdisplayed insight into their own lives as writers, such as Jose’s declarationthat he “like[d] nonfiction books better than stories” (Figure 3).Christopher displayed a particularly astute understanding of the relation-ship between reading, writing, and knowledge when he commented thathe learns about a topic as much from writing about it as from readingabout it (Figure 4).

Figure 2. “That was nice”: Vicky has written her reaction (top half) to a story by Christopher; Christopherhas written his own comments at the bottom (including, “I like my work”).


I was greatly encouraged to see this increased level of self-awareness,and I was particularly heartened to see examples of it both in thestudents’ conversations and in their written self-reflections. These self-reflections, in particular, proved to be a very valuable component of our

Figure 4. “When I write I get more thoughts”: Christopher’s written self-reflection after publishing aninformational report.


classroom’s writing workshop and allowed the students a rare but indis-pensable opportunity for self-assessment. Student self-assessment becamenot only a very powerful way to enrich specific learning experiences andstrengthen student understanding of specific content but also an impor-tant way to undergird academic accountability in the classroom and pro-mote self-directed learning.

SETTING AND MEETING GOALS

The introduction of the unit on goals and goal setting seemed a logicalextension of the work done in the first unit in two respects: First, it builton the critical self-appraisal that was introduced by oral and writtenreflections, and second, it allowed students a consistent and (importantfor some) written venue in which to monitor their own learning. As allthe students adapted to the idea of creating specific, attainable goals inthe classroom, they began to refer to themselves in terms of their perfor-mance in meeting those goals. The technique of identifying weekly class-room goals on Monday or at the onset of a unit of study proved amenableto both conversation and written scaffolding. Whereas some students pre-ferred to discuss their goals with partners or with me before committingthem to paper, Jose felt comfortable enough writing down his goals to doso without extensive consultation.A key component in the goal-setting work, in terms of developing

metacognitive knowledge, was establishing regular routines and “follow-ing through.” We eventually kept our goals in a public part of the class-room and revisited or tracked them on a weekly basis throughout the 5weeks of the unit. The public nature of the goals became a source ofpride and subtle accountability, and the goal-tracking worksheets offereda valuable way to assess student performance with respect to those goals.Jose, for instance, tackled his overzealous speed-reading in one goalsheet, committing to try and take a picture walk before reading (Figure5). His weekly follow-up worksheet (Figure 6) indicates not only that heexperienced some success in willfully changing his behavior as a readerbut also that he was cognizant of the strategy he used to overcome hisdesire to dive straight into the text (“I covered up the words”).Most students, to my delight, made very concrete use of their goals in

self-assessment. The weekly goal sheets became more than abstract stan-dards or hopes; they became useful yardsticks for evaluating learning atthe end of a given learning period. Christopher and Vicky both usedtheir identified goals as “talking points” in oral conversations and writtenreflections to evaluate their success at achieving those goals. This


functionality took varied forms but most often appeared as a startingpoint for “What I did, what I didn’t do” conversations. Of particular sig-nificance for the development of metacognitive knowledge, students(such as Jose) were able to discuss or explain why they felt they succeededor failed in meeting a goal. This unexpected benefit of goal setting andtracking leads me to believe that such devices can be particularly usefulin cultivating latent self-awareness in learners who struggle with orallanguage.

Figure 5. “I want to take a picture walk”: Jose’s goal worksheet indicates that he wants to use a previewstrategy before beginning to read.


WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

A short but profound quote—“I did good”—propelled me into thisinquiry. This was the most my student Vicky could offer by way of self-assessment after what felt like a half hour of my questioning and coaxing.A statement such as this, indicating a “flat” perspective, limited evaluativevocabulary, and little attention to the experience of learning, troubledme greatly. Wouldn’t students who were invested in their work have more

Figure 6. “I covered up the words”: Jose’s goal-tracking worksheet shows a high level of self-awarenesswhile consciously employing a corrective literacy strategy.


to say about it? Are students who seem unconscious of the process oflearning missing something significant in that process? My readings intothe subject convinced me that both awareness of the learning processand awareness of oneself as a learner were valuable intellectual qualitiesand led me to wonder what practices could develop this metacognitionin young students. Several consistent themes emerged from my experi-ence exploring some of these practices.First, although metacognitive knowledge may not depend on oral lan-

guage ability, a robust vocabulary greatly helps young students developand articulate it. As Bereiter and Scarmadalia (1983) observed, youngchildren often lack the “mentalistic vocabulary” needed to describe theevents that occur in their own minds. Practice articulating these events,particularly when supported by an established collection of prompts orphrases, enables students to make their learning manifest to themselvesand others. My experience with cooperative learning and peer-to-peerreflective conversations suggests that students may also be able to side-step articulation challenges by switching from a descriptive to a prescrip-tive mode. That is, students who have trouble describing the steps theyperform in their minds while engaged in a given task may be able todirect someone else through the same steps. This intriguing differencewarrants further exploration.A second and related observation is that metacognition may be both an

intra- and interpersonal matter for some students. AcknowledgingGardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences, many educators dili-gently seek out creative ways to tailor their instruction to students’ apti-tudes and inclinations. This process of identifying specific students’cognitive profiles can be made significantly more profound when thatprocess is made open to, and even in collaboration with, the studentsthemselves. A practice such as weekly goal-setting routines, valuable in itsown right, becomes even more powerful when implemented as a commu-nal activity. When the goals of my students were made public in the class-room, we seemed to gain more than just a spirit of accountability. Thecommunal nature of these goals seemed to encourage the spread of thevery idea of creating goals from the original setting, literacy, into otheracademic and social areas. This leads me to wonder what potential fordeveloping metacognition in an academic sense lies in tapping metacog-nitive knowledge in another schema, such as social relations. Prescott(2001) has explored the connection between individual learning stylesand the capacity to develop metacognitive knowledge. If students areable to reflect on their social “selves,” might that emergent metacogni-tion be transferred to some academic tasks? This idea, too, merits furtherstudy.


CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

In the course of these explorations, I feel that I am constructing someuseful knowledge about the value of some activities in promotingmetacognitive development. I have challenged my initial assumption thatadvanced oral language development is somehow a prerequisite tometacognitive knowledge. Indeed, I now believe that activities or prac-tices that are biased in favor of the orally expressive student not only failto give a complete picture of all students’ metacognitive development butalso may inhibit that development. Additionally, I have confirmed myown confidence in the value of instruction in oral and written self-reflec-tion, coupled with academic and personal goal setting, as a means toenrich students’ self-awareness as learners.These classroom practices cannot exist, however, without school system

practices that support them. On this basis, I make the following policyrecommendations:

• Curricula should contain, as an objective, the development of stu-dent self-awareness as a learner. Instruction should support this goalby allotting sufficient time for these or similar activities: goal setting,explicit strategy instruction, and self-reflective writing and conversa-tion. Consistent and sufficient instructional time should also be allot-ted for activities that permit open-ended inquiry and emphasizeprocess discovery rather than product completion.

• Classroom instruction and assessment should include activities inwhich students are included as partners in both the creation ofrubrics and the assessment of work. Student self-assessment should bea regular component of learning experiences.

• Professional development resources should be allotted to familiarizeelementary school teachers with the importance of self-reflection tothe development of their students and to provide teachers with train-ing in techniques that support that development.

References

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Bereiter, C., & Scarmadalia, M. (1983). Child as co-investigator: Helping children gaininsight into their own mental processes. In S. Paris, G. Olson, & H. Stevenson (Eds.),Learning and motivation in the classroom (pp. 61–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Blakey, E., & Spence, S. (1990). Developing metacognition. Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouseon Information Resources.


Borkowski, J. G., Carr, M., Rellinger, E., & Pressley, M. (1990). Self-regulated cognition:Interdependence of metacognition, attributions, and self-esteem. In B. F. Jones & L.Idol (Eds.), Dimensions of thinking and cognitive instruction (pp. 53–92). Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Brown, A. L. (1975). The development of memory: Knowing, knowing about knowing, andknowing how to know. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior(Vol. 10, pp. 103–152). New York: Academic Press.

Brown, A. L. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation, and other more mys-terious mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert & R.H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, motivation, andunderstanding (pp. 65–116). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carr, S. C. (2002). Self-evaluation: Involving students in their own learning. Reading andWriting Quarterly, 18, 195–199.

Cooper, J. D. (1997). Literacy: Helping children construct meaning (3rd ed.). Boston: HoughtonMifflin.

Elliot, J. (1991). Action research for educational change. Philadelphia: Open University Press.Flavell, J. H. (1971). First discussant’s comments: What is memory development the devel-

opment of? Human Development, 14, 272–278.Flavell, J. H. (1976). Metacognitive aspects of problem solving. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), The

nature of intelligence (pp. 231–235). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-

development inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906–911.Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.Garmon, M. A. (2001). The benefits of dialogue journals: What prospective teachers say.

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APPENDIX

Name:

What do you do when you read?

Think about the kinds of things you do to help you before, during, andafter you read a book.

Read these questions and circle the answer that you think would help youthe most.

1. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- See how many pages are in the story.- Look up all the big words in a dictionary.- Make some guesses about what I think will happen in the story. M- Think about what has happened so far in the story.

2. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- Look at all the pictures to see what the story is about. M- Decide how long it will take me to read the story.- Sound out the words I don’t know.- Check to see if the story is making sense.

3. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- Ask for help with the difficult words.- Reread some parts to see if I can imagine what is happening.- Look for little words inside bigger words.- Decide on why I’m going to read the book. M

4. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:


- Retell all the main parts that have happened so far.- Think of questions that I have about the book. M- Look for homophones.- Look for synonyms.

5. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- Check to see if there are any pages missing.- Make a list of the words I’m not sure about.- Use the title and the pictures to help me make guessesabout what will happen. M

- Read the last sentence so I know how the story will end.

6. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- Think of what I already know about what I see in the pictures. M- See how many pages are in the story.- Choose the best part of the story to read again.- Read the story out loud to someone.

7. Before I begin reading it’s a good idea to:- Check to see if I am understanding the book so far.- Check to see if the words have more than one meaning.- Think about whether or not I will like this book. M- List all of the important details.

8. While I’m reading it’s a good idea to:- Read the story very slowly so that I will not miss any important parts.- Read the title to see what the story is about.- Check to see if there is anything missing from the pictures.- Ask myself if the story is making sense so far. M

9. While I’m reading it’s a good idea to:- Have someone read the story out loud to me.- Keep track of how many pages I have read.- List the story’s main characters.- Check to see if my predictions were right or wrong. M

10. While I’m reading it’s a good idea to:- Keep track of the parts that didn’t make sense and reread them. M- Take my time reading so I can be sure to understand everything.- Imagine how the ending could be different.- See if the pictures match the words.


11. When I’m done reading it’s a good idea to:- Think about what made my predictions right or wrong. M- Check to see if I skipped any of the hard words.- Imagine how the characters could be different.- Make a guess about what will happen next in the story.- Look at the title and imagine what the story could be about.

12. When I’m done reading it’s a good idea to:- Think about why I liked or didn’t like the story. M- Write a review of the story.- Make predictions about what the story will be about.- Read the story out loud to someone.

DARIC DESAUTEL is an elementary educator with interests in research,policy, and advocacy. He currently teaches in Oakland, California.

Documents

Becoming a Thinking Thinker Metacognition Self Reflection