Education & Metacognition

Promoting General Metacognitive Awareness• Schraw, 1998

• Metacognition is a multi-dimensional phenomenon• Metacognition is domain-general in nature• Metacognitive knowledge and regulation can be

improved using a variety of instructional strategies

Metacognition

Knowledge of cognition

procedural

declarative

conditional

Regulation of cognition

planning

monitoring

evaluation

Metacognition is a multi-dimensional phenomenon

Metacognition is domain-general in nature

• How is domain-general metacognitive knowledge related to domain-specific knowledge?• Cognitive skills are domain-specific, metacognitive skills span

multiple domains• How is metacognition related to cognitive ability?

• Acquisition of metacognition does not depend strongly on IQ• Strategies and comprehension monitoring are not related to IQ• Use of effective learning strategies may compensate for differences

in IQ• Metacognitive knowledge can compensate for low ability of lack of

relevant prior knowledge• Metacognitive knowledge is domain or task specific initially,

but students construct general metacognitive knowledge and regulation which can be used in a variety of tasks

Metacognitive knowledge and regulation can be improved using a variety of instructional strategies

• Promoting general metacognitive awareness• Improving knowledge of cognition• Improving regulation of cognition• Fostering environments that promote metacognitive

awareness

Promoting general metacognitive awareness

• Students need to understand the distinction between cognition and metacognition to become self-regulated• Teachers

• Discuss the importance of metacognition• Model cognitive and metacognitive skills• Allot time for group discussion and reflection

• Students• Model metacognitive skills within the ZPD of other students

• Reflection• Regular opportunities to reflect on one’s successes and failures

Improving knowledge of cognition• Strategy evaluation matrix (SEM) • Strengths:• Promote strategy use • Promote explicit metacognitive awareness• Students actively construct knowledge about how, when, and where to use strategies

Improving regulation of cognition• Regulatory checklists (RCs)

• Overarching heuristic that facilitates the regulation of cognition of novice learners• Explicit prompts in the form of checklists help students to be more strategic and systematic when solving problems

Fostering conducive environments• Successful students• Have mastery goal orientation• Have a greater sense of self-efficacy• Attribute success to controllable factors rather than ability• Persevere when faced with challenging circumstances• Use more strategies

• Teachers should promote mastery orientation rather than performance orientation

Discussion• Considering the other metacognitve interventions

we’ve discussed so far, do you think the strategy evaluation matrix, regulatory checklist, and fostering conducive environments would work to improve metacognition?• In your own experience, do teachers model

metacognitive skills effectively?• In your own experience, do teachers place emphasis

on mastery orientation or performance orientation in the classroom?• Should metacognitive interventions be done in

elementary school, upper grades, college courses…or should there come a time when we expect students to have developed the appropriate metacognitive skills?

Teachers’ Metacognitive Knowledge and the Instruction of Higher Order Thinking• Zohar, 1999

• Discuss metacognition• TSC-Thinking in Science Project and Thinking skills• Teacher’s metacognitive knowledge of thinking skills

What are thinking skills?• Identify or formulate a problem• Identify or formulate hypotheses• Design an experiment• Describe experimental results• Control variables• Identify irrelevant information• Make comparisons• Identify assumptions• More in Table 1

Study: Investigating teachers’ prior knowledge about metacognition of thinking skills

• Do teachers need metacognitive knowledge of thinking skills to teach higher order thinking skills?

• The study focuses on teachers’• metacognitive declarative knowledge of thinking skills• pedagogical knowledge of thinking skills

Procedure/Data Collection• Teachers-Israeli junior high/high school science

teachers • Self-selected into the in-service course to prepare to

teach TSC learning activities• Basic course-24 hours• Additional activities• Creative workshops• Reflective workshops

• All discussions audiotaped, notes, and elements of teachers’ written work was collected and coded

Findings• Teaching for thinking in an “intuitive” way• Did not have explicit declarative metacognitive knowledge of

thinking skills• Could not state a list of thinking skills, but were able to design

learning activities once the thinking skills were explicitly listed• Discrepancy between procedural knowledge and metacognitive

declarative knowledge of thinking skills• When shown how thinking skills applied in TSC activities and

asked to define thinking skills, more referred to thinking skills as goals in their own lessons• 42.3% misunderstood a question about thinking skills

Discussion• Do you feel that the author was discussing

metacognition as we have defined it so far?• Do teachers need metacognitive declarative

knowledge to be able to teach higher order thinking skills? Or is procedural knowledge sufficient?• Do you think the author’s suggestion of “inverted”

sequence instruction (teach pedagogical knowledge of thinking skills then metacognitive declarative knowledge of thinking skills) would work for teacher training?

Toward Teachers’ Adaptive Metacognition• Lin, Schwartz, Hatano 2005

• What is adapative metacognition?• What are the characteristics of successful

metacognitive interventions?• How does teaching lack those characteristics?• Techniques to help teachers appreciate the need for

adaptive metacognition

What is adaptive metacognition?• “…adaptation of one’s self and one’s environment in

response to a wide range ofclassroom variability.”

• How is this different from “regular” metacognition?

What are the characteristics of successful metacognitive interventions?• Cognitive characteristics:

• Strategy training• Creating social environments to foster metacognition

• Contextual characteristics• Well defined problems• Stable learning environments• Shared goals and values

• Do you agree that most of the educational metacognitive interventions we have read about have these contextual characteristics? • Can you think of any metacognitive interventions that do not have one

or more of these characteristics?

• How does teaching lack the contextual characteristics of typical metacognitive interventions,e.g.,• well defined problems?• stable learning environments?• shared goals and values?

Cases for adaptive metacognition• Case 1: Teaching new curriculum• Case 2: Triggering adaptive metacognition • Recognizing situations that warrant adaptation• Being dismissive of new models

Techniques to develop adaptive metacognition• “Critical-Event based learning environment” learning

cycle

Techniques to develop adaptive metacognition• “Critical-Event based learning environment” learning cycle-results

• Do you think CEBLE intervention increases the “unexpectedness” of “typical” events? Why or why not?• Would you use this intervention to train pre-service teachers?• Do you think the pre-service teachers are engaging in metacognition?

General Questions• What types of metacognitive knowledge and

regulation (from the Schraw article) did the Zohar and Lin articles refer to?• Have you been in a class where a teacher was

not engaging in metacognition? • Have you taught a class in which you felt the

need to engage in metacognition?• How can a lack of metacognitive teaching affect

student learning?