By Lindsay Tierney

Image by Dany Chilon from Pixabay

Dr. Lindsay Tierney is a fifteen year veteran of student success in higher education, holding such roles as educator, academic coach, and student affairs leadership administrator. Her areas of professional interest and expertise include the success of students with high-incidence disabilities, such as ADHD and Anxiety, as well as the role of self-determination with regard to academic success.

Dr. Tierney resides in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and their three children.

Metacognition is generally regarded as being the awareness or control of thinking for learning. John Flavell is an American developmental psychologist that specializes in cognitive development, and he coined the term in 1976 (1). He described it as the ability to think about one’s own thinking, be consciously aware of oneself as a problem solver, monitor, plan, control one’s mental processing, and accurately judge one’s level of learning (1).

Supporting the development of metacognition is a powerful way to promote student success at all levels. Students with strong metacognitive skills are positioned to learn more and perform better than their peers who are still developing their metacognition. Students with well-developed metacognition can identify concepts they do not understand and select appropriate strategies for learning those concepts. They know how to implement strategies they have selected and carry out their overall study plan. They can evaluate their strategies and adjust their plans based on outcomes (2).

Metacognition allows students to be more expert-like in their thinking and more effective and efficient in their learning.

Modeling Strategies

As educators, you think metacognitively all the time: reflecting on your current understanding, assessing what the burning questions are, and considering how your thinking has changed over the years with new information. Your students need to see and hear this process from you! To see/hear how you solve a problem: how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you’re done — that is all metacognitive modeling!

Dr. Kimberly Tanner from San Francisco State University in California has produced some quality resources on promoting metacognition within the teaching environment. In her 2012 article (3), she provided some sample self-questions for faculty that could be used to promote metacognition about their own teaching practices and classrooms. This is another method of modeling metacognition: You can outwardly share with your students this process you’re going through in order to directly model metacognition, or you can use these self-questions to just be more aware of the metacognition processes and thus, hopefully, ultimately help you to have a greater lens and understanding of this concept, which would undoubtedly positively impact your students as well.

Pre/Post Assessments

Pre assessment can be helpful for the learner and is a wonderful opportunity for promoting metacognition among students. “What do I already know about this topic that would guide my learning?” is an example of a self-question that is at the core of most pre assessments used by instructors. It takes no more than a few simple, reflective questions by an instructor to transform an existing pre assessment prompt. It could be a short addition to a homework assignment, or a question or two on an index card or “clicker question” at the beginning of class.   Creating opportunity for these reflections via a pre-assessment prior to lecture can pay significant metacognitive dividends.

Similarly, a specific post assessment tool that can be done is called an “exam wrapper”—after an exam, the student would complete a form or answer questions such as: When did you start preparing for the exam? How did you prepare? What types of questions were the most challenging for you and why? Name 3 things you will do differently for your next exam. However it is done, (written, orally, etc.), post-assessments provide the student with the much needed reflection and evaluation that is KEY in having strong metacognitive skills.

Prompts Integrated into Course Activities

Here are three styles of metacognition prompts that educators could utilize in their classrooms (3):

Pair or group discussion: Direct students to answer a question about the course content. Then, in pairs or groups, have them share how they thought about what the question was asking. Share the process they used to arrive at an answer they wanted to choose. What was the main reason for choosing that answer? Etc. and then, they can hear and discuss further how their ideas compare with their neighbor’s ideas.

Using Active-learning tasks (such as case studies, concept maps, and problem sets) and then have the students reflect. For example, ask them to pose three questions that they had about the concepts explored in the assignment that they still cannot answer. Other ideas: Describe at least two ideas related to this assignment that you found confusing. How was the way you approached completing this assignment different compared with the last time we had an assignment like this? What advice would you give yourself based on what you know now if you were starting this assignment all over again?

Lastly, in preparing for exams, you can use the following prompts to get students to use metacognition to plan for studying: How do you plan to prepare for the upcoming exam? Why? What resources are available to support you? How will you make sure to use these? What concepts have you found most confusing so far? What concepts have been most clear? Given that, how should you spend your study time in preparing for the exam?

Bonus Tips (2, 3)

Encourage a spaced practice schedule

Many students do not use a spaced practice schedule when they study, which involves studying the same content in two or more sessions that are spaced across time. Spaced practice is essential for mastering difficult course content. To use spaced practice, students need to manage their time and plan when to return to each topic multiple times across study sessions. To help them out, consider encouraging your students to use a weekly calendar to schedule multiple study sessions for your class, where each session involves studying the most recently presented material in class and engaging in practice tests for content presented earlier (that students have already studied).

Use practice questions to help students accurately and regularly monitor their learning

To help your students monitor their progress, develop practice questions (low- or no-stakes) that allow them to test their knowledge of content that will appear on a higher-stakes exam. Students can monitor what content they are understanding and what they are struggling to understand. And, when they correctly answer a question, doing so will itself boost their retention of that content. If they answer incorrectly, feedback can help them better learn the content.

Very much like Universal Design of Learning (UDL), the implementation and encouragement of metacognition benefits ALL and, aside from the initial forethought and set up, should not create dubious amounts of additional labor on the educator. Metacognition is a secret weapon that can help educators and students alike reach new levels of academic success.

References:

(1) Flavell, J. H. (1976). Metacognitive aspects of problem solving. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp. 231-236). Erlbaum.

(2) Stanton, J. D., Sebesta, A. J., & Dunlosky, J. (2021). Fostering metacognition to support student learning and performance. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0289

(3) Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113-120. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033