There once was a teacher who said though,
It seems that I know that I know,
What I'd like to see,
Is that the students are like me,
That they know that they know that they know.
- adaptation from a Zen master
Getting students to think about thinking might be one of the most important aspects of creating opportunities for learning. For me, this is a central goal for my active learning classrooms and also one of the most challenging. One of the important outcomes of practicing metacognition is an increase in what is called metacognitive accuracy; the ability to know what you know and use that to predict an outcome. We all know that our students are, in general, very poor at doing this. How many times have you had a student come to your office claiming that they knew everything only to bomb an exam. Research in this area shows that the less a person knows, the worse they are at predicting any outcome on an assessment in that particular area. In addition, it turns out the more you know, the worse you are at predicting how others will do on assessments. Sound familiar?....our classes. Here are a few things I do to try to promote metacognition through group activities in my classroom.
1- Ask students to share and assess each others work. I will ask students to solve a problem on their own, then exchange their work with a partner. Each student then "grades" each others work and provides feedback. Then, they are asked to reflect on the feedback they received and if they feel they were assessed correctly based on their answers. These type of activities take time but are worth it.
2- I think using the whiteboards in various ways can be effective to stimulate metacognition. For example, the students can generate work on the boards, which can then be shown to the entire class for a reflection. The nice thing about this is that in the larger classes, the work can have an anonymous feel to it which helps students to share their work.
What ideas do you have for in class or out of class activities?
John
I remind students of the types of errors their memory can make and encourage them to notice during studying when they see one of these, because then they can take special care not to make the same mistake on an exam or the next time they are recalling the info in question. For example, terms learned after about age 14 are stored by meaning AND by the sound or spelling of the word such that similar sounding words in a context can be stored together and conflated when retrieved. Thymus/Thyroid, Hockney/Hopper, Iran/Iraq. One can know the right answer but still choose the wrong word. Knowing when to take extra care is a form of metacognition I think.
ReplyDelete