Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning

Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy

Naomi Silver, Matthew Kaplan, Danielle LaVaque-Manty, Deborah Meizlish, Naomi Silver, Matthew Kaplan, Danielle LaVaque-Manty, Deborah Meizlish

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781579228279
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Research has identified the importance of helping students develop the ability to monitor their own comprehension and to make their thinking processes explicit, and indeed demonstrates that metacognitive teaching strategies greatly improve student engagement with course material.This book -- by presenting principles that teachers in higher education can put into practice in their own classrooms -- explains how to lay the ground for this engagement, and help students become self-regulated learners actively employing metacognitive and reflective strategies in their education.Key elements include embedding metacognitive instruction in the content matter; being explicit about the usefulness of metacognitive activities to provide the incentive for students to commit to the extra effort; as well as following through consistently.Recognizing that few teachers have a deep understanding of metacognition and how it functions, and still fewer have developed methods for integrating it into their curriculum, this book offers a hands-on, user-friendly guide for implementing metacognitive and reflective pedagogy in a range of disciplines. Offering seven practitioner examples from the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, the social sciences and the humanities, along with sample syllabi, course materials, and student examples, this volume offers a range of strategies for incorporating these pedagogical approaches in college classrooms, as well as theoretical rationales for the strategies presented. By providing successful models from courses in a broad spectrum of disciplines, the editors and contributors reassure readers that they need not reinvent the wheel or fear the unknown, but can instead adapt tested interventions that aid learning and have been shown to improve both instructor and student satisfaction and engagement.

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Reflective Pedagogies and the Metacognitive Turn in College Teaching

Naomi Silver

Reflection and metacognition, the key terms of this book, have deeply intertwined histories in discourse on teaching and learning. In a general sense, interest in the two terms arises from the recognition that, in learning and in professional practice, content and procedural knowledge alone are insufficient for persistent and self-directed growth in a learner’s or practitioner’s understanding and expertise. Additionally, knowledge about how one learns content or practices a procedure is required. It is this attention to how that gives rise to the moment of reflexivity in reflection and the moment of meta in metacognition—that is, the moment of standing above or apart from oneself, so to speak, in order to turn one’s attention back upon one’s own mental work. In broad terms, then, reflection is often defined as a conscious exploration of one’s own experiences (see, for example, Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985), and metacognition as the act of thinking about one’s own thought processes (see Flavell, 1979). In the course of this chapter, I will aim to elaborate these initial definitions by placing them within the context of the educational trends and research out of which they developed, outline their connections to other important educational concepts, and overview the specific reflective and metacognitive pedagogical practices offered by the volume’s contributors.

WHY METACOGNITION AND REFLECTION, AND WHY NOW?

The idea for this book grows out of a three-year research project at the University of Michigan (U-M), undertaken by the editors as part of a multi-university collaborative funded by the Teagle and Spencer foundations tasked with “chang[ing] the nature of the conversation [about U.S. higher education] from critiques to a focus on efforts at systematic improvement in undergraduate education” (Thompson, forthcoming). Titled “The Impact of Metacognitive Strategies Within Writing in the Disciplines,” the U-M project aimed to develop targeted, exportable classroom strategies to help bridge the gap between students’ and faculty’s (or novices’ and experts’) understandings of disciplinary writing and thinking (Pace, 2004; Shulman, 2000).

Many thanks are due to Zak Lancaster (graduate student research assistant on “The Impact of Metacognitive Strategies Within Writing in the Disciplines” project, and now assistant professor at Wake Forest University) for his tremendous help in compiling elements of the literature review that appears in this chapter.

Research in education has identified the importance of helping students develop the ability to monitor their own comprehension and to make their thinking processes explicit to teachers; and indeed, interest in the role of reflection and metacognition in fostering these abilities has exploded in the past few decades. Some landmarks in metacognition are the publication of the 1998 textbook Metacognition in Educational Theory and Practice (Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser) and its 2009 companion volume by the same editors, Handbook of Metacognition in Education, and the 2006 founding of the journal Metacognition and Learning. In studies of reflection, development in the field may be charted via such titles as Boud et al.’s (1985) Reflection: Turning Experience Into Learning, Yancey’s (1998) Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Moon’s (1999) Reflection and Learning in Professional Development: Theory and Practice, and Lyons’s (2010) edited Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Mapping a Way of Knowing for Professional Reflective Inquiry. As these titles suggest, research on metacognition has had its widest impact in the fields of cognitive and educational psychology, while research on reflection has been largely taken up by professional practitioners and in experiential learning pedagogies.

As early as 1990, student metacognition was identified in a comprehensive metareview of research on learning variables as being primary among the elements deemed “most important to good learning outcomes” (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1990, p. 37). In this connection, the authors note:

We were surprised and encouraged that in this synthesis the metacognitive items emerged as most important, including comprehension monitoring, use of self-regulatory, self-control strategies, and use of strategies to facilitate generalization of concepts. Metacognitive variables are heavily cited in the current literature, in contrast to an earlier focus on relatively stable general mental abilities. A better understanding of those alterable variables may ultimately help the great majority of students to reach higher achievement levels through appropriate training in metacognition. (p. 37)

As one attempt to move this research agenda forward, our project at U-M applied metacognitive theory to questions of disciplinary understanding, asking if students would become better disciplinary thinkers if they understood the nature and components of thinking and writing entailed by that discipline, and if explicit instructor focus on disciplinary metacognition would help students better connect diverse disciplinary writing tasks and develop more versatile identities as disciplinary writers. Our results offer a provisional yes to both questions (Meizlish, LaVaque-Manty, Silver, & Kaplan, forthcoming). Further, they suggest that student and faculty engagement with course material and writing tasks is resoundingly improved by the introduction of metacognitive teaching strategies (see chapter 6).

The Importance of Engagement

This second finding of our project, regarding engagement, may in fact offer one of the primary rationales for reading this book, because, indeed, while we all want to improve our students’ learning, fewer of us may feel prepared to investigate our students’ reflective and metacognitive strategies as educational researchers do, and we may feel put off by the technical vocabulary employed by much of the research. As it turns out, more familiar concepts like engagement, motivation, self-efficacy, and agency all connect positively to the key terms of this volume, reflection and metacognition (see, for example, Bandura, 1989; Schunk, 1991). The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which began in 2000, has brought the importance of engagement to student learning in college and beyond to the attention of college educators at a wide range of institutions, and higher education research has documented that college outcomes are tightly linked to student educational effort; that is, they “depend largely on students’ engagement in educationally purposeful activities” (Hu & McCormick, 2012, para. 3). As George Kuh, the founding director of NSSE, has noted, “Student engagement is generally considered to be among the better predictors of learning and personal development. … The very act of being engaged also adds to the foundation of skills and dispositions that is essential to live a productive and satisfying life after college” (Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006, p. 2). Consequently, “engagement in this sense is not just a proxy for learning but a fundamental purpose of education” (Shulman, 2002, p. 40).

One way to engage students is to help them become involved in and responsible for their own learning, making decisions about how they go about learning in addition to deciding what they want to learn and how they want to use that learning. Metacognition allows students to make decisions about how they learn best by helping them become aware of what they are doing when they are learning. For instance, if when writing a paper a student always gets stuck trying to move from one idea to another, he might just get frustrated and give up, gloss over the problem by making an artificial or overly facile transition, or use any number of other hedging strategies. But, if he has been taught to “monitor” his writing process by inserting self-reflective comments into the margins of his papers, noting when he is having trouble (or when he finds something that works for him), then he is prompted at those moments to name what the problem is, and this act of naming and describing may help him better understand why he is running into trouble. In the best case scenario, this self-reflective naming and describing may even help him to solve the problem and make a revision in the paper rather than need to insert a comment to request feedback from his instructor. This discovery of his own problem-solving ability, in turn, may help this student enjoy writing more and find more engagement in the act of writing.

The student who can monitor her progress and make adjustments in this way is referred to as a self-directed or self-regulated learner, and indeed the literature on self-regulated learning provides a useful connector between metacognition and motivation or engagement. To repeat a frequently cited formulation, self-regulated learners are

metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process. Metacognitively, self-regulated learners are persons who plan, organize, self-instruct, self-monitor, and self-evaluate at various stages during the learning process. Motivationally, self-regulated learners perceive themselves as competent, self-efficacious, and autonomous. Behaviorally, self-regulated learners select, structure, and create environments that optimize learning. (Zimmerman, 1986, p. 308; see also Zimmerman & Moylan, 2009)

Many of us may recognize in these descriptions the highly successful students we have encountered—students who are motivated to excel, but whose motivation is linked to a deeper engagement with and excitement about learning that extends beyond a particular task or class, and who are poised to exploit this learning in the service of personal and professional goals as well.

The Importance of Instruction

How, then, do we engage students by helping them become self-regulated learners who actively employ metacognitive and reflective strategies in their learning? What are the next steps for college educators in their own classrooms? One key element is the clear importance of explicitly teaching students to develop metacognitive awareness and strategies and to apply them in a range of situations. In their review of the literature on metacognition in learning, Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters, and Afflerbach (2006, p. 9) highlight three “fundamental principles … for successful metacognitive instruction.” Instructors who are most effective in teaching reflection and metacognition:

(a) embed … metacognitive instruction in the content matter to ensure connectivity, (b) inform … learners about the usefulness of metacognitive activities to make them exert the initial extra effort, and (c) [incorporate] prolonged training to guarantee the smooth and maintained application of metacognitive activity.

Readers will find examples of these three principles put into practice throughout the chapters of this book.

Nonetheless, qualitative research presented in the literature, as well as our own experiences in presentations and consultations with faculty at U-M and elsewhere, suggests that many teachers lack a rich understanding of meta-cognition and how it functions, and even those familiar with the concept have not necessarily developed methods for integrating it into their curriculum (Veenman et al., 2006). Reasons for this absence range from a lack of knowledge of the research to a sense that it does not apply to a wide range of disciplines or to a concern that employing such strategies will be too time-intensive. Compounding these reasons is the relative absence in the literature of hands-on, user-friendly guides for college-level teachers to implement metacognitive and reflective pedagogy in a range of disciplines.

Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning aims to provide such a framework for college educators. In seven practitioner examples from the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, the social sciences, and the humanities, along with sample syllabi, course materials, and student examples, this volume offers a range of strategies for incorporating reflective and metacognitive instruction into college classrooms, as well as theoretical rationales for the strategies presented. By providing successful models from courses in a broad spectrum of disciplines, we hope to reassure readers that they need not reinvent the wheel or fear the unknown, but can instead adapt tested interventions that aid learning and have been shown to improve both instructor and student satisfaction and engagement.

WHAT IS REFLECTION? WHAT IS METACOGNITION? HISTORIES AND DEFINITIONS

Although both concepts have been traced back to classical philosophy and rhetorical practices—particularly Plato’s report of Socrates’s call to the self-examined life and Cicero’s report of Simonides’s creation of the technique of “memory places” (see, for example, Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009)—the contemporary history of both reflection and metacognition dates to the early twentieth century and the work of William James, John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget (see Fox & Riconscente, 2008; Tarricone, 2011).

Not surprisingly, in a field that has seen so much growth and interest over the past century, the definitions of reflection and metacognition are both varied and contested in the research literature (Boud et al., 1985; Moon, 1999; Tarricone, 2011; Weinert, 1987). In a nontechnical sense, the two terms are relatively synonymous and are often used interchangeably by educators. As Duffy, Miller, Parsons, and Meloth’s “Nomenclature Problems in Describing Metacognitive Aspects of Teaching” puts it, “Given that metacognition is ‘thinking of one’s thinking,’ it is a short step to associating metacognition with ‘reflecting’ on one’s thinking” (2009, p. 242). In classroom activities, for instance, a “reflection” may be an assignment about a particular lesson meant to promote student metacognition, so students may be asked to complete a “metacognitive reflection” exercise (see, for example, Fogarty, 1994; White, Frederiksen, & Collins, 2009).

In a more technical sense, these terms have developed relatively independently in research and practice. Until quite recently, researchers and educators who work on reflection have not often referred to metacognition, while for those in the field of metacognition, reflection sometimes constitutes a particular moment or stage in a metacognitive schema. In their “Cyclical Phase Model of Self-Regulatory Feedback,” for instance, Zimmerman and Moylan (2009) define a “Forethought Phase,” a “Performance Phase,” and a “Self-Reflection Phase” of student activity (emphasis added). In the latter, students make a “self-judgment” in which they compare their own performance against a standard (a typical metacognitive move), and they also describe a “self-reaction” that assesses their affect in relation to their self-judgment. These moments of self-reflection then feed back into student forethought for the next iteration of the activity (p. 300). In this example, as in those mentioned in the previous paragraph, reflection appears to become an occasion for taking stock of one’s cognitive processes.

Reflection

The definition mentioned previously is not out of line with more researched notions of reflection, certainly, but the construct as theorized by John Dewey is broader in its scope, and also more rigorous. In his landmark book How We Think, Dewey defines reflective thought as “Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends” (1910, p. 6, emphasis in original). Deweyan reflection is more sustained than a general stock-taking, then, and perhaps closer to the much broader concept of critical thought itself. Reflection, for him, constitutes a meticulous process of evidence- and implication-seeking, with the aim not only of fuller understanding by means of creating connections and relationships within experiences but of transforming experience and one’s environment as a result (Dewey, 1910, 1916). Reflective activity, then, is fundamentally constructive as well as ethical; it implies responsibility for and identification with the outcomes of an action (Dewey, 1916, pp. 172–173). Significant for Dewey is the claim that a reflective operation must begin with a genuine problem, something that causes the thinker to feel discomfort or uncertainty, what Dewey calls “a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives” (1916, p. 11, emphasis in original). In attempting to seek the basis for this dilemma and to restore equilibrium, the reflective learner or practitioner considers each possibility in turn before arriving at a provisional understanding. As Dewey asserts, “To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking” (1910, p. 13).

Following Dewey’s early focus on reflective thought, the role of reflection in education began receiving serious scholarly attention in the 1980s. An early book-length collection is the multiauthored examination of reflection in experience-based learning by Boud et al. (1985). Indicating the scope of interest in this topic, the editors make a point of noting that the book’s “contributors have been chosen from very diverse areas” (p. 15), ranging from management and medical education to professional and spiritual development to teacher and technical training, and more. While these contributors identify and describe reflective practice within the contexts of their particular areas, the editors offer a more general framework for reflective pedagogy that defines reflection initially as “a form of response of the learner to experience” (p. 18), and they develop this definition with a model of the reflective process that includes “returning to the experience, attending to feelings, and re-evaluating th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Reflective Pedagogies and the Metacognitive Turn in College Teaching
• 2 Make Exams Worth More Than the Grade
• 3 Improving Critical-Thinking Skills in Introductory Biology Through Quality Practice and Metacognition
• 4 Reflection and Metacognition in Engineering Practice
• 5 “The Steps of the Ladder Keep Going Up”
• 6 Implementing Metacognitive Interventions in Disciplinary Writing Classes
• 7 Designs for Writing
• 8 Reflection, ePortfolios, and WEPO
• Contributors
• Index