Teaching Students First, Subjects Second: Developing Metacognitive Skills

A major challenge for college students and young professionals entering the workplace is managing their time, being self-directed and assessing their tasks. As educators, we need to be more explicit, we need to provide models of work that is not at par, and we need to provide continuous feedback by asking students to give us feedback on the process. We must also provide roadmaps, criteria, checklists and rubrics to assist students along the way. Our goal is to position our students to be college and career ready. How can we do this?

 

To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress and adjust their strategies as needed. When students can evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses, students are active in their learning process.

 

Providing our students with modest heuristics or strategies for assessing a piece of finished work before it is submitted to a teacher lays the groundwork for how the student will adapt in the real world and for how they will return to that preconceived piece of finished work and refine it before submitting it. This very act requires students to reflect on and mark their own work whereby explaining the what, why and how. “Researchers have proposed various models to describe how learners would ideally apply metacognitive skills to learn and perform well." (Brown et al., 1983; Butler, 1997; Pintrich, 2000; Winne & Hadwin, 1998). 

Ambrose et al.* reviews in the figure below a cycle of basic metacognitive skills in which learners:

 

 

*Excerpt From: Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman & Richard E. Mayer. "How Learning Works." iBooks. https://itun.es/us/GYzLw.l

 

It makes sense, when we stop and ask ourselves if we understand the task at hand before moving forward, the likelihood is that our finished product will be better than if we never stopped to ask, Why am I doing this? What is being asked of me? How am I doing? What can I do better?

How Learning Works states that “…students who naturally monitor their own progress and try to explain to themselves what they are learning along the way generally show greater learning gains as compared to students who engage less often in self-monitoring and self-explanation activities.” For example, a good orator or writer will adjust their pitch or prose to their given audience. A student who performs poorly and attempts the same approach yielding the same result is less likely to achieve success than a student who self-assesses and tracks one's progress through the process.

Scaffolding work for students to practice the use of and practice with their metacognitive skills can be employed in a myriad of ways. As educators, we can provide students with practice or opportunities to develop these skills. For example, working individually on a task first in isolation before employing it in a group setting. Illustrating to students that learning takes place over phases and that process is more important than getting a task done quickly. The end product and its quality or accuracy are highly dependent upon the process, guided self-assessment and planning.

 

Ambrose, Susan A.; Bridges, Michael W.; DiPietro, Michele; Lovett, Marsha C.; Norman, Marie K. (2010-04-16). How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series). Wiley Publishing.

Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman & Richard E. Mayer. “How Learning Works.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/GYzLw.l