Metacognition's Role in the Classroom

Metacognition

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Metacognition is the main theme of this weeks lesson, I used to think of it as "thinking about thinking" but the text and Mr. Kushner have talked about how it is more than just that. The text referred to 3 main categories of metacognition:

• Metamemory & Metacomprehension
• Problem-Solving
• Critical Thinking

Now, at first I thought this was all semantics and creating these long words for no real purpose, but it was useful in the distinction of different thought processes. I had never thought of the distinct ways we process how we store and retrieve information like that.



 
Metamemory is self-insight into whether someone believes they can answer a question correctly. Michael E. Martinez has stated that it has been shown to have a predictive power for future learning.

Metacomprehension is the self-appraisal of one's own knowledge. This had very practical application to the classroom because one of the dangers is having a student with poor reading comprehension think that they have understood the text when in reality they have missed the major points and concepts.

Problem Solving was defined in a very elegant way by Martinez, "the pursuit of a goal when the path to that goal is uncertain." This is one of the most relevant parts of metacognition for students, how to proceed when the answer or the path to that answer is unclear. A lot of students might be tempted to give up, but training them to seek out possible avenues to pursue.

Critical Thinking is a phrase that I think is poorly defined in many contexts, but Martinez was able to shed some light on it by comparing it to assessing the information at hand. "Is the idea clearly stated? Does one idea follow logically from another? Is the message logical, rational, and coherent?" Students often find this step hard, and I believe that critical thinking becomes easier as one develops an experience dealing with the content. As adults in specific fields, we have certain skills in critical thinking that we can teach our students to develop. In the end, the more experience they have with the material, the more patterns and cues they can pick out.

Reading Apprenticeship

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Our discussion of Metacongition leads directly into the idea of apprenticing our students in reading. As adults who are well versed in their content areas, we have developed many techniques for handling texts as they appear in our fields. This idea of our technique being invisible was a very good way to describe it. I had never thought about my own skills at reading science material as being a mastery on the topic. But as Mr. Kushner has told us, compared to the student's ability to tackle these texts, we have become experts in literacy in our field.

There were many strategies discussed both in the text and in class, but my favorite one and one I'll be bringing into the classroom with me was "think aloud." I think this is perfect at illuminating the metacognitive thought process one has to go through to tackle a text. Since I've mentioned before that Critical Thinking is often a vague term used in a lot of places, think aloud has been able to make visible those critical thinking skills. When Paul and I read through the texts it was clear that we were able to dissect it more and identify problem areas. As I heard someone read it out loud and voice their thoughts, I got a chance to peek into their thinking process, and I think for students this will be invaluable. The most important thing for the students to realize is that even though we are experts in literacy, we will still struggle sometimes, but it's the problem solving skills we have developed that help us in the end. This social style of reading is going to be very useful in my classroom.