Saturday, March 26, 2011

Teaching strategies to develop metacognition

There are identified strategies that were found to be effective in developing students' metacognition. These are the following:

Have students
- monitor their own learning and thinking
- Make predictions about information to be presented next based on what they have read
- Relate ideas to existing knowledge structure
- Develop and ask questions of themselves, about what’s going on around them

Learners are classified based on the level of metacognition:

Novice learners:
- Have limited knowledge in different subject areas
- Satisfied at just scratching the surface; hurriedly gives solution to the problem
- Employ rigid strategies that may not be appropriate to the task at hand
- Attempt to process all information they receive
- Do not examine the quality of their work, nor stop to make revisions

Expert Learners:
- Have deeper knowledge in different subject areas
- First try to understand the problem, look for boundaries, and create a mental picture of the problem
- Design new strategies that would be appropriate to the task at hand
- Select important information to process, able to breakdown information to manageable tasks
- Check their errors and redirect their efforts to maintain quality output

Metacognition

The word "metacogniiton" was first coined by John Flavell. Accordingly, it consist of metacognitive knowledge and experiences or regulation. It also means“thinking about thinking”, “learning how to learn" and thinking which involves active awareness and control over cognitive processes engaged in learning.

Metacognitive knowledge refers to acquired knowledge about cognitive processes, knowledge that can be used to control processes.

3 categories of metacognitive knowledge:
1. Person variable – knowledge about how human beings learn and process information and individual’s knowledge of one’s own learning process
2. Task variables – knowledge about nature of tasks and type pf processing demands that it will place upon the individual
3. Strategy variables – awareness of the strategy one is using to learn a topic and evaluating whether this strategy is effective
1. Meta-attention – awareness of specific strategies so that you can keep your attention focused on the topic or task at hand
2. Meta-memory – awareness of memory strategies that work best for you