SESSION CLOSED
10:15 AM – 12:15 PM | Drinko Library 349
Abstract: The act of thinking about your own thinking, or Metacognitive Thinking, is something professors do every time they plan a class schedule, make a note on how students respond to a lecture, or review test question data after an exam. As mature learners, faculty know how to plan for their own learning, monitor learning progress to make adjustments, and determine how they learned something to apply it to another situation. It is no wonder that faculty are often frustrated by students, who do not seem to have mastered learning how to learn.
Adding Metacognitive Thinking to a course or project is a practice that has a high impact on learner success, teaches reflection on learning, encourages a growth mindset, and helps students to adapt thinking to diverse problem-solving situations. Stanton, et al. (2021) describes four benefits of adding metacognitive thinking practices to courses and projects.
- Students will have higher academic achievement, and become expert-like in their learning.
- Students will be better at monitoring what they do and don’t know and can focus their studying and learning efforts on the content that they know less well.
- Students will have better knowledge about which strategies are most beneficial to their learning and become more effective learners.
- Students will have better problem-solving skills.
John H. Flavell (1976) first defined the term metacognition as “active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of [cognitive] processes, usually in the service of some concrete goal or objective” (p. 232) In the book Metacognition: The Neglected Skill Set for Empowering Students, Fogarty and Pete argue that too often metacognitive thinking is implied in classrooms rather than explicitly addressed. Researchers (Feuerstein, 1980; Brown, 1980; Brown and Palinscar, 1982) have shown that students can be taught metacognitive skills.
This 2-hour workshop will introduce the concepts and theories of metacognitive thinking, explain how metacognition can be used to enhance learning, and demonstrate how to infuse metacognitive thinking into a course across multiple disciplines. During the second hour of the workshop, attendees will be guided through the process of infusing metacognitive thinking practices in a course or project assignment of their choice and will leave the workshop with a plan for how to promote metacognitive thinking for students in their courses. Attendees are encouraged to bring a class assignment and syllabus to which they would like to add metacognitive thinking.
Facilitators: Allyson Goodman (Associate Professor, W. Page Pitt School of Journalism & Mass Communications); Ruthann Arneson (Associate Professor, Early Childhood Education Program); Tina Cartwright (Professor, Curriculum, Instruction & Foundations Program); Brittany Riley (Assistant Professor, Pharmacy Practice & Administration); Kelly Rutherford (Associate Professor, Communication Disorders); Laura Stapleton (Instructor, Mathematics)
Session Format: Traditional