Teaching and Assessing Discipline-Independent and Discipline-Specific Metacognitive Strategies

1. Teaching and Assessing Discipline-Independent and Discipline-Specific Metacognitive Strategies Laura Wenk Assistant Professor of Cognition and Education Hampshire College

2. Goals of this talk • Examples of learning challenges and metacognitive strategies • Discipline-independent examples • Discipline-specific examples • Teaching example for each • Assessment

3. Discipline-independent examples • Intention (goal setting) • Reading comprehension (Reciprocal Teaching, PQ4R) • Writing to transform ideas (rather than knowledge telling) e.g. • Building explanation • Building argument • Genre • Checking for confirmation bias and pre-mature closure

4. Discipline-specific examples • Scientific inquiry, including: • Explanatory reasoning in science • Theories, models, hypotheses • Thinking with them • Empirical confirmation • Interpreting evidence to distinguish among knowledge claims • Research design • The helix of inquiry • Where from & where to? • Primary research literature skills • Reading and understanding • Writing about

5. My courses this semester • CS 122T: Inquiring Minds: Find out what other students think and do (social research and psychology) • Understand social research • Use primary research literature • Conduct a study, manage and analyze data, write it up • CS 208: How People Learn: Introduction to cognition and education • Write an argument using the literature (and own research data)

6. Why use primary research literature? • Engages students’ schemas about: • What makes for a well-designed study • What qualifies as evidence • Distinction between data and interpretation • How data are interpreted • Epistemological change • Theory-based explanations are inherently uncertain • Results hinge on the details of the research process • Preparation for student’s own research

7. Challenges to using primary literature • Students can’t find it/evaluate it • Aren’t interested in it (at first) • Can’t understand it • New genre, vocabulary, assumptions, etc. • Difficult to draw the larger lessons from it • It’s about more than just understanding this study

8. Some ideas to meet the challenges • Going slowly • Breaking primary literature skills into components • Metacognitive explicitness • Rubric • Using the project to maintain motivation

9. Questions assigned with a research article: • What question is addressed? Explain the relevant past research and ideas that led to it • What hypothesis was investigated? Explain how it is related to the research question you discussed in #1 above. • How was the study set up? Explain why it was set up this way. • What data were collected? Explain why the authors chose these particular data to collect.

10. Questions assigned with a research article: • What were the results? • Explain how well the results do (or do not) support the hypothesis. • Explain any alternative explanations for the findings • What further research does this study suggest? Explain why it should be conducted.

11. In-class activity • Students compare answers in expert groups by question • Groups present “best” responses • All discuss what makes for strong answers, what is appropriate level of detail • Meta-conceptual conversations on the nature of science, design issues, underlying assumptions, interpretation, etc.

12. Students receive feedback via rubric

13. Subsequent assignments • Additional common articles • Answer questions • Student self-assesses with rubric • I assess with rubric • We compare assessments • Multiple opportunities for modeling and practice with feedback

15. Study Results - 100 Level Natural Science Classes N=42 pre-post matched pairs

16. First year students can • Read primary research • Improve understanding of research design • Improve understanding of data interpretation • Improve in distinction between data and interpretation

17. My courses this semester • CS 122T: Inquiring Minds: Find out what other students think and do (social research and psychology) • Understand social research • Use primary research literature • Conduct a study and write it up • CS 208: How People Learn: Introduction to cognition and education • Write an argument using the literature (and own research data)

18. Expectations for student writing • Hampshire courses are writing intensive • All students complete a senior thesis (Division III) • Most course projects and the Div III are on negotiated topics • Often requires interdisciplinary arguments

19. Some challenges to writing an argument • Students don’t know what an argument is • Why do we have to argue :-) • Early college students’ writing tends to be descriptive rather than analytical • It lacks transitions • It lacks explanation of why they are citing someone • It ignores complexity • The main point is often reached in the concluding paragraph

20. Some challenges to writing an argument • Students fear redundancy • I already wrote what they found • Students don’t feel qualified to have an opinion • Students’ strategies support descriptive writing

21. Strategies students tend to use • Reading articles/chapters and outlining them • Independent judgments about importance of each fact or idea • Not transformative • Reading everything before writing • Sitting down to write, going back to things they had read before, and extracting the part they thought was interesting • Stringing ideas together in an order suggested by an outline of topics • Leaving little time for revision

22. Some strategies to meet the challenge • Write AS you read (micro-writing) • About specific ideas as they occur to you • Use your own words • Include important details (elaboration) • Do a number of these; have an epiphany • Write across the shorter pieces (macro-writing) • Read out loud (maybe to a friend) • Stop when you find you need to explain something/why it was there and write that explanation down • Hand in for feedback • Keep revising with feedback (peer and professor)

23. Assignments to support new strategies • Critical response papers (articles I assign) • Develop a thesis • Engage with the article and details of the points made (of interest) • Consider questions raised by the reading • Portfolio of response papers • Periodically engage in: • Selection of best piece • Assessing its strengths and weaknesses • Revising

24. Assignments to support new strategies • Receive feedback from me (on portfolio and self-assessment) • For final paper • Students must write critical response papers for 5 articles they find and select on their topic

25. No study yet - but… • I’m happier with the writing • They know what I mean when I ask for elaboration or transitions, etc. • Seem more able to make connections across articles

26. Assessment - Both examples • Formative feedback • Explicit criteria (discussed in class/rubric) • Timely feedback - adjust • Both teacher and self-assessment (helps students internalize criteria) • Use same criteria on multiple assignments • Use the same criteria to judge their projects • Success on project requires use of target skills