Metacognition
Students learn through continual self-monitoring of their current understanding (Bransford & Donovan, 2005).
Teaching strategies that facilitate engaging place include:
The Conceptual Change Model (CCM) facilitates metacognition because learners must examine their understandings and those of their peers. To reconstruct their understanding of a concept, learners must think about how they think!
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Concept maps encourage students to create a physical representation of their personal cognitive structure. This exposes novel ideas, promotes thinking about the student’s understanding of the concept, and highlights connections between concepts and prior knowledge.
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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy facilitates metacognition because it requires students to understand how their personal perspectives affect how they perceive the world and other cultures.
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According to a teacher who participated in a study by Carroll et al. (2010), design thinking is not about what students know, but is about students discovering how to learn. To take this one step further, design thinking does not just get students thinking about problems, it gets them thinking about why the problem is a problem (Carroll et al., 2010). One of the key aspects of design thinking is that it is mindful of process (Carroll et al., 2010); students are engaged in monitoring their own thinking and learning (Donovan & Bransford, 2005).
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Inquiry promotes metacognition through involving activities such as planning how to tackle a given task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task. Metacognition is at the core of inquiry by asking students to evaluate the ideas of science and the natural world, as well as processing the collection of facts (Bransford & Donovan, 2005).
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Project-based learning provides students ample opportunity to assess their own thinking and how they present their ideas in group settings. This strategy requires students to contribute creative and thoughtful insights to the group process. PBL, by nature, challenges the way students reflect on this process (and their role in it) by way of formal feedback sessions. With PBL, students understand that "revision is a natural component of achieving a learning goal" and they recognize "the value of scaffolds, resources, and social structures that encourage and support revision (Barron et al., 1998)."
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References
Barron et al (1998). Doing With Understanding: Lessons From Research on Problem- and Project-Based Learning. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 7(3-4), 271-311.
Bransford, J. D., & Donovan, M. S. (Eds.). (2005). How students learn: History, mathematics, and science in the classroom. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Carroll, M., Goldman, S., Britos, L., Koh, J., Royalty, A., & Hornstein, M. (2010). Destination, imagination, and the fires within: Design thinking in a middle school classroom. International Journal of Art and Design Education 29(1), 37-52.
Bransford, J. D., & Donovan, M. S. (Eds.). (2005). How students learn: History, mathematics, and science in the classroom. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Carroll, M., Goldman, S., Britos, L., Koh, J., Royalty, A., & Hornstein, M. (2010). Destination, imagination, and the fires within: Design thinking in a middle school classroom. International Journal of Art and Design Education 29(1), 37-52.