Kristin Bonnie, assistant professor of psychology at
Beloit College (Wisconsin), was curious about her students? performance on
exams in the introductory psychology course. As she explained to a packed room
at the 2011 annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities (AAC&U) in San Francisco, she had been giving her students,
mostly first-years, the choice of deciding not to answer two or three of the
approximately twenty-five multiple-choice questions that appeared on each exam.
In some cases, students answered every question anyway, before indicating which
ones they did not want graded.
Bonnie?s curiosity was partly just the response of a good
teacher and researcher wanting to know more about student learning in her
classes. But her questions were considerably deepened and developed?and
connected to ongoing discussions about metacognition?by her participation in
the Teagle Foundation?funded Collegium on Student Learning through the
Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM).
In November 2008, participants in the ACM collegium
embarked upon a thirty-month project to examine recent work in the cognitive
sciences, to test out the theories through classroom interventions and
experiments, and, ideally, to improve student learning through the process.
They focused especially on the importance of metacognition, which might be
summarized as knowledge of one?s own thoughts and the factors that influence
one?s thinking. Other researchers emphasize the ability to plan, monitor, and
evaluate the learning process as key elements of metacognition.
As Bonnie and her colleagues reported at the annual meeting,
that focus not only had good effects on student learning but often a profound
effect on the teachers. In creating scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)
projects that documented their questions and interventions, and working as part
of a group of scholars, collegium members reported becoming significantly more
thoughtful about their teaching practice.
Bonnie was joined in the AAC&U session by David
Thompson, associate professor of Spanish at Luther College (Iowa); Holly
Swyers, assistant professor of anthropology at Lake Forest College (Illinois);
Karl Wirth, associate professor of geology at Macalester College (Minnesota);
and John Ottenhoff, vice president of the ACM. They worked with a dozen
colleagues from other ACM colleges in the collegium, which began with an
opening conference featuring a keynote address from Patricia M. King, whose
work on reflective thinking and self-authorship helped shape the thinking of
the participants. Classroom interventions were carried out over the 2009?10
academic year, and a final conference about the group?s work was held in
October 2010.
Throughout the process, as reported in San Francisco, the
group found that metacognition was by no means a ?silver bullet? for improving
student learning, but nonetheless was an effective tool for focusing students?
attention more consciously on their learning and, ultimately, providing a means
to encourage students to think about the larger purpose of their education.
Perhaps as important, the collegium group found that by asking metacognitive
questions of students, they became both more aware of their students? learning
and increasingly self-reflective about their own teaching practices and
effectiveness.
David Thompson?s work exemplified well the point about
faculty learning. He reported that his early questions about the effects of
cumulative testing on increasing students? ability to monitor their learning in
Spanish classes prompted him to set up separate ?control? and ?intervention?
sections of intermediate Spanish at Luther. Finding no correlation between
cumulative testing and increased self-monitoring, he began introducing students
to more explicit self-monitoring processes, including post-assignment and
post-exam ?wrappers,? brief writing exercises that asked students to reflect on
their learning process both before and after seeing their graded tests.
Again, Thompson?s results were mixed; increased
metacognitive skills, as measured by the Metacognitive Self-Regulation subscale
of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich 1991), didn?t
necessarily lead to better learning of Spanish. But in comparing the gaps
between student predictions and performance on exams, he came to see that
instruction in metacognitive skills may be particularly important for
first-year students as they adjust to the expectations of college-level work
and learn to evaluate and monitor their own understanding relative to those
expectations. Tracking metacognitive growth in first-year students and in the
weakest test-performers gave Thompson a new focus in his teaching, which he
will carry forward in a recursive cycle of new interventions and modifications.
As is true of most good SoTL projects, inquiries into
student learning begat further questions and more reflection about the practice
of teaching. Thompson learned that as a humanities scholar engaging in this
kind of research, he needed to find more suitable methods; humanities
approaches such as discourse analysis might serve better than control groups
for shedding light on his questions. This realization was made possible in
large part by the mix of peer and expert support provided by the collegium,
which offered the encouragement and framework for Thompson?s initial foray into
the literature of metacognition and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Both Thompson and Bonnie were influenced by Karl Wirth?s
work on ?knowledge surveys? as a central strategy for helping students think
about their thinking. Knowledge surveys involve simple self-reports from
students about their knowledge of course concepts, content, and skills, Wirth
explained at the AAC&U session in San Francisco. In knowledge surveys,
students are presented with detailed content and skill objectives for each
topic and are asked to indicate their perceived mastery of each. Faculty can
use these pre- and post-reports to gauge how confident students feel in their
understanding of course material at the beginning or end of a course, before
exams or papers, or even as graduating seniors or alumni.
Wirth noted that the surveys need not take much class
time and can be administered via paper or the web. The surveys can be
significant for clarifying course objectives, structure, and design. For
students, knowledge surveys achieve several purposes: they help make clear
course objectives and expectations, are useful as study guides, can serve as a
formative assessment tool, and, perhaps most critically, aid in their
development of self-assessment and metacognitive skills. For instructors, the
surveys help them assess learning gains, instructional practices, and course
design.
Wirth?s San Francisco presentation featured several
charts showing how knowledge surveys matched up with student performance on
exams. Perhaps most strikingly, Wirth found that students in the lower quartile
of performance on exams were least able to predict their performance; students
who performed best were often likely to underestimate how well they understood
the material.
Wirth?s collegium work also involved a collaborative
project with Fahima Aziz of Hamline University (Minnesota) on the use of
?reading reflections,? another attempt to help students monitor their learning
through brief online writing about their reading assignments. According to
Wirth, expert readers are skilled at using a wide range of strategies during
all phases of reading (e.g., setting goals for learning, monitoring
comprehension during reading, checking comprehension, and self-reflection), but
most college instruction simply assumes the mastery of such metacognitive
skills.
In making the reading reflections a regular part of their
courses, Wirth and Asiz concluded, ?there is no longer any question in our
minds whether reading reflections are a powerful intervention for improving
learning. With reading reflections, students read more regularly before coming
to class, they read more deeply, and they use a wider range of reading
strategies. They are better prepared to participate in, and learn from,
classroom activities resulting in deeper content learning. There is also
evidence that this intervention might hold even greater potential for
underperforming students.?
Other members of the ACM collegium group experimented
with various forms of knowledge surveys, exam wrappers, and reflective writing.
The common theme was that metacognitive awareness didn?t lead directly to
greater mastery of course content, but helped improve the focus of instruction
and especially seemed to benefit students who tended to perform poorly. For
example, Tim Tibbetts (Monmouth College, Illinois) found in his introductory
biology classes that ?reading reflections give me a tool to hear where students
are struggling and respond, knowledge surveys help students see what topics are
important and what types of questions they should anticipate on exams.? He also
found clear improvements in learning outcomes for the students who did exam
wrappers.
Diane Angell (St. Olaf College, Minnesota), also a
biologist, found that metacognitive assignments in the form of ?exam
preparation assignments? and ?wrappers? produced a consistent, if small, effect
on improving student learning. She speculated that even more explicit
metacognitive instruction, especially for underprepared students, would be
helpful. Clara Hardy (Carleton College, Minnesota) concentrated on making
learning strategies more explicit in her introductory Latin classes. Her
conclusions, based on a small sample, were that meta?cognitive activities were
especially helpful for the very lowest-achieving students, who in other years
did not complete the course successfully. She also found that exam wrappers for
the higher-achieving students were much fuller in their accounts of what they
had tried and how they had thought about what to try than were the
lower-achieving ones.
The collegium also produced some interesting
collocations. At the final conference for the collegium, held at Macalester
College in October 2010, Joy Jordan (Lawrence University, Wisconsin) reported
about some meta?cognitive interventions in her intermediate statistics course
in the same session in which Kent McWilliams (St. Olaf College, Minnesota)
reported on his piano performance class. Jordan concentrated on helping
students learn the essential but difficult concept of sampling distribution,
focusing especially on reflections about ?confidence judgments.? She reported
being most surprised by the ?repeated overconfidence in the lower-performing
half of the class? and became interested in what happens when these students,
working in groups, become more confident even though their understanding may
not have changed. McWilliams also became intrigued by the issue of confidence
and by what changed as he asked his piano students to be consistently
self-reflective while they learned a new piece of
music. He reported that students found the metacognitive framework helped them
pose a wider range of questions, from well-structured questions to higher-level
ill-structured questions, and that they seem to have been successful in
transferring these same learning processes to other repertoire they studied.
Holly Swyers, on the other hand, used meta?cognition as a
common language in a ?pod? of three first-year seminar classes, focused in the
diverse disciplines of anthropology, chemistry, and education, at Lake Forest College.
The ?pod? came together throughout the year with a team of colleagues,
including not only the faculty teaching the courses but also a coach, a public
safety officer, student-life professionals, and learning specialists. As she
described in San Francisco, Swyers saw the real breakthrough in the project in
the value of a shared vocabulary for talking about what is happening in student
learning. ?The metacognition frame proved adaptable by all members of the pod,
so students would hear the same ideas in the classroom, in the dorm, in study
sessions, and on the playing field,? Swyers reported. ?Most members found the
principles very similar to ideas they already had in practice, so the real
value was in helping students see that the overriding premise of all their college
activities was consistent.?
Metacognition is a topic that has attracted increasing
attention nationally, starting with the groundbreaking How People Learn
(Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000), and the ACM collegium offered some intriguing
insights into how abilities in self-monitoring and awareness of the learning
process can improve learning. The ACM-Teagle collaboration also delivered
significant insights into how successful faculty development work can occur.
Quite simply, successful faculty development takes time,
particularly if it involves work (like the scholarship of teaching and
learning) with which faculty are not familiar. Successful projects are
long-term, blending support and accountability. The collegium project, initially
funded for thirty months, has been extended, as members of the group continue
to collaborate on projects and discussions. Throughout the project, requests
for project proposals, updates, and final reports kept participants focused and
engaged?and provided opportunities for discussion and suggestions.
Faculty projects such as the Collegium on Student
Learning also require collegial conversations nurtured carefully with
appropriate support. All the faculty involved in this project engaged in common
work, even though they came from disciplines ranging from classics to
statistics and geology to music. In order to support this collaborative faculty
work, the group reaffirmed the need for an egalitarian ethic, substantive
collegial interaction, and a supportive intellectual community that inspired
and transformed teaching practices. Working together with agreed-upon goals
around a common issue (in this case, student learning and metacognition) led to
a natural progression of discussions concerning common practices inspired by
issues raised by classroom practices. This collegial support was enhanced by
the creation of small cohort groups of faculty members who worked closely
together across disciplines and institutions.
Colleagues in institutions with a history of close
collaboration through the consortium found a network of support and challenge,
as well as a way to reduce the isolation that commonly characterizes faculty
research. This isolation was further reduced through the use of a project
website that allowed for sharing of relevant materials and resources and for
continuing online conversations about work in progress. As several members of
the group observed, metacognition itself became a fruitful concept for
increasing the cohesiveness of the group.
Finally, the work initiated in the ACM-Teagle Collegium
project signals a shifting attitude about who learns in college. As Gerald
Graff noted in speaking about his Clueless in Academe, ?We?ve gotten accustomed
to a system in which the very few excel in school (and reap the rewards in the
vocational world beyond) and the many stumble along and more or less get by, or
get through, or fail. In some ways such a system suits us academics?it?s not
our fault if the majority stumble or fail, we can easily say, that?s just the
way it is; only an elite in any society is going to ?get? the intellectual
club? (Warner 2003). Metacognitive interventions, this project suggested, may
be an especially powerful tool in helping the ?academically adrift? student
find a way to get into the game, to become more aware of the kind of thinking
that supports strong academic performance. And while that?s not the whole
answer to the problems of ?limited learning? on our campuses, it?s certainly
something worth thinking
about.
References
Bransford, J. D., A. L. Brown, and R. R. Cocking. 2000.
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, DC: National
Research Council.
Pintrich, P. R., D. A. F. Smith, T. Garcia, and W. J.
McKeachie. 1991. A Manual for the Use of the Motivated Strategies for Learning
Questionnaire (MSLQ). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Warner, J. 2003. ?Clueless in Academe: An Interview with
Gerald Graff.? The Morning News, September 16, http://www.themorningnews.org/article/clueless-in-academe-an-interview-with-gerald-graff.
John Ottenhoff is vice president of the Associated
Colleges of the Midwest (ACM). On behalf of the ACM, the author expresses deep
gratitude to the Teagle Foundation for funding the project described in this
article and for its record of extraordinary support for liberal education. The
author also thanks Kristin Bonnie, Rachel Ragland, David Schodt, Holly Swyers,
and David Thompson for their contributions to this article.
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