17 minute read
Strategies to Assess Metacognitive Skills
Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:
Kristoffer Barikmo Instructional Coach Shawnee Mission East High School Prairie Village, Kansas
Robin Fogarty Education Consultant Robin Fogarty and Associates Chicago, Illinois
Nathalie Fournier K–5 French Immersion Teacher Prairie South School Division Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada
Caitlin Fox Instructor Red Deer College Red Deer, Alberta, Canada
Angie Freese Consultant Woodbury, Minnesota
Whitney Freije Seventh-Grade Teacher Windsor Central School District Windsor, New York Teresa Haskiell Math Teacher James Wood High School Winchester, Virginia
Maria Krum Teacher Valencia Middle School Los Lunas, New Mexico
Joshua Kunnath English Teacher and Department Chair Highland High School Bakersfield, California
Adrienne Paone ILC and English 2 Pedro Menendez High School St. Augustine, Florida
Brian Pete Education Consultant Robin Fogarty and Associates Venice, Florida
Nancy Petolick Instructional Coach/Interventionist Savannah Elementary, Denton ISD Aubrey, Texas
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/studentengagement to download the free reproducibles in this book.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Author .............................................. ix
Introduction ................................................. . . 1 Self-Regulation and Metacognition .............................. 2 About This Book ............................................ 5 The Road Map to Expertise .................................... 8
Chapter 1
Metacognition ................................................. .9 Metacognition and Self-Regulation ............................. 11 Core Methods to Encourage Metacognitive Thinking ............... 15 Strategies to Assess Metacognitive Skills ......................... 22 Summary ................................................. 33
Chapter 2
Mindsets and Motivation .......................................35 Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning ......................... 36 The Growth Mindset and Self-Efficacy .......................... 37 The Value of Scaffolding ..................................... 41 Strategies for Developing Positive Mindsets That Create Motivation ... 42 Strategies for Using Goals to Increase Motivation .................. 53 Strategies for Cultivating Resilience and Grit to Maintain Motivation ... 58 Strategies for Evaluating Learning Through Feedback, Reflection, and Revision ............................................. 62 Summary ................................................. 67
Effortful Control and Emotional Regulation ...................... 71 Emotional Vulnerability in the Classroom ........................ 72 The Value of Emotions in the Classroom ......................... 73 Strategies for Mindfulness .................................... 74 Strategies for Emotional Regulation, Behavior Reflection, and Change .. 80 Summary ................................................. 87
Chapter 4 Planning, Prioritizing, Organizing, and Managing Time ...........89
Executive Function and Self-Regulated Learning .................. 91 Strategies for Ensuring Priorities Match Goals and Values ........... 92 Strategies for Planning the Completion of Daily Tasks ............. 101 Strategies for Monitoring the Completion of Daily Tasks ............ 112 Summary ................................................ 116
Chapter 5 Remembering, Understanding, and Applying .................... 119
Foundational Taxonomy Levels and Self-Regulated Learning ........ 120 Classroom Conditions for Remembering and Understanding ......... 122 Strategies for Using Mnemonics to Remember and Understand ...... 128 Strategies for Testing, Asking and Answering Questions, and Summarizing ......................................... 134 Summary ................................................ 148
Chapter 6 Critical Analysis, Evaluation, and Creative Thought .............. 151
Critical Analysis, Evaluation, Creative Thought, and
Self-Regulated Learning ................................... 152 Strategies for Reading, Collaborating, and Notetaking .............. 154 Strategies for Visualization, Design, and Creation ................. 160 Summary ................................................ 180
Epilogue ..................................................... 181 References and Resources ..................................... 187
Index ........................................................ 199
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nina Parrish is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Parrish Learning Zone in northern Virginia, a learning center that provides supplementary educational services to students of all ages. She has worked as a special education teacher, tutor, and education center director and has taught remedial reading, language arts, mathematics, history, and study skills since 2003. Nina specializes in working with students with learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.
Nina writes The Learning Zone Blog and has contributed numerous articles to national and international publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Mary Washington. She received the Project PISCES scholarship to attend North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she completed her teaching certification in special education. Nina earned a master’s degree in education for school counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University.
To learn more about Nina’s work, visit www.parrishlearningzone.com or follow @parrish learning on Twitter.
To book Nina Parrish for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
© 2022 by Solution Tree Press
INTRODUCTION
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO DEVELOP SELF-REGULATED LEARNERS
Sam walks into my classroom and heaves his heavy backpack onto a desk. It falls into the attached chair with a thud. His face is expressionless, but his body language says, “I can’t believe that I have to do this again.” I see many Sams every year. His parents and teachers have asked me to talk with him because he is not turning in work, has many incomplete or missing assignments, and often seems disengaged in class. They know Sam has potential because, despite his lack of practice and returned work, he remembers a lot of the material and seems to excel on creative project-based assignments. After school, he likes to come up with stories, write scripts, and organize friends to participate in elaborate videos he posts to his YouTube page. Sam unzips his backpack and a mass of binders, crushed papers, and books filled with folded loose-leaf paper tumbles to the floor. As we sort through the mess, he explains that he often intends to finish a task, but it gets lost or he never comes back to it. He has the most trouble in classes that aren’t interesting to him or where the teacher “doesn’t like him.” When Sam feels angry, frustrated, or bored, he has trouble getting beyond his emotional response to complete the work in front of him or work up the motivation to continue with it later.
Teachers with gifted but disengaged students will relate to this scenario. Sam is motivated, creative, and bright in his free time, so why is he so forgetful in class? My years as an educator have led me to the answer: Sam struggles with developing a plan to take control of his learning because he hasn’t yet learned that he can organize his motivation. He is overwhelmed by so many moving parts in his life between school and homework that he lashes out instead of sitting down to plan. Even if students are aware of effective learning strategies, they are
often unsure when to use them because they haven’t been given tools for self-motivation, emotional regulation, and executive functioning. Although having a learning disability or ADHD or experiencing trauma or poverty intensifies academic struggles, most students—including the Sams in your class—still need some level of support accessing the complex thinking skills required to succeed in school.
Students must feel both engaged in learning the curriculum and empowered to pursue their own goals and interests. The only way to achieve this is by making students a partner and eventually the leader in their learning process. For real learning to take place, education must be student led, creative, and have a process instead of a product focus. When teachers use testing for feedback to increase overall understanding instead of only teaching correct answers for the end-of-unit test, they are favoring a process focus over a product focus. Prioritizing a student’s understanding of a concept (as opposed to how familiar it is to them on a test) is the ultimate way to individualize and differentiate.
Who knows students better than themselves? Instead of focusing on teaching students primarily what to learn, teachers must also teach students how to learn. Teachers must be experts in both content and research-based learning strategies. Having background knowledge in all subjects is important if students want to use strategies and engage in critical thinking, but if teachers only teach facts, students will forget those facts long before they join the workforce. Also, a curriculum centered completely on facts that students can just search for online will seem irrelevant to 21st century learners. By contrast, becoming motivated, capable, and strategic learners will serve students for their entire life. It will allow them to acquire whatever skills and knowledge they need for their future.
In The Independent Learner, you will learn about the importance of cognition and metacognition to the learning process and gain activities to support students in becoming autonomous learners. The following sections explain this book’s approach to self-regulation and metacognition, detail how this book is organized and who it’s for, and illustrate how to help students become learning experts.
Self-Regulation and Metacognition
The term self-regulation originated with psychologist Albert Bandura’s (1991) social cognitive theory of human behavior. Bandura believes self-regulation is the process that allows people to “exercise some control over their thoughts, feelings, motivation, and actions” (1991, p. 249). Successful self-regulation relies on metacognition, or the ability to self-monitor and think about your own thinking (Kuhn & Dean, 2004). Through self-monitoring and feedback, goals can be set for changing routine and habitual thinking. Then people can evaluate and reflect on how changing their thoughts affects how they feel, their level of motivation, and the actions they choose to take (Bandura, 1991). Cognitive structures, self-beliefs, and mood states can affect a person’s capacity to self-monitor (Bandura, 1991). Cognitive structures, like personal standards and knowledge about level of performance, are constructed through the influence and feedback of significant people, reflections on past performance, personal values, and social modeling and comparison. Self-beliefs, also called self-efficacy, are the beliefs people hold about their own ability to control their behavior, actions, and daily life through their choices. When people have high self-efficacy, they ascribe failures to lack of effort; when they have low
self-efficacy, people attribute failures to lack of ability (Bandura, 1991). Mood states are transient, affective states that measure a state of mind at any given time (think fatigue, anxiety, or depression) and are slightly less specific than emotions or feelings. Mood states affect how people monitor and evaluate their performance, the level of satisfaction they have with their accomplishments, if they remember their successes or failures more strongly, and whether they are overly harsh or critical with themselves when they experience failure (Bandura, 1991).
Educational psychologist Barry J. Zimmerman drew on Bandura’s (1991) work to create his theory of self-regulated learning, which focuses on the process learners use to develop “cognitive models and become experts in different tasks” (as cited in Panadero, 2017, p. 2). This book focuses on frameworks students can learn, beginning in kindergarten through teacher modeling and continuing through high school. With increased independence, they become expert learners. Coeditors Zimmerman and Dale H. Schunk (2011) define self-regulated learning as “the degree to which students are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active in their own learning process” (p. 4). For students to succeed in working independently, they must have strategies to monitor their thinking, motivation, and behavior.
Educational psychologists Philip H. Winne and Allyson Fiona Hadwin further developed the idea that students who are self-regulated learners monitor their learning using metacognitive strategies and academic standards to set goals (Panadero, 2017). In this book, I will explain how building a metacognitive process allows students to become more skilled at examining and overseeing their own learning. To be able to use a strategy on their own in the future, students must know what skill they are working on and metacognitively evaluate and reflect after learning a strategy to decide how they will modify that strategy and make it work for them in new learning contexts. For this reason, each strategy in this book contains prompts to guide students in planning, monitoring, and evaluating their learning and strategy use.
Professor of pedagogy and educationalist Monique Boekaerts also contributed to the development of self-regulated learning theory by outlining the interaction between motivation, emotions, and goal achievement. She found that goals guide behavior, but if a task triggers negative emotions and thoughts, it can cause students to change their focus from learning and mastering that task to protecting their well-being and shielding their ego (Panadero, 2017). The most recent model of self-regulated learning by cognitive and experimental psychologist Anastasia Efklides clarifies the relationship between metacognition, motivation, and emotions. Efklides suggests that students engage in tasks that are guided by their goals in a top-down manner as well as actions that are less conscious, bottom-up reactions to feedback or data from others, and the environment (as cited in Panadero, 2017). Because of the interaction between mindsets, motivation, task management, and achievement, this book also focuses on ways to guide students in managing their motivation, regulating emotions, and prioritizing and organizing tasks in order to become more successful at directing their efforts toward their goals.
Students do not naturally possess self-regulated learning strategies; instead, teachers must add them to each learning task to help students develop the processes necessary for independent learning. The process of setting goals, learning strategies, reflecting, and adapting based on feedback is what allows students to turn their cognitive abilities into actual skills they can apply in school and life (Dent & Koenka, 2016). Students who can analyze and evaluate the information they are learning in school are engaging in critical thinking with the goal of
creating new ideas and products. Students who can analyze and evaluate their own thinking process are engaging in metacognition with the goal of creating new strategies and habits. Educators must guide students to think critically about information and metacognitively about ideas and strategy use if we wish for them to become independent, self-regulated learners.
According to Zimmerman and Schunk (2011), self-regulated learners can do the following. • Set achievable school-related and personal goals. • Use strategies to confidently persist in their efforts toward a difficult task and to manage time, the environment, and their thinking. • Adapt based on their own monitoring or the feedback they receive. • Seek help when needed. • Have a sense of self-efficacy and a belief that their efforts will affect their actions. • Monitor their own progress toward reaching their goals. • Utilize creative problem solving (Rubenstein, Callan, & Ridgley, 2018). • Transfer what they have learned from one situation to another (Ferlazzo, 2017).
The earlier students learn to take control of their own learning, the better. Many parents, teachers, and students focus on learning strategies only when they face a major academic difficulty like the one Sam is facing in the opening scenario. From the beginning of their learning career, students receive multiple assignments with conflicting deadlines and varying difficulty levels without solid self-regulation techniques to help them take control of these situations. Eventually, most students encounter more challenging coursework and find what they have been doing to get by in previous years no longer works. Many teachers can think of a time in their academic career where they felt unprepared or stuck without the planning, study strategies, time-management abilities, thinking skills, emotional regulation, or motivation they need to succeed. It can be difficult to introduce study and thinking skills later in a student’s academic career for several reasons. Studying is already frustrating to students. Secondary-level students develop habits for using what worked for them in the past. Even if these habits are not working for them now, students will still have a hard time breaking them.
Think about Sam. Although it is certainly possible for him to acquire different learning strategies now, it will require more effort and dedication than if he had learned organizational strategies when he was younger. Sam’s actions, attitude, and level of persistence will affect the outcome. The instructor’s feedback and strategies will also impact how quickly Sam can adapt. Studies prove that breaking a habit and forming a new one can take, on average, around sixty-six days (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, 2010). It can be difficult to change ineffective learning habits or habitual ways of thinking.
With struggling students like Sam, the focus often shifts entirely to completing assignments. This is understandable because it is hard for students to learn when they are not engaged. However, completing a pile of work will not connect students to school or cause them to learn. The teacher’s job goes beyond helping students complete their assignments. If teachers focus only on students finishing work, the students will just get stuck again and become less motivated when the teacher assigns more work. Instead, teachers must teach students strategies that allow them to acquire, organize, and process information on their own.
I wrote this book because I needed a resource to use with my students that made the application of research-based self-regulation strategies in the classroom possible. Educational reformer John Dewey points out a gap between theory and practice and the need to link what teachers are doing in the classroom with what research deems most effective (Korthagen, 2017). For research to work in classrooms, it must be valuable and useful to teachers (Korthagen, 2017). I hope you find this book personally useful to reflect on your own strategy use and learning process. This experience will allow you to inspire your students to become more engaged, empowered, and effective learners.
About This Book
The aim of this book is to give teachers tools they can use to help their students become more proficient learners. Traditionally, self-regulated learning is made up of three main areas: (1) metacognition, (2) motivation, and (3) cognitive strategies (Akamatsu, Nakaya, & Koizumi, 2019). Considerable research in this field focuses on behavioral and cognitive-behavioral processes, especially as they relate to impulsivity, effortful control, anxiety, procrastination, and attention (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Research also suggests that emotions, motivation, cognition, metacognition, and behavior all affect self-regulated learning (Lawson, Vosniadou, Van Deur, Wyra, & Jeffries, 2019). The resources in this book support the use of executive-function and emotional-regulation skills. The mindsets and motivations, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts of learners all contribute to their ability to use metacognition to self-regulate (Beishuizen & Steffens, 2011). These components—metacognition, mindsets and motivation, emotional regulation (which I refer to as hot executive functioning), time management and planning (I term cool executive functioning), and thinking skills are the focus of this book (see figure I.1).
Learning strategies for:
Mindsets and motivation
“Hot” and “cool” executive functioning
Thinking skills for remembering, creative thinking, and critical analysis A metacognitivethought process
A metacognitivethought process
A metacognitivethought process Planning
Evaluating Monitoring
Self-Regulated Learning
FIGURE I.1: Components of self-regulated learning.
The following sections detail what you can expect from each of this book’s chapters and how you can put this knowledge to use.
Chapter Overview
Many books that teach students how to learn using self-regulated learning strategies address only the needs of college students. Although some of the information in these books is helpful, it would take grades K–12 teachers too much time to read the books, choose strategies, and then create lesson plans that also work for their students. This book includes reproducible student activities alongside strategies that make it quick and easy to put what teachers learn to immediate use in the classroom. Each strategy and activity is designed for the teacher to implement across multiple subject areas and grade levels. My hope is that integrating these self-regulated learning strategies right into your year’s lesson plan will not take too much work.
Chapter 1 takes a close look at metacognition. This will be the foundation for most of the work in this book. A metacognitive-thought process allows students to effectively apply all other strategies in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2 introduces strategies teachers can use to help increase student motivation. Learning and achievement both rely on students’ ability to set goals and align their behavior so they can work toward those goals. Motivation is the spark that gets students moving in the direction of accomplishing a goal and keeps them going over time and in adverse conditions.
Chapter 3 approaches executive-function strategies for emotional regulation and explores the interaction between emotional regulation, motivation, and the ability to retain learned information. Emotional-response regulation allows for increased overall executive function.
Chapter 4 looks at executive-function strategies for time management, organization, focus, selecting priorities, and planning. These skills play an important role in students’ ability to engage in metacognition and exercise control over their own learning process. I introduce strategies in chapters 3 and 4 that allow teachers to present students with ways to sustain or switch attention. These skills give students the ability to choose among competing interests so they can focus their attention on a specific activity to work toward meeting goals.
Chapter 5 presents cognitive strategies teachers can use to help students remember, understand, and apply the information they learn in their classes, so students are not just retaining facts but also making learning personally relevant and meaningful.
Chapter 6 explores techniques to lead students toward deeper critical and creative thinking. Students will learn strategies to analyze and evaluate their thought process and the information they receive so that they can become more self-directed, independent learners.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for K–12 educators hoping to instill lifelong self-reliance in students. If K–12 educators make it a goal to teach students to self-regulate from the time they enter school, then they can help develop learners who can plan, implement strategies, monitor their own performance, assess their own outcomes, and eventually learn to create not only new ideas and products but new strategies and habits. As they progress from grade to grade and course to course, students will be ready for any academic task teachers place in front of them. For self-regulated learning strategies to feel authentic and useful, they need to be taught right along with academic content in each subject area. Although it is possible to have the school
