How well do you understand metacognition? Enough to put your skills to the test with an unseen poem about a mythical beast? That’s the spirit! In this blog, Dr Liz Taylor looks at using metacognition to boost student achievement.
First, let’s remind ourselves about what metacognition is.
Metacognition describes the process involved when learners plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours. This happens in three phases:
- Plan – before approaching an activity – ‘what am I going to do?’
- Monitor – during an activity – ‘how am I doing?’
- Evaluate – after finishing – ‘how did I do?’
The key to this process is the cyclical nature – learning about how to approach new tasks from past experiences.
Teachers tend to be excellent at metacognition, even if they’re not aware of it. Let’s have a look at an activity and see how you would approach it.
Metacognition: a task
Here is an extract from a poem published 150 years ago. Read the extract and write a one-sentence summary. How will you approach the task? What strategies will you use?
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
This, of course, is part of the brilliant nonsense poem, ‘Jabberwocky’, by Lewis Carrol. But how did you tackle the task?
My one sentence summary is simply: son goes to a strange place to hunt a dangerous monster.
How did you plan what you were going to write about the poem? Did this change when you saw the language? Have you come across poetry like this before? How effective do you think your summary was? How motivated were you to complete the task?
These are just some questions that you probably asked yourself as you completed the above. So how do you teach students to go through this same process?
First, let’s look at why metacognition is important.
How can metacognition boost student achievement?
Evidence shows teaching metacognitive strategies can substantially improve student learning. Hattie (2009) measured the average effect size of metacognitive strategies at 0.69.
If you are unfamiliar with effect size, it means how likely a strategy will have an effect on achievement over time if done well. 0.4 is the impact you’d expect from normal teaching, and so 0.69 is quite an improvement.
In addition, the Education Endowment Foundation found that metacognitive approaches had a high impact, with students making an average of 7 months’ additional progress of where the teacher expected them to be.
This does not just apply to secondary students either.
“A common misconception is that metacognition is only developed effectively in mature young adults and not young children. We know from research, however, that children as young as three have been able to engage in a wide range of metacognitive and self-regulatory behaviours, such as setting themselves goals and checking their understanding.”
EEF 2019 Metacognition and self-regulated learning. P.10
Strategies
Modelling
Introduce metacognition to your students bit by bit and model the types of behaviour you want to see from them. Essentially, start thinking aloud! When approaching an activity or asked a question, say things like, ‘let me think about it, how did I do this last time? Was it effective? Yes, I think I’ll try that again.’
This helps students to access the thinking and language of an expert learner (as we found out earlier in the blog, teachers are experts at metacognition!) and lets them in on their learning process.
Metacognitive talk
In class or online, get students used to talking about their thought process. This could look like:
Planning – I could use… How will I…? I will try…
Monitoring – Do I understand? That’s not working. I could try…
Evaluation – How well…? Did I achieve the aim? What could I improve?
When creating worksheets, could you introduce a question at the top that gets students to think back to a previous lesson? For example, ‘Before you start this worksheet, you’ve done long division before, can you remember the two strategies… which is going to work this time?’
KWL charts
At the start of the lesson, ask learners to write down what they already know and what they would like to know about the subject you’ll be studying. After the lesson, ask them to think about what they have learned.
This works well if you lay out the KWL chart on the wall or board and ask students to use sticky notes – that way, they can move things between columns.
The great thing about KWL charts is that, as well as metacognition, they actually serve active learning and assessment for learning (AfL) purposes too.
AfL – feedback to teacher so that they can adjust the learning process appropriately.
Active learning – students actively involved in their learning. They’re accessing and building on prior learning to consider what they have learnt and what they would like to learn.
Metacognition – students planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning.
Cognitive strategies
Cognitive strategies are processes we use to solve a learning challenge in any subject. You may recognise some of the examples in this list:
- Card sorts (for example, diamond 9)
- Odd one out
- Values line
- Silent debate
- Thinking hats
- See-think-wonder
You can make cognitive strategies metacognitive very easily; it’s just a matter of how well we debrief students. Focus on how we learned those things – which strategy did we use? Did it work? Ask questions that encourage planning, monitoring and evaluating. Plan these before the lesson. To help, we’ve included suggestions for each lesson in the Primary and Lower Secondary teacher’s resources.
Reflection
Metacognition is definitely one of those terms that sounds more confusing than it actually is. In that way, you could look at it like the nonsense poem! On the surface, it may look confusing, but when you dig a little deeper, you realise you understand a lot more than perhaps you thought you did.
If you are a primary or lower secondary teacher looking for more help with metacognition, don’t forget that our resources help you bring these techniques into your lessons. Go to our website to look inside the books and find out more.
