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Mauritius: Developing learners' metacognitive skills
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L'Express (Port Louis)
18 September 2007
Posted to the web 18 September 2007
Shardha Sandapen
Port Louis
The term metacognition means knowledge about one's own learning or knowing how to learn. Thinking skills and study skills are both examples of metacognitive skills. Learners can be taught strategies to assess their own understanding, figuring out how much time they will need to study something, and choosing an effective plan of attack to study or solve a problem.
While most learners gradually develop adequate metacognitive skills, others do not. Teaching metacognitive strategies to them can lead to a marked improvement in their achievement. Students can learn to think about their own thinking process and apply specific learning strategies to think themselves through difficult tasks.
For example, self-questioning strategies are particularly effective. This involves teaching students to look for common elements in a given type of task and to ask themselves questions about these elements. Hence, in Literature classes, we can teach our learners to look for characters, setting, problems and problem solutions, starting with specific questions and then letting students find these critical elements on their own. Students also comprehend better when they are taught to ask themselves the Wh questions (who, what, when, where and how) as they read through a text.
The simple act of rereading an extract or paragraph that we have not been able to understand is an example of a metacognitive skill. As we read through a text, information is constantly entering our minds through our senses. Similar to a computer, the mind processes this information and (more effective than the computer) assesses our understanding of it. Thus, when we come across an extract or paragraph that we do not understand at the first reading, our brain activates its metacognitive engine, almost automatically. This is what makes us reread the extract or paragraph more slowly or look for other clues, such as pictures, metaphors, similes or simply refer to glossary terms to improve our understanding.
Metacognition also enables learners to develop effective study strategies and ever since Aristotle, philosophers and educators have been using study strategies to improve learning. But how do students learn? How do we learn? How do you read this article or any other piece of writing? Are you underlining or highlighting key sentences? Are you taking notes or summarising? Are you discussing the main ideas with a friend or mate? Or while reading a book are you putting the book right under your pillow at night and hoping the information will somehow seep into your mind?
The following is a list of the most common study strategies that we can use and teach our students to improve learning:
â-è Note-taking is an effective strategy, as it requires the mental processing of main ideas. It requires critical thinking and decision-making about what information to note down and what to discard. This mental processing of information is more effective than simply writing down what we read and it prevents our note-taking from being inconsistent. One apparently effective means of increasing the value of learners' note-taking is for the teacher to provide skeletal notes before an explanation or reading, giving her or his learners categories to direct their own note-taking. Several studies have revealed that this practice combined with learners' note-taking and review, enhances learning.
â-è Underlining or highlighting is perhaps the most common study strategy. Yet despite the widespread use of this method, research on underlining has yielded few benefits. The problem is that most learners fail to make decisions about what material is most critical or simply underline too much. A simple way of overcoming this problem is to ask learners to underline the one sentence in each paragraph that is most important. Thus, they retain more since they must decide which is the most important sentence and this involves a higher level of mental processing.
â-è Summarising involves writing brief statements that represent the main idea of the information read. The effectiveness of this strategy depends on how it is used. One effective way is to have students write one-sentence summaries after reading each paragraph. Another is to have students prepare summaries intended to help others learn the material, partly because this activity forces the summariser to be brief and seriously consider what is important and what is not.
â-è Outlining and mapping strategies require learners to represent the material studied in skeletal form. These strategies include outlining, networking and mapping. Outlining presents the main points of the material to be learned in a hierarchical format, with each detail organised under a higher-level category. In networking and mapping, learners identify main ideas and diagram connections between them.
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Learners have been using these and many other strategies since the invention of reading and metacognition is asking ourself which stategy/ strategies will contribute most effectively to our learning.
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