Reflctions from readings (June 2 2009)

Designing Metacognition Activities

Metacognition is the mental process of regulating and monitoring cognition. Many research show that students do better job when students participate in metacognitive activities such as self-assessment and monitoring. But, generally students do not have any chances to engage in metacognitive activities. So, this article tries to suggest an outline to design metacognitive activities. The framework this article proposes is a balanced metacognitive training involving both strategy training and creation of social environment.

I was interested in when I read prompting of strategy training. Some researchers such as Berardi-Coletta et all (1995) and King (1992) used prompt cards to help students produce metacognitive questions. From my experience, this is a very powerful tool to help students more deeply think about their work. I often go to a WLRC (Weingarten Learning Resources Center) to revise my writing (Especially, grammatical error correction). According to Writing Center’s policy, instructors at WLRC do not provide any idea about contents of students’ work. Instead, the instructors stimulate students’ self-explanation for metacognition through prompting. When the instructors want to encourage students to produce more ideas, they ask students prompt questions; “What is another example of this phenomenon?”; “Why do you say so?”; “How does A effects B?” Sometimes, I do not produce new ideas despite of their prompting question. But, in many cases, the prompting question encourage me to generate some ideas that I didn’t think of before. So, I believe that the using prompt cards or questions should be considered when designing metacognitive activities.