e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Metacognition (Admin Update 8)
Metacognition—for example, involving extensive giving and receiving of feedback, and recruiting students as self- and peer- assessors. This places them in the position of having to think metacognitively about the nature of the task, and the cognitive processes of the discipline. It is vital that learners move from empirical and experiential understandings to pattern recognition and theory making—in this respect, metacognition is key.
-
Video 6a: Why Metacognition Matters
-
Video 6b: Metacognition in e-Learning Ecologies
-
Metacognition in Scholar
All Levels of Participation: Make a comment below this update about the ways in which educational technologies can facilitate metacognition. Respond to others' comments with @name.
Additional Introductory and Advanced Participation: Make an update introducing a concept related to metacognition on the community page (not your personal page - because only peers will see that!). Define the concept and provide at least one example of the concept in practice. Be sure to add links or other references, and images or other media to illustrate your point. If possible, select a concept that nobody has addressed yet so we get a well-balanced view of metacognition. Also, comment on at least three or four updates by other participants. Metacogniton concepts might include:
-
Self-regulated learning
- Mnemonic work (contrasted with memory work)
- Epistemology in learning
- Learner engagement
- Intrinsic motivation
- Pattern recognition
- Conceptual learning
- Theorizing
- Critical analysis
- Concept mapping
-
Suggest a concept in need of definition!
I think that metacognition is an essential aspect of learning, but one that is hard to really get. In my personal experience, I feel that metacognition has played an important and conscious role in my learning process only after I started doing and publishing research. A critical change was to deeply understand how the type of knowledge that is in textbooks is being produced, since I was myself contributing to producing it. This established a continuity between what I may call personal metacognition, the reflection on my personal learning process, and external metacognition, the understanding of how knowledge is produced.
Based on this personal experience, I am convinced that metacognition is intimately related to learning by doing and, more specifically, to producing new knowledge and artifacts that can be used by others to learn. Internet definitively provides a space for such learning, through writing blog posts, contributing to wikis or code repositories, etc. I suspect that a critical aspect is to produce artifacts that can be as useful to others as those that we use ourselves to learn. This highlights the importance of eventually producing public artifacts, that exist beyond the physical or temporal space of the classroom, in order to increase the use of metacognition in our learning process.
After watching video 1, in which Dr. Kalantzis explains the concept of metacognition as reflection on what we're doing, on the concepts we're developing and the way we're applying any particular kind of knowledge, i.e. thinking about thinking, it was clear the importance of metacognition for learning, something that I agree with. On the other hand, I was not sure I quite agreed on the fact that e-learning environments did make such a difference in terms of metacognition as compared to schooling. I agreed it did if compared to traditional schooling, but other forms of education might as well provide students with more chances to develop metacognition. The same seems to apply to e-learning environments as well. Some might enhance the development of metacognition while others may not. In other words, it seems to me it is more connected to pedagogies than to being in e-learning environments or not. However, I do agree with Dr. Cope that e-learning environments favour the development of metacognition due to its often present dialogical characteristic. Consequently, in e-learning environments, in which metacognition becomes more commonly a part of educational practices, its development becomes not only more practical, more possible, but also more likely to provide chances for critique to take place.
I'd like to open a dialogue about the concept of epistemology in learning ESP (English for Specific Purposes) in Higher Education.
I have been teaching different ESP courses at my institution and the way students perform linguistic and communicative abilities has been improved. I have set a blended learning environment in which different tasks are designed in order to respond to the performace of the 5 core and specific competences of the course. Some of those competences have to do with content and form in the foreign language (cognition), but some other competences have to do with independent learning skills, collaborative skills or digital abilities (here, metacognition may be happening, especially when collaborating with others). There is a communicative, group-work task which allows students to set a problem in their specific area of study (English for Telecommunications Engineering, for example), and to find a solution using the language and establishing that transition between the general to the specific (Cope and Kalantzis). In order to present this work, they video record a roleplay in the context of telecommunications engineering (a meeting at work, a discussion about a new product, a practical session on a new project, the creation of a new app). So they are using the English language, the expressions, the use of English, and they are discussing, they are definitely thinking about thinking, and being unique in the creation of this task.
This particular task implies communicative skills, collaborative skills, linguistic skills and ITC skills. I forgot to mention that the rubric of what they have to do to succeed and how they must present is also posted on the course platform since the task is set during the course.
I have recently published an article entitled, Knowledge Creation and Digital Collaboration in Higher Education if you are inrested in reading more on this case study. (https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=51224)
Also, there is a prezi presentation about Designing a learning environment using Collaboration and EFL. Although it is in Spanish, I hope I could share it here since it could be useful for some of you:
http://prezi.com/wifbu7hsnbei/diseno-de-ambiente-de-aprendizaje-ulpgc/
Finally, the following the pictures posted below illlusatrate how important the practical work is if general and specific competences are to be enhanced. So, the focus is once again, the learner.
http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/content/uploads/2010/11/Digital_and_Media_Literacy_A_Plan_of_Action_P15.jpg
https://images.morebooks.de/fullcover/2000x/9783848447305.jpg
Thanks and have a great day/night!
Outstanding contributions!! I couldn't agree more with Bridget McGraw and the use of rubrics to keep both the learner and the teacher focused on the actions of the course. I often post rubrics on the course platform for learner to check WHAT and HOW they are being assessed. Also, I'd like to thank Mark Smith for that outstanding acronym, DATA, that it helps the educational community to be focused on the competences to be achieved.
I have to admit that metacognition has become more important in my teaching plans since I try to highlight students' competences when doing a course. Thanks to the EHEA (European Higher Education Area), we are required to plan lessons, tasks and assessment criteria having in mind competences and abilities instead of just aims (which was our focal point in the past-cognition). Now, we want our students to demonstrate how they perform well this and that ability. Instead of the what, we want to see the how, which implies that we often have unique pieces of work that enhance a variety of competences (independent learning, collaborative learning, etc.) for learners to become good professionals. This has to do with the epistemology of learning (The study of how we do things) and that socratic dialogue between cognition and metacognition, mentioned by the professors of this MOOC on various ocassions.
Thanks for reading this and have a good day!
After grappling with the concept of metacognition for a bit, I found this useful definition in a paper by Udeani and Okafor (2012) according to which, 'metacognitive strategies which empower learners to take charge of their own learning in a meaningful fashion' (paraphrased). Their paper is about concept mapping as a metacognitive strategy. So what is concept mapping and how can it help?
They describe concept mapping as, 'two-dimensional hierarchical diagrams which illustrate the connectedness between and among individual concepts'. I guess, a bit like mind maps. I can see how this could help with metacognition as one of the things I have struggled with in my teaching is to persuade students to look beyond a given lecture or module and start linking concepts between modules and across lectures. For example, one lecture covers general behavioural models; another lecture covers a particular behavioural model the 'Health Belief Model' (HBM) in the context of a lecture on tobacco and public health; a third lecture covers obesity and talks about broad public health strategies which include behavioural strategies. If I set an exam question such as 'Explain how behavioural theories could be used to design a public health intervention to address obesity at a population level', most students do not even think of discussing the HBM in the answer as it was not covered in the lecture on obesity. Perhaps one way to encourage this linking across concepts would be to get students to start by drawing circles representing different concepts that have been covered in then module and then connect them together.