1. Metacognition: Supporting a Thinking Classroom
Connie Wehmeyer, Ph.D.

2. The term "metacognition" is most often associated with John Flavell, (1979). According to Flavell (1979, 1987), metacognition consists of both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences or regulation. Metacognitive knowledge refers to acquired knowledge about cognitive processes, knowledge that can be used to control cognitive processes. Flavell further divides metacognitive knowledge into three categories: knowledge of person variables, task variables and strategy variables

3. 24
+ 43
Cognition- knowledge or skill to carry out a task.

4. Objectives:
1. What is metacognition? 2. How do I teach my students about metacognition? 3. What metacognitive strategies should I use?

5. Student Metacognitive Strategies
Which statement best describes you? Assess yourself.
I am a Novice
I am just starting to learn this and I don’t really understand it yet.
I am an Apprentice
I am starting to get it, but I still need someone to coach me through it.
I am a Practitioner
I can mostly do it myself, but I sometime mess up or get stuck.
I am an Expert
I understand it well and I could thoroughly teach it to someone else.

6. Learners can think before they enter a classroom
Learners can think before they enter a classroom. Educator’s role is to teach them to think in different ways and to think more effectively.

7. Under NCLB
Teachers and students approached content, not as a mode of thinking, not as a system for thought, or even as a system of thought, but rather as a sequence of stuff to be routinely "covered" and committed to memory.
Consequences: no basis for intellectual growth, no deep structures of knowledge formed, no basis for long term grasp and control.

8. Common Core Standards
The Common Core Standards require students to think and communicate their thinking in order to demonstrate understanding of complex text, and conceptual mathematics.

9. Why: Confronted with Real World Problems

10. So, what can teachers do to support student thinking?
Problem Solvers
Critical Thinkers
Precise
Persevere
Think with others
Utilize limited resources

12. Lenoir County Public Schools
4/15/2017
Embed within our
Instructional Model?
Target
Data Analysis
Teach all students
Metacognitive Strategies
Collaboration
Management
Learning Strategies
Engaging
Thinking For All
Students
4/15/2017
Tezella G. Cline, 2006
Professional Development

13. What is Metacognition?
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14. “thinking about your thinking”
What is Metacognition?
“thinking about your thinking”
Our ability to know what we know and what we do not know; how I think; and what helps me learn.
Person variables: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information.
Task variables: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task.
Strategy variables: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task;
For example: “I know that I (person variable) have difficulty with word problems (task variable), so I will answer the computational problems first and save the word problems for last (strategy variable).”
Knowledge about one's own cognitive system; essential skill for learning to learn
The term "metacognition" is most often associated with John Flavell, (1979).
According to Flavell (1979, 1987), metacognition consists of both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences or regulation. Metacognitive knowledge refers to acquired knowledge about cognitive processes, knowledge that can be used to control cognitive processes.
Flavell further divides metacognitive knowledge into three categories: knowledge of person variables, task variables and strategy variables
For example, knowledge that it will take more time to read, comprehend, and remember a technical article than it will a similar-length passage from a novel. for example, using a glossary to look up unfamiliar words, or recognizing that sometimes one has to reread a paragraph several times before it makes sense

15. “how to regulate your thinking”
What is Metacognition?
“how to regulate your thinking”
What I do to help me think and learn:
plan a strategy for producing what information is needed
monitor the steps and strategies during the action of problem solving; and
reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking.
(Dirkes,1985)
Knowledge about one's own cognitive system; essential skill for learning to learn

16. Who practices Metacognition?
Plan the lesson (content, instructional strategy, checking for understanding) to keep you on track.
Monitoring the plan over a period of time –to make adjustments.
Reflect back to make judgments
Evaluate the plan upon its
completion to determine
future changes.

17. Who else?

18. Not everyone John Flavell, 1979
50% to 66% of the world’s population engage in metacognition
John Flavell, 1979
Some children have no ideas of what they should do when they confront a problem and are often unable to explain their strategies of decision making
Sternberg and Wagner, 1982

19. The result of not thinking before we attempt to solve real world problems

20. Not everyone Teacher asks “How did you solve that problem?
“ What strategies did you have in mind?
“Tell us what went on in your head to come up with that conclusion?
“What part do you not understand?
Student response “I don’t know, I just did it.”

21. “ Students without metacognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction or opportunity to review their progress, accomplishments, and future directions.”
O’Mally, Chamot, Stewner-Mazanaares, Russo, & Kupper, 1985, p.56

22. Benefits to Students with Learning Disabilities
When metacognitive strategies are explicitly taught they can support students information retrieval. (Lenz, Ellis, & Scanlon, 1996).
Moreover, students possess a powerful learning tool that builds learning independence. Confronted with a problem-solving situation, students can implement metacognitive strategies when they have difficulty remembering how to solve a particular problem.
As students learn, practice, and independently use metacognitive strategies, these strategies often become integrated into these students’ learning repertoires.
(Mercer & Mercer, 1993
For many students who have learning problems, their inability to efficiently retrieve information previously stored in memory negatively impacts their ability to accurately express what they know.

23. Reading Comprehension and Metacognition
Awareness and monitoring
are in itself what it means to be metacognitive during the process of reading.

25. Reading Task
Reading a passage and our minds wander from the pages. We see the words but no meaning is being produced. Suddenly we realize that we are not concentrating and that we've lost contact with the meaning of the text. How do we recover? The inner awareness and the strategy of recovery are components of metacognition. What do you do? Who taught you to do those things?

26. Capacities of a Literate Individual
They demonstrate independence.
They build strong content knowledge.
They respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.
They comprehend as well as critique.
They value evidence.
They use technology and digital media strategically and capably.
They come to understand other perspectives and cultures.
Refer to your list

27. The National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000),
Effectiveness of systematic direct instruction of multiple metacognitive strategies designed to assist students in comprehending of expository text and vocabulary.
Binomial Effect Size Display
40% difference in gains in vocabulary between the two groups and a 20% difference in gains in reading comprehension in just five weeks.
This research project took place in six third-grade classrooms in two urban elementary schools in the southwest United States that were deemed demographically and academically equal by the school district's research department. One school was selected as the intervention school and the other school was the comparison school. The students in both schools were pretested before the five-week study and posttested at the end of the study.
the effect size of .40. Anything above such an effect size has more of an impact than just a typical year of academic experience and student growth. And an effect size of 1.0 or better is equivalent to advancing the student’s achievement level by approximately a full grade.

28. Visible Learning For Teaching
John Hattie rank orders factors that have the greatest effect size in student achievement. Meta-cognitive strategies taught and used have an effect size of .69
the effect size of .40
the effect size of .40. Anything above such an effect size has more of an impact than just a typical year of academic experience and student growth. And an effect size of 1.0 or better is equivalent to advancing the student’s achievement level by approximately a full grade.

29. How do we teach students to use metacognition
How do we teach students to use metacognition? Teach the Metacognitive Process:
Plan for thinking
Clear about the task
Determine strategies: graphic organizer, take notes, draw a picture or diagram, identify what you already know
Set goals
Determine a sequence
Set deadlines
Identify possible distract actions
Determine how to overcome distractions

30. Metacognitive Process:
Monitor and adjust plan: Am I
making progress on the task
thinking about the learning and identify the problem
comprehending what I read or is said and identify the problem if you are not
making adjusts to help me

31. Metacognitive Process:
Self Reflect and Evaluate : How well did I
accomplish my task
manage my time
stay on task
use strategies to help me

32. Behaviors and Disposition of Successful Students:
Using Metacognitive Strategies
Evaluating work - recognizing strengths and weaknesses of their work helps them to improve
Self-assessing - students think about how well they did learning this particular lesson
Self-questioning - students ask themselves questions to deepen their understanding during a lesson
Selecting strategies - students determine which strategies would be most appropriate for a task
Selective thinking - students follow only one determined line of thinking to solve a problem
Critiquing - students provide constructive feedback to classmates
Revising - students improve their own work after receiving the constructive feedback
By showing them how to think about their thinking, teachers change the dialogue in students' heads into a constructive, empowered and problem-solvinbased on the work of Kim Austin, Melissa Cheung, Linda Darling-Hammond and Daisy Martin: g mindset, and this is reflected in their increased success at school.

33. College and Career Anchor Standard for Reading 1
Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

34. Process Steps support
Metacognition

38. For teachers to help students become self-regulated learners teachers need to make the students aware of:
What the student knows about the subject (use KWL)
What is the goal of the lesson or project
What are the resources available to the student
When is the work to be complete What is the student’s anxiety level (how does the student feel about learning or doing this assignment or taking this test)
Monitor
Teacher needs to help monitor progress and then to help the students reflect on the assignment
What is working – are the students on task
Change strategies if needed – give students different strategies if students experiencing difficulty with task
Self test on what is being learned – teacher needs to encourage students to self test their knowledge

39. Preparing for an exam

41. Post- Exam
Reflection
of Exam
Preparation

42. Direct Instruction of Strategies
Many researchers have tried to foster better metacognition and comprehension through direct instruction of strategies (Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991).
What can teachers do?

44. Metacognitive strategies
Teacher action that prepares students for learning or elaboration through self-reflection regarding what was learned.
Teacher modeling of problem solving steps
Think-pair-share
Goal setting
Journal Writing
Activation of Prior Knowledge
Cues and Questions
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34,
Teacher Strategies

45. Metacognitive Strategies
Brainstorming
Webbing
Task-specific graphic organizers
Think Aloud Problem Solving-- Self- questioning
Debate
Role Play
Story map
Story retelling
Story frame
Semantic mapping

46. Graphic Organizers K W L
A graphic organizer for students to use as they are doing a project (KWL) K
What I Know W
What I Want to Learn L
What I Have Learned

47. Student Metacognitive Strategies
Which statement best describes you? Assess yourself.
I am a Novice
I am just starting to learn this and I don’t really understand it yet.
I am an Apprentice
I am starting to get it, but I still need someone to coach me through it.
I am a Practitioner
I can mostly do it myself, but I sometime mess up or get stuck.
I am an Expert
I understand it well and I could thoroughly teach it to someone else.

48. Thinking Maps

49. Tree Map

52. Think A loud
One of the most effective way to teach metacognitive strategies is the think-aloud.
This involves teacher talking the class through his/her thinking as he/she tackles a task, like a piece of text with new vocabulary or a new math concept.

53. Modeling Metacognition with Students
Predict
What do the pictures tell me about what I will read?
What do the heading tell me about what I will read?
What do I predict is the author’s purpose?
Summarize
So far, I know this about what I read:
I think I will read more about __________ as I continue to read.
I think what might happen next in this text is ….
Connect
Does this remind me of something I already know?
How does this fit into what I already read so far?

54. Modeling Metacognition with Students
Clarify
I didn’t understand …. , so I reread, figured it out, and read on and now I know what it means /how it connects.
Visualize
The main thing I see on the page is ….
I can draw or represent this concept in another way that makes sense to me.

55. Modeling Metacognition with Students
 Question
I am wondering about
I need someone to help me understand…
Something I will ask my teacher or another student to clarify is….
Evaluate
As a result of reading, I know these three things about what I read.
As a result of taking notes, I can explain these concepts.

56. THINK ALOUD PROBLEM SOLVING
Pose challenging problems then: Invite students to describe their plans and strategies for solving the problem. Share their thinking as they are implementing their plan. Reflect on/evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy.

57. Foods
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58. Cooperative Learning
Cooperative leaning is an effective method for metacognitive exchanges as students discuss and interact in a shared reading environment. It provides opportunities to reduce anxiety, and provide positive support among peers. (Paris et al., 1990; 1991).

59. Teacher Questioning: prompt students to think about their task and how they're doing
1. Describe what kind of thinking you did
2. Describe how you did your thinking
3. Evaluate your thinking
4. Check for accuracy
5. Data Gathering Questions
6. Reflective and Reasoning Questions
adapted from Schwartz & Parks (1994)
Posting a list of metacognitive questions on the wall can help to remind children of the sorts of questions they can ask themselves, for example questions that assess awareness of learning (What have you learnt? What have you found out? What did you find hard? What did you do well? What do you need to learn/do next?), assessing attitudes and feelings (What do you like doing/learning? What do you feel good/not good about ...? What do you feel proud of?) and in setting targets (What do you need to do better? What would help you? What are your targets?)

60. Metacognitive Thinking Questions
Teacher Response
"Describe the steps you took to arrive at that answer.”
"What goes on in your head when you compare?“
"Describe your plan of action."
Student Statement
The answer is 36 dollars, 7 cents
I am comparing…
I am ready to begin writing

63. Evaluate the Curriculum: What kinds of thinking did your curriculum unit require?
How did you encourage your students’ thinking about their thinking?
Did you include ways for students to regulate and monitor their own learning in your plans? For example, were students asked to articulate their learning process and what they had learned?
Did students share strategies and solutions with each other?
Did students have opportunities for revision and for self- or peer assessment?
What aspects of the unfolding events increased or decreased the opportunity for students to reflect on and regulate their learning in this learning event?
How do you think this may have influenced what occurred?