Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving

by Janice Florent

Students who succeed academically often rely on being able to think effectively and independently in order to take charge of their learning. They are thinking about their own thinking; mastered the knowledge about their own learning. This is referred to as metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to think about your thoughts with the aim of improving learning.

Students who do not learn how to "manage" themselves well as they proceed through school experience more setbacks, become discouraged and disengaged from learning, and tend to have lower academic performance.

In an Edutopia article, Dr. Donna Wilson, provided the following steps for helping students learn how to be more metacognitive:

1. Explicitly teach students about this essential learning skill by defining the term metacognition.
2. Ask students to describe the benefits and supply examples of driving their brains well.
3. Whenever possible, let students choose what they want to read and topics they want to learn more about.
4. Look for opportunities to discuss and apply metacognition in a variety of lessons so that students can transfer it for the most benefit.
5. Model metacognition by talking through problems.

If this has piqued your interest, read the Edutopia article, Metacognition: The Gift That Keeps Giving.

Additionally, incorporating metacognitive strategies into your Blackboard course design can help to create autonomous and self-starting learners, who are responsible for their own learning and are willing to share the synthesized version of their knowledge with peers. For more information read my Metacognition for Effective Online Learning blog post.

Image Credit: Image by 139904 from Pixabay