Metacognition
Teaching Them How to Fish: Metacognitive Awareness and Reflective Writing in TA Training
By Albert Rouzie, English
- View as pdf
- View as Powerpoint
You Can Give Them Fish — Or You Can Teach Them How To Fish
(And Give Them Equipment To Do It)
What?s the Big Deal about Meta-Cognition?
First, Some Terms
- Flavell?s (1979) definition of metacognition: ?the ability to reflect upon one?s knowledge and control one?s thinking? (96).
- Consists of both knowledge of and regulation of cognition
- Knowledge of cognition includes awareness of one?s own cognition, the cognitive strategies available, and how/when to use these strategies.
- Regulation of cognition includes activating cognitive strategies and resources to achieve a goal, monitoring comprehension and progress towards this goal, and evaluating the results of the effort that has been made.
More Better Meta
From Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing
- Metacognition ? the ability to reflect on one?s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes and systems used to structure knowledge.
- Metacognition promotes learning by enabling students to effectively assess their understanding of a subject and encouraging them to apply a more sophisticated learning approach.
Metacognition Is Fostered When Writers (Instructors) Are Encouraged To
- Connect choices they have made in texts [class plans] to audiences and purposes for which texts [classwork] are intended.
- Use what they learn from reflections on one writing project [class session] to improve writing [teaching] on subsequent projects [sessions].
- Reflect on how different writing tasks and elements of the writing [pedagogical] process contribute to their development as a writer [teacher].
Can Result In
- Metacognitive awareness: the ability to know when and how cognitive strategies should be applied (Schraw and Moshman, 1995)
- Metacognitive Regulation: ?learners use of metacognitive awareness to monitor and control their own thinking and learning? (Flavell, 97).
Tacit Knowledge
- Polanyi: tacit knowledge is ?gained from experience with objects, experience with propositions about them, and rumination? (Stake, 20).
- Tacit knowledge is remembered ?without that which is remembered through words, symbols, or other rhetorical forms? (20).
- Permits us to know ourselves. Kind of raw material for building new meanings and understandings.
- My thought: to be a useful element of metacognition, tacit knowledge needs to be articulated.
- Next: