Have you noticed that many students do not know how to study? Some students have mastered the art to study, while others procrastinate until the night before the exam. Some students ran out of time when reviewing the material before the exam, because they were not sure how much time they needed to study. You probably have in your classroom students that do a combination of different levels of preparation. Judging by the percentage of students that do not perform well, maybe this is a topic that is worth reflecting on.
Something that will help your ineffective students is to give them strategies to become better students. If you dedicate some time to talk with your students about metacognition or the knowledge of how to learn you will help all your students, even the ones that are doing well. The more your students know about metacognition the better they will do when learning.
Metacognition is more than thinking about your own thinking, because it involves being consciously aware of your learning process, including your strengths and weaknesses around learning. Don’t assume your students know the obvious strategies to master the content you are teaching them, such as choosing the right place to study. Share with your students discipline-specific strategies. For example, Tanner (2012) published metacognitive strategies relevant to Biology courses; maybe some of these can be adapted to other courses.
There are three stages to develop metacognition:
- Planning: What do I need to learn? How am I going to learn it? How much time will I need? What is my learning goal? What do I already know about this topic?
- Monitoring: Do I understand what I am doing? What strategies will support my learning? What materials do I need to learn this material? Should I change my plan?
- Evaluating: How well did I achieve my learning goal? What material did I master? What material did I not understand? What do I do differently next time?
Is it possible to teach your students how to learn challenging subject matter?
Saundra McGuire has dedicated years to mentoring students who were failing in her chemistry class and she has documented cases of students going from Cs or Ds to As. She has been invited to many higher education institutions to talk about the success she had teaching students how to study, including UM Ann Arbor. Here is a video of her presentation to teach metacognition to students focusing on the habits that allow grasping concepts or processes. This short video is a conversation about learning and how to acquire higher mastery levels of learning.
Consider dedicating one or two class periods to teach your students metacognitive skills or maybe you could dedicate a few minutes every week to teach your students cognitively active study behaviors. You can share with your students Bloom’s taxonomy which is a framework that describes 6 categories for learning organized hierarchically. At the bottom you can see the categories for lower order thinking and at the top the categories for higher order thinking. This framework is used to write learning objectives, but is beneficial to guide learning not only teaching.
The more students engage in challenging work the more they should reflect on their own learning processes. Students should learn to check their progress to see if their plan worked. Self-evaluation is a big part of developing metacognitive skills. Incorporate reflection into your more difficult assignments or big projects and consider giving students points for completing reflections. Give your students some reflection questions to guide them until reflection becomes something they are used to doing after every assignment or exam. These questions will make your students more aware of how effective or ineffective they are when they study. Usually, students that are not expert learners are not particularly good at evaluating themselves; that’s why there should be enough assessments in your class with feedback. Once students recognize they are ineffective they need to identify what they can do to improve.
Furthermore, expert learners are highly skilled individuals that possess self-regulation and reflection strategies; they are able to set their own learning goals and achieve them. When they are learning a new topic, they approach it by being aware of their metacognitive skills. They are good at evaluating themselves starting with identifying gaps in their prior knowledge relevant to the new topic they are learning. Wouldn’t it be great if all your students could acquire these strategies?
Encouraging students to use metacognition skills in your classroom
There are some activities that instructors can do in their classroom for students to become more aware of their metacognitive skills. These activities encourage students to use metacognition and support them to become self-regulated learners.
Here are some activities you can do in your classroom that you can grade pass/fail:
- Reflection questions: You could incorporate reflection questions into assignments to increase students’ awareness of their learning process. For example: How do I recognize important information about this topic?
- Reflection Journals: students could write regular journal entries to describe their learning experiences.
- Minute Paper: During lecture you could give students a simple question to answer in 60 seconds to check for understanding. For example: What is the muddiest point? What concept can you write in your own words? What topic(s) did you not understand? Here is a template.
- Exam Wrappers: You can ask students to complete low-stakes writing assignments before or after an exam to explain how they prepared for the exam or to reflect on their performance. Here is a cognitive exam wrapper template.
Be explicit why it is important for students to develop their metacognitive skills as well as how to learn and how to plan their learning. Don’t let your students guess about this; it’s better to be clear. Every time you introduce a change in your classroom it is a good idea to explain why you are changing things.
Teaching the students you have, not the students you wish you had
Consider talking to your students about how to do homework or how to take notes during class. Share with them specific strategies for learning concepts, processes, or skills in your discipline. Sometimes you need to tell students obvious things they need to do for planning, monitoring or evaluating their own learning. Students need to be constantly reflecting on their learning and constantly quizzing themselves after they study. Some students fail because they are overconfident that they learned the material when they actually do not understand it.
This resource from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has many tips: Studying 101: Study Smarter Not Harder. Here is this UM Metacognition resource to share with your students. This free and open book has information about student learning University 101: Study, Strategize and Succeed. This video series about how to study by Stephen Chew has a teaching guide with tips for faculty to use the videos and the list of topics. The first video in the series is: Developing a mindset for successful learning.
For students that have trouble focusing during long periods of time, you can recommend them to use the pomodoro technique, which lets students work in small chunks of time rather than long periods. This technique helps students avoid procrastination since they do not need to commit to focus more than 20 minutes at a time. Point out that it is better for students to focus their full attention when studying (or working on something important) rather than multitasking.
Books about Learning
Here are some books you can read if you would like to learn more about effective ways to learn:
The book How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000) is a free read from the National Academies site. This book includes extensive research about the learning process and the implications for teaching: “what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess”. One of the topics is how learning modifies the physical structure of the brain. The authors present the idea that metacognition is not generic; there are specific learning contexts for different disciplines.
A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) is a book by Oakley (2014) focusing on learning mathematics & science. It is written by an engineering professor who used to struggle with math but finally learned it after having a career as a linguist. There is a course by the same author in Coursera: Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects.
In the book How Learning Works: Eight Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching the authors shared strategies for college teaching based on psychology, education and cognitive science research taking into account social, emotional and cultural factors.
Dweck (2017) wrote Mindset to introduce the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset. Students that have a growth mindset believe their intelligence can be cultivated; these students are more willing to take challenges and they are more resilient when they have setbacks. Students who have a fixed mindset can develop a growth mindset.
Make it stick by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel (2014) explains how learning and memory works. They include many examples of people learning complex knowledge and skills to show effective principles of learning.
The book Teach Students How to Learn by McGuire, McGuire & Angelo (2015) presents strategies for college faculty to improve student learning and metacognitive skills. The book Teach Yourself How to Learn by McGuire displays simple strategies for students that will help them become better learners and improve their academic success.
Resources:
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn (Vol. 11). Washington, DC: National academy press.
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press.
Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset-updated edition: Changing the way you think to fulfill your potential. Hachette UK.
Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (1996). The expert learner: Strategic, self-regulated, and reflective. Instructional science, 24(1), 1-24.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University Learning Centres. (2018). University 101: Study, Strategize and Succeed. Pressbooks. Retrieved from: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/studystrategizesucceed/
Lovett, M. C., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Ambrose, S. A., & Norman, M. K. (2023). How Learning Works: Eight Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
McGuire, S. Y. (2023). Teach yourself how to learn: Strategies you can use to ace any course at any level. Taylor & Francis.
McGuire, S., McGuire, S. Y., & Angelo, T. (2015). Teach students how to learn: Strategies you can incorporate into any course to improve student metacognition, study skills, and motivation. Routledge.
Oakley, B. A. (2014). A mind for numbers: How to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra). TarcherPerigee.
Pintrich, P. R. (2002). The role of metacognitive knowledge in learning, teaching, and assessing. Theory into practice, 41(4), 219-225.
Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113-120.
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