Table of Contents
What is metacognition?
Metacognition is the conscious consideration of mental processes and their impact on function and learning. The easiest way to understand metacognition is to define it as “thinking about thinking”. This article will explain what it is and give guidance for teachers to implement metacognition in the classroom.
A good example of metacognition is thinking about how an emotion impacted something done or said. If, during therapy or just in one’s own thoughts, a person begins to consider that perhaps the reason they lashed out was because they were afraid of something rather than being angry, this is a form of metacognition. A therapist may also use metacognition to help people recognize triggers or avoid negative thought spirals.
Why is teaching metacognition in the classroom important?
In education, metacognition is most often discussed in the context of students understanding their individual learning process to adjust their approaches to learning. For example, metacognition in the classroom could look like asking students to think about how they learn based on different learning styles or how good or bad habits affect their ability to learn in class.
This can range from getting students to think about how they study best to considering how lack of sleep or distraction by friends can affect their test scores. Students need to consider how they learn so that they can adjust their approaches to learning and try new strategies to solve problems and improve themselves.
Metacognition is actively implemented in the classroom in most learning support programs, but oftentimes is not mindfully applied in subject area classrooms. This is unfortunate because research on metacognition from 2022 shows “moderate-to-high effect sizes of metacognitive strategies on students’ achievement scores in core subjects” (Chen and McDunn)
This guide will list 5 easy to plan metacognitive activities teachers could use to get their students to be more mindful about their own brains. Each activity is easy to implement in lesson plans and will help students leave class with practical tools to improve themselves after they graduate.
5 Examples of Metacognition in the Classroom.
- Get students to think about their individual learning preferences
A teacher can ask a student to look through three different activities on the same topic, one visual graph or picture, one audio recording, and one textual passage and consider how the different styles of presenting the information helped them understand the concept being taught better. The teacher can choose whatever mix of assignment types is most useful in their specific subject, but the idea should be to choose a wide variety of different types of ways to present the topic so that students can consider how the different presentation helps them understand the topic.
Not only is this useful as a metacognitive activity, but also works to help students consider different ways of presenting information and in what contexts different styles might be most useful. The students can then be asked to create a lesson on new topics using one or more of the different ways of presenting information they looked at before.
This works great as an activity to give more responsibility for teaching to the students themselves in order to create more independent learners. The students can be guided to create useful and interesting lessons and then present their lessons to the class.
A wide range of content can be covered this way in addition to giving each student a topic or lesson that fits their personality, preferences, or proclivities. In this way, students can still learn everything that needs to be covered while still focusing most on developing what matters to them in their own lives.
Because their research and lesson will be presented to and completed by their classmates, the students will take the assignment much more seriously than some worksheet that only the teacher will privately grade. Students care much more about what their peers think of them than the teacher’s opinion, so the teacher can leverage this positive peer pressure to get kids to do their best to impress and entertain their friends with their unique and helpful lesson.
- Have students keep a habit journal
Another easy way to implement metacognition in the classroom can be for a teacher to have students track their habits over a period of time. The activity tracked can be whatever the teacher finds most important for students to work on, but commonly used options include sleep habits, hours studied, or emotional state.
Teachers should have students track the habit in an app or on paper each day for a minimum of one week, but preferably closer to a month to get more useful data. Time should be provided in class to do the tracking and it should not be left up to students to remember on their own.
Doing the tracking together in class can be useful for several reasons. Not only does it prevent students from forgetting for several days and just guessing to fill in what they missed, but it also provides a stable time of day for students to track which is particularly important for considering emotional states.
Students can come into class each day and mark down the emotion that most closely responds to how they feel. Not only can they be asked to consider how this specific emotion might affect their learning that day, but teachers can have students look back at the end of each week to reflect on their week and how their habits or emotional state made them feel that week.
At the end, students can create graphs or charts to look at their data in a more objective way. This is most easily done in phone app habit trackers, but this can also be easily transferred to something like Google Sheets where it is easy to create graphs.
When students look back at what they have done and consider how it affected them, they can begin to think about being more proactive rather than reactive in life. While this will be very useful for students of all ages, teachers should not expect major results visible within the short time frame of one school year.
The part of the brain that deals with metacognition, the frontal lobe, is not fully developed in most people until into their 20s, so even high schoolers may not yet be able to implement what they have learned to maturely fix their bad habits. Teachers should instead think of what they are doing as planting a seed that will actively help students develop this part of their brain as it is growing rather than having to start from scratch once old habits are already deeply entrenched.
- Make students second guess their reactions
A really fun metacognitive activity to get students to be more careful is to trick students in order to get them to not always go with their first gut reaction when reading. Today’s news media is riddled with examples of reactionary and emotionally charged writing that often manipulates emotions by misleadingly presenting information.
One common example of this activity is teaching students about the dangers of DHMO or dihydrogen monoxide. This website on DHMO goes over the research of the dangers of the chemical and how it is “an enabling component” in acid rain, helps all types of cancers to form, and is present in high levels in every river, lake, and ocean in the world.
After giving students time to look over the studies, surveys, and warnings about the need to ban the chemical included on the website, the students will have had time to form their opinions about the chemical. The teacher can then reveal the secret, that DHMO is simply another chemical name for H20 aka: water.
Science writers, political commentators, and many others often use this tactic of presenting information in a fear mongering way to get people emotionally invested in their personal opinions, however, the facts are often not as dramatic as these people want their readers to think.
Teachers can also include other examples specific to their subject where writers have misrepresented or oversold data or findings in order to push their agendas. This activity will make students more wary of dramatic click bait titles and encourage them to always look up the data on what is being said instead of just trusting what they are being told.
It will also help them think about how they react to things and teach them to be more metacognitively aware of their own biases. This is such an important skill in today’s world, but is sadly lacking in the vast majority of people.
- Suggest several study strategies
Metacognition in the classroom can effectively be implemented during test time. For this activity, teachers can give students three quizzes over a period of time and have students use a different study strategy for each.
Study strategies will often be subject specific, but good examples could be having students use flashcards for one quiz, read textbook pages or written notes for another, or form a study group or partnership to discuss and quiz one another. To highlight the importance of studying at all, teachers could include a baseline “no study” quiz to help students see how much studying can improve their scores.
Of course, to get the best data, these quiz types should be repeated several times over the course of the year to give multiple data points and avoid outlying data points. This metacognitive activity is not just good for helping students think about the importance of studying, but also presents them with several concrete study strategies that they can add to their toolbelt to use later in life.
As teachers are already well aware, many students have absolutely no idea how to study and think mindlessly flipping through textbook pages or lesson slides will be sufficient to learn content effectively. After this activity, not only will students know several clear study strategies, but they will know which work best for them personally.
To keep things fair, especially in highly grade driven schools, teachers can say that they will only count the best of each set of quizzes. This will reassure those students who worry that the baseline “no study” or one of their less preferred study strategies will impact their final grade.
- Help students know how well they know what they know
One of the most difficult things for students to understand is how much they actually understand. Teachers can implement metacognition in the classroom to help students learn not only what they know and what they don’t, but also how well they know it.
To do this, teachers should prepare a couple of short sets of questions (IE a quiz, but don’t call it that). One of these sets should be fill in the blank, one multiple choice.
These two types of questions require students to know information in two different ways using two different parts of the brain. Multiple choice tests only require students to recognize the right answer while fill in the blank questions require students to be able to actually recall and produce answers without anything to prompt their memory.
Simply being able to recognize information does not necessarily mean that a person knows it independently. This is often most apparent to people who have tried to learn another language.
Oftentimes, people who are learning a second language or who learned it in childhood but have rarely used it since will be able to understand or recognize many of the words and sentences being said to them, but will be unable to say the words without hearing them first in order to be able to create sentences themselves.
The two parts of the brain implicated in this activity are the Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area of the brain. The Broca’s area, generally above the front of the temporal lobe, is involved in generating responses, while Wernicke’s area, generally above the back of the temporal lobe, is involved in receiving and processing received information.
Students may often be able to understand information when a teacher lectures about it or even when presented with multiple possible answers on a multiple choice test, but then totally draw blank when asked to complete fill in the blank or essay exams. This activity can help students understand how their brain works with information in these two different ways and ensure that they are going deep enough to be able to independently utilize learned materials rather than just simply recognize it when they see it.
Conclusion
It is important to implement metacognition in the classroom so that students can work to recognize what makes them tick and improve themselves mindfully. Without metacognition, people would simply be reactionary and never change their firmly entrenched habits.
The metacognitive activities in this guide offer an easy to modify set of lesson plans that will help teachers encourage the development of the frontal lobe of their students while not falling behind on required content to cover. These activities will also help students to be more independent and not always rely on the teacher to tell them what needs to be done.
A teacher’s job is not just to help form the minds of young people, but also to help them form their own minds and be able to independently leave the classroom with new tools and skills to continue their learning after class ends. Teachers, much like parents, are often doing their job best when they are needed least and young people are able to independently proceed mindfully and effectively to solve their problems and have a good life.
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References
Chen, Shiyi, and Benjamin A. McDunn. “Metacognition: History, Measurements, and the Role in Early Childhood Development and Education.” Learning and Motivation, vol. 78, 2022, p. 101786., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lmot.2022.101786.
