Reading, Reflecting, and Relating: A Metacognitive Approach to Learning

The goal of this paper is to describe a simple metacognitive activity that can be used to improve reading, learning, and metacognitive skills in any course.  In an increasingly complex and interconnected world it is ever more important that students develop intellectual and practical skills for lifelong learning.  Intentional, or “expert,” learners are more purposeful, they are more aware of themselves as learners, and they “take the initiative to diagnose their learning needs, formulate learning goals, identify resources for learning, select an implement learning strategies, and evaluate learning outcomes” (Savin-Baden and Major, 2004).  Research on cognition and learning (Bransford et al., 2000) indicates that expert learners typically demonstrate better-developed metacognitive knowledge, control, and reflection (Ertmer and Newby, 1996).  If an important goal of higher education is to help students become intentional learners, then our curricula should reflect those aims. Instruction about metacognitive knowledge and skills need not “displace” disciplinary content, but instead can be used to support learning of content (Lovett, 2008).

Students submit online reading reflections (e.g., using Blackboard or Moodle) after completing a reading assignment and before coming to class.  In each reflection, students summarize the important concepts of the reading and describe what was interesting, surprising, or confusing to them.  Instructors can respond to the reflections individually online, or in aggregate in the classroom.  The instructor can also use the student reflections for ‘just-in-time’ planning and design of classroom activities.  The reading reflections not only encourage students to read regularly before class, they also promote content mastery and foster student development of monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection skills.  Although reading reflections constitute only a small fraction (5-10%) of total points in our courses in economics and geology, they are excellent predictors of final course grades (r² > 0.70) in all of the courses where we have implemented them.  These results support the notion that improving students’ monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection skills will enhance their learning.  Next, we employed the Shapley value regression (Shapley, 1953) to determine in a systematic way the contributions of reading reflection to the variance of the course grade.  Though reading reflections count for only 10% of the course grade, the Shapley results indicate that reading reflections contribute 26% and 30% to the variation in the course grade (success in the course) at Hamline and Macalester, respectively.

A survey about student’s reading habits was conducted both in courses with and without reading reflections.  Students were asked to describe the depth of their reading, their self-regulation of environmental conditions, and strategies they used during pre-reading, reading, and post reading phases.  Survey results indicate significant differences between the experimental and control groups regarding the completion of reading assignments (36% vs. 94%, respectively), the depth of reading (deep vs. surface approaches used by the experimental group), and strategies (increased self-reported frequency of use reported by the experimental group) used by students during all three phases of reading.  These results confirm that reading reflections are having significant impacts on student reading and metacognitive skills.