Skills for Lifelong Learning: Students Thinking and Learning about Cognition in Economics

We describe a simple activity that can be used to improve student’s reading, learning, and metacognitive skills.  In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, it is ever more important that students develop the cognitive and metacognitive skills for lifelong learning.  If an important goal of higher education is to help students develop as intentional learners, then our curricula should include explicit instruction on the skills for lifelong learning.  Instruction about cognitive and metacognitive knowledge and skills need not “displace” disciplinary content, but instead can be used to support disciplinary learning.

Because a great deal of what students learn in college is learned though independent reading and studying outside the classroom, it is critical that students be able to make accurate judgments of their comprehension in order to guiding their learning.  Remarkably, numerous research studies have concluded that students are generally poor at making accurate judgments about their comprehension of readings.

In a controlled study, reading reflections were introduced into one of two sections of the Microeconomics course during Fall 2009.  After each reading assignment, students are asked to respond to three prompts: (1) summarize the important concepts of the reading, (2) describe what was interesting or surprising, and (3) describe what remains confusing or unclear from the reading.  The reading reflections are not graded, but students receive credit for submitting timely responses that demonstrate meaningful reflection.  The experimental section (with reading reflections) enrolled 34 students, whereas the control section enrolled 27 students.  A similar experimental design was implemented in two sections of an introductory earth science course at Macalester College.

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.  The course grades for the Microeconomics experimental group were lower than those for the control, however post-experimental analyses confirm that the control and experimental groups differed significantly (significantly lower grade point averages in the experimental section).  Despite these differences, reading reflections had a powerful positive effect on disciplinary learning for the experimental group.  The average scores on the first exam were significantly different (p = 0.000) between the control (mean = 83.8) and experimental groups (mean = 72.7).  Reading reflections were introduced to the experimental group after the first exam.  With each subsequent exam, the gap between the two different sections decreased, and by the final exam the difference in the average scores between the control (mean = 79.9) and experimental (mean = 80.4) groups was not significant (p = 0.825).  Furthermore, students showing the greatest improvement in their exam scores also had the highest reading reflection scores (r = 0.34; p = 0.066).  Students in both sections of the Macalester geology course had very similar academic preparation and ability, but those in the experimental group earned significantly (p = 0.032) higher overall grades (mean = 88.4) than those in the control (mean = 83.9).  We are in the process of seeking additional evidence of improved learning after making further pedagogical changes.