Metacognitive literacy

Draft

Introduction

Metacognitive literacy refers to various metacognitive skills that are useful to thinking and learning.

Learning how to learn is strongly related to metacognitive literacy, since successful learning seem to be more metacognitive than others.

A somewhat related topic is metacognition in literacy instruction (Griffith & Ruan, 2005; Davis-Wiley & Wooten, 2015), i.e. teaching reading strategies. This topic is strongly related to note taking. “Although students are expected to be proficient note-takers at primary, secondary, and university levels across the curriculum, very few of them have actually been taught the basic skills of note - taking (Boch & Piolat, 2005)” ()

Teaching metacognition

Wilson and Bai (2008) argue that “that teachers who have a rich understanding of metacognition report that teaching students to be metacognitive requires a complex understanding of both the concept of metacognition and metacognitive thinking”. The authors also note that “despite the recognition of the role of metacognition in student success, limited research has been done to explore teachers' explicit awareness of their metacognition and their ability to think about, talk about, and write about their thinking”

The six hats classroom strategy

• http://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/developing-metacognitive-literacy-through-role-play-edward-de-bonos-six-thinking-hats/

Novak's concept maps

Novak and Gowin (1984) advocate hierarchical concept maps

Teaching specific metacognitive strategies

The Sticky Note Strategy for reading

Davis-Wiley & Wooten describe a successful strategy used with teachers in training.

he graduate students participating in the research study were instructed that they would take notes in their textbooks by using sticky notes to record their comments and then adhere the sticky notes to the page which relates to their comments. Students were informed that their sticky note comments would not necessarily be summaries about the text but would include questions, connections, thoughts, ideas, and reactions. This method would be used in lieu of their typical manner of note-taking (i.e., highlighting, writing in the page margins), when reading assigned articles and books. [...] The results of this study do strongly reflect and also corroborate the research of Rosenblatt and support her mantra of enabling the reader to personally react to text, and thus, expand the reader’s personal strategies for deriving meaning from text. In the present research study, the student subjects were truly able to utilize this sticky note approach to interact with text, over the duration of an entire semester, so that they could better use and adapt it to meet their own personal learning styles. By extension, they will be able to model it for the students in their own classrooms.

Links

• Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects, Coursera MOOC by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski and Dr. Barbara Oakley, UC San Diego.

Bibliography

Cited

Other

• Griffith, P. L., & Ruan, J. (2005). What is metacognition and what should be its role in literacy instruction. Metacognition in literacy learning: Theory, assessment, instruction, and professional development, 3-18. https://books.google.ch/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b6SPAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=%22metacognitive+literacy%22&ots=becfqMdHZf&sig=yq5VeAdueLOTKJaKekkHLqYDCoA#v=onepage&q=%22metacognitive%20literacy%22&f=false