Literacy Teachers Pedagogical Understandings of Metacognition

1
Literacy Teachers Pedagogical Understandings of
Metacognition

• Nance S. Wilson
• University of Central Floridanwilson_at_mail.ucf.edu

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Statement of the Problem

• We know that metacognitive students are
  successful in school (Sternberg, 1998).
• However, significant research has not been
  completed that explores teachers explicit
  awareness of their metacognition and their
  ability to think about and talk about their
  thinking (Zohar 1999).
• Gaining knowledge about teachers understanding
  regarding the teaching of metacognition could
  improve our ability to plan professional
  development.

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Theoretical Framework

• Examining Metacognition
• Examining Pedagogical Understandings of
  Metacognition
• Measuring Pedagogical Understandings of
  Metacognition

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Examining metacognition

• Metacognition is the awareness and regulation of
  ones mental processes (Griffith Ruan, 2005).
• In reading, metacognition has been the focus of
  much reading comprehension research because
  reading comprehension is a complex cognitive
  process that requires thinking about what the
  reader knows and the application of the reading
  processes (Baker, 2002).

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Examining pedagogical understandings of
metacognition

• Pedagogical understandings of metacognition
  refers to teachers understanding of what is
  necessary for the teaching of metacognition.
• In order to implement metacognitive literacy
  instruction teachers must create a learning
  environment in which students are
• explicitly required to apply metacognitive
  activities
• asked to reflect on their thinking processes.
• The instructional strategies used include
• think alouds (Isreal Massey, 2005)
• opportunities to practice thinking strategies
  (Schreiber, 2005)
• active discussions (Zohar 2006)
• the use the language of thinking (Tishman,
  Perkins, Jay, 1995).

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Measuring teachers pedagogical understandings of
metacognition

• An analysis of teachers understandings of how to
  guide students in being metacognitive could
  inform professional development (Wilson, Grisham,
  Smetana, In Press).
• In order to do this
• A survey was created for this study was designed
  to assess teachers beliefs about practices that
  encourage students metacognition. It was
  created because a robust review of the literature
  could not find an instrument designed to assess
  the instructional strategies teachers valued in
  guiding their students to be metacognitive.
• Teachers responded to the metacomprehension
  survey.
• Teachers answered open-ended questions about
  comprehension and metacomprehension.

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The instrument

• Three parts
• Open-ended questions
• What is metacognition?
• What are metacognitive thinking strategies?
• Assess what teachers believe they should do in
  the classroom to teach students thinking skills.
  
• Assess effectiveness of teaching activities--The
  questions asked teachers to rate the level of
  metacognitive thinking if students described
  actions during learning, planned a project, or
  wrote an essay .

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The metacomprehension survey(Moore, Zabrucky,
Commander, 1997)

• Assess
• anxiety (stress related to comprehension
  performance)
• capacity (perception of comprehension abilities)
• regulation (methods of resolving comprehension
  failures
• strategy use (techniques to improve
  comprehension)
• task (knowledge of basic Processes)
• achievement (importance of good comprehension
  skills)
• locus of control (control of reading skills).

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The open-ended questions

• Two sets
• The first centered on the idea of memory and
  comprehension.
• The second set of questions asked teachers to
  define metacomprehension and to describe what it
  means to teach metacomprehension in reading
  instruction.

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Methods
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Participants

• Large Group
• 105 education graduate students
• Range teaching experiences
• 56 taught fewer than three years
• 22 taught four to six years
• 22 taught more than six years.

• Focus Group
• twenty- four teachers enrolled in courses
  required for the M.Ed. in Reading
• The experience ranged from 1-21 years.
• All the participants have taken the graduate
  level foundations in reading course.
• Grade level assignments included grades K-12
• 19 of the participating teachers assigned to
  grades K-5
• 2 assigned to grades 10-12
• 3 assigned as reading coaches.

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Data Analysis

• Data analysis occurred in multiple phases.
• First, the qualitative data was analyzed using an
  iterative approach.
• Next, the data collected from the Likert
  questions on the survey were coded and entered by
  trained research assistants into SPSS.
• The instrument was evaluated for both validity
  and reliability, as well as for a deeper
  understanding of teachers pedagogical
  understandings of metacognition.
• The instrument was evaluated by experts in
  metacognitive theory and an expert in measurement
  and evaluation therefore, the face validity was
  achieved. The exploratory analysis revealed six
  clear factors, with 59.13 of the total variance
  explained therefore, the content validity was
  confirmed. The internal subscale reliability was
  all above Cronbachs Alpha value of .71, showing
  acceptable internal consistency of the
  instrument.

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Results
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The Pedagogical Understandings of Metacognition
Survey

• Two themes
• An active process requiring engagement
• The teacher guides metacognitive activities in
  the classroom
• Teaching conditional knowledge
• Teachers should demonstrate metacognitive
  thinking
• Students are accountable
• Touching the surface of metacognitive thinking
  strategies
• Making students aware
• Providing Assignments

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The metacomprehension survey

• Teachers in the focus group were aware of the
  strategies necessary for metacomprehension,
  valued it for readers, and had limited anxiety
  regarding reading tasks.

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The metacomprehension survey

• The teachers identified rereading and careful
  reading as strategies they enacted for
  comprehension but did not identify the use the
  strategies of looking words up in the dictionary,
  scanning before reading, or asking questions
  during the reading of difficult text.

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The open-ended questions

• The results of the qualitative analysis
  demonstrates that the teachers understandings of
  metacomprehension in reading are directly related
  to their understandings reported on the
  pedagogical understandings of metacomprehension
  survey. For instance, two responses describing
  metacomprehension included both themes of active
  learning and awareness.
• Having students ask themselves questions about
  what they are reading. Modeling to students how
  to ask questions when reading
• I teach metacomprehension by having students
  visualize what they read, self-monitor themselves
  by note-taking, and modeling think aloud
  strategies

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The open-ended questions

• The teachers descriptions of what is necessary
  for the teaching of comprehension appeared to
  demonstrate that the participants did not have
  the same understandings of what is necessary for
  teaching metacomprehension as for teaching
  comprehension. Only seven of the 24
  participants in the subgroup linked descriptions
  of teaching comprehension to metacognitive or
  metacomprehension teaching strategies. A typical
  response to describing how to teach comprehension
  included
• To teach comprehension strategies other than
  plain memorization need to be used. Having
  students repeat a concept back to the teacher but
  with different words is a way to see if they
  understood.
• Retell in own words, ask questions about big
  ideas of what was read or discussed.
• I would give my students different examples of
  one concept and discuss which one they
  comprehend.

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The open-ended questions

• Responses that indicated that the teaching of
  comprehension involved the teaching of
  metacognition or metacomprehension skills
  occurred less than 1/3 of the time and can be
  characterized by the examples below
• I teach metacognitive strategies to help them
  process the text. I shoe them my thinking by
  modeling.
• Explicitly teach comprehension strategies such as
  decoding, rereading, summarizing, predicting.
• Think alouds showing students how to make meaning
  from textshowing thought processes.

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Discussion

• Teachers primarily identified their
  implementation of pedagogical understandings of
  metacogntion as modeling/demonstrating and
  strategy instruction.
• Teachers who had a high degree of
  metacomprehension did not report giving students
  opportunities to share thinking processes
• Pedagogical Understandings are complex and
  teachers knowledge of are not necessarily link to
  knowledge that.

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Future Research

• Observation and further interviews are necessary
  to sort out teachers pedagogical understandings
  of metacognition
• An observation protocol and a follow-up to the
  teachers responses to the pedagogical
  understandings of metacognition survey will be
  created.