Metacognitive Learning Strategies in All Classes

Contributors: Saundra McGuire
Dave Gosselin
Martha Mamo
Mary Anne Holmes
Jenefer Husman
Sandra Rutherford

Developed at the 2008 workshop, The Role of Metacognition in Teaching Geoscience.

Course level: intro

Description of the metacognitive tactic:
To introduce and employ organizational strategies.

Goals for using this tactic

  • Learning goals:
    The overall goal is for student's to develop their own organizational tactic for each content area.
  • Self-regulation goals:
    This tactic supports metacognition.

How this tactic helps students meet that goal:
The instructor will do an activity that will model the effectiveness of organizational strategies. The instructor will then model and explain a few organizational tactics, such as concept mapping, KWL (know, want to learn, and have learned), and outlining. Instructors will assign the students to develop their own organizational tactic for different topics, 2 or 3 times in a class at the beginning and at the end. Then the students bring in their tactic and the share their tactic and talk about the effectiveness of their tactic. What organizational strategy did you use? 5 minutes in class. What organizational strategies did you do?

See more examples of strategies for teaching metacognition