Reflective Writing to Construct Meaning

Contributors: Merry Wilson
Laura Wenk
Dave Mogk
Developed at the 2008 workshop, The Role of Metacognition in Teaching Geoscience.

Course level: intro

Description of the metacognitive tactic:
Use short writing prompts to help students reflect on their thinking. Prompts will be exactly the types of thinking skills we want to model for the students, so they can practice the process of independent action and analysis.

Goals for using this tactic

• Learning goals:
  The goal is to help students independently determine what they know, what they don't know, and how to find by writing about a guided set of reflective questions. Students should be able to self-correct and be able to ultimately form strategies to allow them to derive correct answers. The types of questions must be in the context of a given course.
• Self-regulation goals:
  Students will explicitly write about a) what they know (are confident about), b)what they don't know, and c) how they propose to find out--what knowledge, skills or tools are needed.

How this tactic helps students meet that goal:
What do you feel confident about explaining to the rest of the class? What do you feel you understand but can't (yet) explain? Specifically articulate responses to what they got wrong, why, and how they can attend to this? Write a memo to yourself/or instructor about what they will do to improve performance in next round.

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