Lessons Learned from the Workshop and Recommendations for the Community

Lessons Learned

• Mixture of Ed Psych, Cognitive Psych and Geoscience Faculty was very fruitful
• Self-regulation and metacognition are not the same but related in overlapping ways
• Metacognition can be and should be taught – an investment at the beginning leads to rewards throughout
• Knowing about metacognition colors everything you do with respect to teaching
• Other geology educators at all levels do use this and it is a powerful tool – activity collection is/will be powerful and worth an investment
• Confidence in formalized understanding of metacognition
• Metacognition needs to be front and center as you design the course to integrate effectively
• Metacognition is a whole dimension of teaching that is often taught subconsciously, making it explicit provides a whole new tool for teaching.
• Critical and practical link between cognitive and affective domains that can be used to help students.
• Tools for improving metacognition are very valuable in planning and assessing instruction
• Examples demonstrate how we can teach metacognition in large classes.
• Significant numbers of science faculty are very invested in helping students learn
• There are metacognitive skills that are better suited or likely to be especially valuable in geoscience (e.g. retrodiction (present is key to past); spatial; temporal; multi-dimensional skills; scale range of space and time; incomplete ambiguous data; unrepeatable experiments). Many instructors teach to these skills – metacognition gives a framework in which we can understand their success.
• Expert modeling is an especially valuable tool for teaching metacognition
• Being explicit and intentional in exposing our thinking and teaching geoscience thinking.
• Technology provides new and valuable tools for teaching and assessing metacognition (e.g. Moodle, LectureTools)
• Power of changing attribution – we can help students understand that they can learn difficult skills – their ability to do math or science can change with practice
• The role of students in learning – understanding that students have substantial control changes frame for thinking about teaching.
• Changing metacognition (or thinking) takes time (ours and theirs).
• Metacognition has fuzzy edges – we have struggled hard to understand boundaries between cognition and metacognition. Continuing to work with these ideas will help us better understand the distinctions.

Recommendations

• Additional work (opportunities to work collectively, individually) on understanding, teaching and assessing metacognition –particularly assessing.
• Additional examples of activities for teaching metacognition in geoscience are needed and will be part of the pathway to development of assessments
• Design research that uses pre-post measures that allow comparision of learning gains in classes that emphasize metacognition and those that don't in collaboration with Ed Psych
• More use of teams of geoscience faculty with ed psych/education researchers
• Discuss metacognition and their experience with instruction in this area with students.
• Teaching metacognition explicitly is one way faculty can teach students to focus on learning, not on grades.

Next Steps

• Working group to continue to elucidate metacognitive strategies of geosciences – Helen and Mimi
• Theme session at AGU – Dexter to write session description
• Develop elevator talk (why teaching metacognition is important; how it supports the learning of geoscience)
• Add metacognition field to activities – or seek
• Dialog re how metacognition activities work
• Submit a metacognition activity – everyone
• AERA/APA/NARST session – Erin and Jenefer in charge
• Submit your best resources – all
• Set up reviewing and observational protocols so that all can find and use them with the metacognition activities – Cathy / Carol
• Develop a special issue for JCST
• Develop a special issue for XX with focus on geology
• Send annotated references to the email list – all