Metacognition
Metacognition is, simply put, thinking about one's thinking. As it applies to education and learning, metacognition refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.
In this course, you will see problems on exams, etc, that you have not directly seen before. This means that even if you memorize the book, and can recite the lecture material back verbatim, it is not enough. You must be able to use the concepts and skills we cover in class to solve new problems.
To make this clearer, take a look at Marzano’s learning taxonomy (similar to Bloom’s taxonomy, if you’ve run into that before). it’s organized according to the level of cognitive control required: you have to think harder to do things in the “Analysis” block than you do for the “Retrieval” tasks.
I’m willing to bet that most of your science courses to date have been heavy on the retrieval end of things. This is not to say they have been easy - there are some very challenging, involved tasks that only require retrieval skills, and we’ll meet up with more of them this semester! But these tasks involve the application of rules and procedures, and do not require you to evaluate competing approaches, draw inferences, generalize patterns of behavior, etc.
An important goal of this course is to improve your ability to think at higher levels of cognition.
Daily quizzes will tend to be at the [R], and [C] levels; worksheets and homework will strive for higher ground at the [A] and [U] cognitive levels . Exams will have a few points to reward [R] thinking but more value will accrue as you progress into the [C], [A] and [U] regimes. (This is one reason cramming for exams won’t work well.)
To scaffold your ability to deal with these more challenging types of questions, we spend a lot of time in class wrestling with them. Pay attention here - if I show you how to do them, you are not practicing higher level thinking yourself. You need to put in the effort outside of class to decide what is being asked, what is given, and resolve any ambiguities. That process can be facilitated by working with others.
It’s important to learn how to judge your progress toward a solution, and to evaluate your ideas about how to approach it. This is hard! It’s easier to evaluate someone else’s proposed approach, and to detect errors that others make while solving a problem. Practice doing that in group work and you will improve your ability to evaluate your own progress.
You’ll notice I put a lot of emphasis on group work. Talking about chemistry, having to present your ideas to others, and evaluate their ideas in turn, is a very effective way to learn. Yes - even talking to people who know less than you do! It’s not [R] level learning we’re after here. I know many of you think you learn better on your own; you’re wrong. It doesn’t feel like you’re learning much (if anything), but the first step in improving your ability to learn is to recognize that what feels good, usually isn’t. With that being said, we will not be able to do much group work during class time, but I encourage you to form study groups outside of class and put this to use.
It will benefit you immensely to periodically step back and think about how, and at what level, you are thinking. For more information about Metacognition, see Saundra McGuire's video on the Study Skills page.