Metacognition

First, the issue: The problems on the exams are problems you haven’t seen before.

Think about that. Even if you memorize the book and can recite verbatim everything I’ve told you, it’s not enough; you need to be able to use the concepts and skills 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. To emphasize this, for each of the unit objectives I have indicated the level of Marzano’s taxonomy that is required - [R] for retrieval, [C] for comprehension, [A] for analysis, and [U] for knowledge utilization. Many of these objectives don't automatically fall into one of these categories; the level of thinking required obviously depends on the kind of questions I ask. So I have tried to use these categories as indicators of the kind of questions to expect. For example, you might know how the number of protons, neutrons and electrons of an element can be determined from the atomic symbol, and you'd probably think of that as requiring retrieval or executing [R] thinking. If I've listed this objective as [C], I'm probably not going to ask you something so simple.

I will refer to these levels in many aspects of the course. Class prep assignments and occasional quizzes will tend to be at the [R] level; weekly group activities will strive for higher ground. 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’re no longer practicing higher level thinking. You need to put in the effort 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. Deep learning involves discomfort :) There’s a wonderful book by Peter C. Brown, “Make it Stick” ($13.95 on Amazon) that presents some truly surprising results from learning research. I have recommended this book to students who have told me it changed their lives.

It will benefit you immensely to periodically step back and think about how, and at what level, you are thinking.