What's Changed?

When we learn—really learn, rather than temporarily storing something in our memories—we change our brains. We develop and strengthen neural connections. We may also change our perceptions, our behaviors, our beliefs, our decisions. Thinking about this change, and thinking about our thinking, is a critical part of learning, so reflection is an essential metacognitive activity.

Brown, Roediger and McDaniel (2014) explain that “reflection is a form of practice”: it’s an internalized self-coaching that “involves several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.” Kimberly D. Tanner warns that “students will not really learn new information if they do not go through a metacognitive realization that requires them to examine how they thought about the topic before and how they are thinking differently… now.”

When we ask students to reflect at different points throughout the semester, we are helping them to observe their thinking changing over time, and when we ask them to do a final reflection at the end of the term, we are helping them to assess and articulate how their thinking—their conceptions, their reasoning, their frame of reference, etc.—has changed because they took a course.

Although they need to reflect, this form of practice isn’t instinctive for most students. We’ll need to prompt them. Ideally they should be doing this thinking on a regular basis, but the end of the semester is a great opportunity for reflection. Tanner suggests “retrospective post-assessments”:

A simple tool for explicitly charging students to think about how their ideas are (or are not) changing is a retrospective post-assessment. As its moniker implies, this tool is a post-assessment and occurs after learning may have taken place. It is retrospective, in that students are asked to recall how they were thinking about the topic prior to course learning activities and compare that with how they are now thinking about the same topic afterward. As an example, students might be asked to complete the phrase: “Before this course, I thought evolution was… Now I think that evolution is…” Alternatively, they may be asked to write about three ways in which their thinking about a given topic has changed over a given period of time. Either of these explicit approaches to teaching metacognition is a mechanism of training students to self-question, “How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?”

In addition to helping students to consolidate and make meaning of their learning, by prompting reflection at the end of the semester, we’re also inviting them to end the term focusing on what they’ve learned, what they’ve gained, and how they’ve changed because of the all the intellectual work they did our courses. It’s gratifying for us to read or listen to those reflections, too.