Metacognition

Objective: Students will develop a greater awareness and understanding of their own thought processes. 

Key Terms: Metacognition. Process. 

Timing: These activities can be utilized at any time throughout the course.

Lesson

Part I: Short reflections, eg via a Google form.

  1. Provide a framing for the students regarding the purpose of this activity, for example using the Conceptual Framework discussed above. 
  2. Provide the students with a short list of prompts that you would like them to respond to. You can have them respond in class or outside of class time.
  3. Determine whether you would like the responses to remain private (ie each student is writing only to themselves), or whether you would like them to turn in their reflection. If you would like them to turn it in, you could have them for example use a Google form, such as in this example reflection assignment from week 2 of a Number Theory course, created by Li-Mei Lim. 

Part II: Longer reflection assignment.

  1. Provide a framing for the students regarding the purpose of this activity, for example using the Conceptual Framework discussed above. 
  2. Provide the students with a list of prompts that you would like them to respond to outside of class time, and provide them with a due date for their reflection, such as this reflection Assignment from the course Mathematical Explorations, created by Debbie Borkovitz. Here is the associated syllabus. 

Part III: Exit reflections.

  1. Provide a framing for the students regarding the purpose of this activity, for example using the Conceptual Framework discussed above.
  2. Use the final 10-15 minutes of each (or some/most, depending on instructor preferences) class meeting to give students time to write their exit reflection. 
  3. Determine whether you would like the responses to remain private (ie each student is writing only to themselves), or whether you would like them to turn in their reflection, and communicate this to the students. You could make a different choice for each prompt, in which case that choice should be indicated in the prompt (ie, “You will be asked to share your response to this prompt with the class at our next meeting.”) 
  4. Provide the students with a prompt, then ask them to write a response to it. The prompt could be written on the board or written in a class Google doc that gets updated before each class meeting. The latter is convenient because students have a record of all of the prompts they’ve responded to throughout the semester. Here are some example prompts, created by Margaret Beck and Anna Panszczyk.