In my Meta-Era; how do we best support students to know what they don’t know?
“Read it again.”
“Listen one more time.”
“Use your resources.”
If you are an educator, it is likely that you have made these suggestions to your students when their confusion shows.
I think back to the many times I made these suggestions with blank eyes staring back at me. How were my students suppose to know what they didn’t know? How can we teach this type of awareness and self monitoring? The answers to these questions is explicit instruction in the process of metacognition.
WE KNOW: “Metacognition is the ability for planning, monitoring, and evaluating the learning process and consists of two fundamental aspects, namely monitoring and control” (Ozturk, 2017). Thus, meta comprehension is the ability to recognize what you can and cannot understand.
WHY THIS MATTERS: For many of our students, especially those that are neurodiverse, struggle with identifying when they begin to struggle with understanding. Perhaps during a read aloud a student is asked a question about main idea and their response is “I don’t know.” Maybe you often see students give up because they can’t seem to articulate what is confusing for them. Instead of responding with my unhelpful statements above, model strategies that support self monitoring and awareness to show the process and the HOW in identifying what you don’t know.
WE KNOW: Metacognition affects reading outcomes as it helps readers to plan, monitor, and evaluate their understanding of language and texts (Effects of Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy for Developing Reading Comprehension Capacity, 2022).
WHY THIS MATTERS: The more we understand about our students understanding the more effective our instruction will be. The importance of modeling strategies as an adult allows students to hear and see self monitoring and control. For students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and those that struggle with comprehension, the following strategies can support language comprehension which is the foundational for reading comprehension.
Quick Tips:
Model with clear and explicit dialogue such as “that sentence didn’t really make sense to me, because I don’t know what this bolded word means. Although, it must be important because of the bolded font. I know I can look up a bolded word in a glossary at the back of the book.”
“I noticed as I was reading this paragraph, there were many nouns and pronouns, ‘her,’ ‘them,’ the character’s name and group. This is really confusing because I am not sure who is talking and who is who. I am going to go back and re-read the last few lines of dialogue.”
Effective Inference Instruction improves general, inferential, and literal comprehension. (Elleman, A. M, 2017). Explicit instruction modeled and then immediately applied with necessary feedback.
Embed visual/physical cues for students as they are listening, thumbs up/thumbs down. For older students, give the option of placing a post-it note at the top of their desk to signal clarification is needed.
If I were to go back to some of the blank faces, I would live in my meta-era. (Thank you T. Swift). If we are explicit in our instruction across all other components of academics, we must also include explicit instruction that includes thinking about thinking.
Effects of Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategy for Developing Reading Comprehension Capacity. (2022). 6(4). https://doi.org/10.31038/asmhs.2022642
Elleman, A. M. (2017). Examining the impact of inference instruction on the literal and inferential comprehension of skilled and less skilled readers: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 761–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000180
Ozturk, N. (2017). An analysis of teachers’ self-reported competencies for teaching metacognition. Educational Studies, 43(3), 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2016.1273761
