READING, REFLECTING, AND RELATING: A METACOGNITIVE APPROACH TO LEARNING

Learning from texts is an essential skill for college success, and for learning throughout one’s life. Yet, research suggests that most students receive little training in deep reading strategies and that they commonly lack the ability to accurately monitor their comprehension (metacomprehension) of text. Instruction about metacognitive knowledge and skills need not “displace” disciplinary content, but instead can be used to support learning of it.

We use a simple metacognitive activity to improve student reading, learning, and metacognitive skills. Students submit online reflections after completing a reading assignment, but before coming to class. The reflections are guided by prompts that ask students to: 1) summarize the important concepts of the reading, 2) describe what was interesting or surprising, and 3) describe what is still confusing. The reflections not only encourage students to read before class, they also promote content mastery and foster student development of monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection. The instructor uses the reflections for ‘just-in-time’ planning and design of instruction. Although reading reflections constitute only a small fraction (5-10%) of total points in our courses, they are excellent predictors of final course grades (r-square > 0.70). These results support the notion that improving students’ monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection skills will enhance their learning.

In a survey of reading habits, we asked students to describe their reading goals, self-regulation of environmental conditions, and reading strategies. Results indicate that students generally do not employ many expert reading strategies, and that there are significant differences between the experimental (classes with reflection) and control (classes without reflection) groups regarding the completion of reading assignments (94% vs. 36%, respectively), the depth of reading (deeper approaches used by experimental group), and reading strategies used during all three phases of reading (increased strategies and frequencies reported by experimental group). These results confirm that reading reflections are having significant impacts on student reading and metacognitive skills, and they underscore the importance of attending to students’ reading knowledge and skills.