Tamas, I certainly agree that we should strive for deeper learning. How would you motivate people to learn. Would you start with a definition of learning shared by teacher and learner?

It is probably because the early attempts at teaching metacognitive and cognitive skills failed to produce the desired results. Those early attempts especially in the US colleges produced students who developed the skills but wouldn't use them. Researchers like the late Paul Pintrich and his contemporaries therefore conceded there was more to self- regulation than cognitive skills.

Gideon, I definitely agree that there is more to metacognition than cognitive skills. We are having just such a discussion on Linkedin at the Metacognition Group. I started a sub discussion there which was labeled MetaLearning Curricula: Are there any? Who is using them? How effective are they? Although everyone in that discussion doesn't agree on the definition of Metacognitiion, there are some interesting perspective on both the cognitive and affective dimensions of knowing about....knowing, learning, thinking....

Gideon, Here is more data to support your point that meta teaching has not been very successful at the college level. This report highlights the reasons, focusing of what they call the pedagogy of application. I've just posted a comment on this report on my Linkedin Discussion (Meta Curricula: Are There any...

Fran Toomey • Calvin started a new discussion (Student Success Courses (in higher ed)} that I believe addresses teaching metacognition skills at all levels, so I'm coping the site here:

College 101 Courses for Applied Learning and Student Success

Melinda Mechur Karp et al

http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=1142

This site addresses 3 critical elements of learning and metalearning: (Self) Awareness, Agency and Application. I'd add a 4th A: Accountability (for both teacher and learner).

Here's another site addressing student success from an assessment point of view:

http://www.pearsonlearningsolutions.com/academic-executives/blog/2012/10/15/educators-voice-seeking-student-success/

So, we might add a 5th A to Metalearning: (Self) Awareness, Agency, Application, Assessment (formative/informative/self), and Accountability.

We can hand out ideas about learning. here is an example of what might help students.

Don Woods, Emeritus, Chemical Engineering, McMaster University

Thanks, Don. I think that is a useful tool. Have you found that students respond to this while taking your courses?

Good question. I would hope so but since I retired in 2000 I have not had a chance to use this approach.

Lately I've been thinking about the role of f(informative) formative assessment--by both learnes and teachers--as being a key to metacognition. It seems to me that if a teacher/learner has a goal/purpose in mind, there must be check points (formative assessment) along the way to keep going in the desired direction. Although I believe that we use (judgmental) formative assessment at the higher ed level, I'm not sure that we really use it as a tool for "course" correction.

I've actually had students tell me that I overdo it on (informative) formative assessment. Something to work on.

I have been working with Dr. Randy Isaacson for some time on teaching college students to be better at simple knowledge monitoring (in some models the foundation of metacognition). You can find a description of how we incorporate knowledge monitoring into a course curriculum in the following article. http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1048

Chistopher, Thank you for the link and for adding to the discussion. I so strongly believe in the power of metacognition to empower students to engage in deep learning that I am eager to keep this conversation going.

Christopher, Checked out the site...again, thank you. I posted it on my Scoopit Metacognition site.

http://www.scoop.it/t/metacognition-1

Fran, You are welcome. This is also an area in which I have a great deal of interest. My interests is partially due to my teaching an educational psychology course to pre-service teachers. My hope is that how we designed our course students form the habit of mind of knowledge monitoring and then they teach that skill to their k-12 students.

It looks like your scoop it site has a great deal of informative resources. I am looking forward to reviewing many of them.

Thanks Chris, And I will look forward to any sites or articles you can share with us.

You might be interested to know, if you don't already, that there is a fairly active Metacognition group on Linkedin, including a dicussion I started called Metalearning.

PS, My interest comes from my degree in Developmental Psy as well as teaching a graduate course called "Development and Learning." and an undergrad ed course in Cognition and Indiividual Differences. As well I continue to develop a wiki site for middle school teachers on "Learning how to learn.."

Teachers may not use the term "Metacognition' very often, but some do try to encourage their students in taking responsibility for their own learning. For example, a visit to www.pedagoo.org or the personal Blogs of a number of teachers of will lead you to examples of teachers using Bloom's Taxonomy or the SOLO Taxonomy with their students. Some share these 'models' with their students as a supporting tool for them to use in directing their own learning. Whether or not we have reservations about the accuracy of these models, the teachers seem to be able to demonstrate their use for the students and themselves in planning their own lessons. Personally, I think this is the route to go. Provide conceptual tools for teachers and students to think about their own learning and/or practice and leave them to apply them within their own contexts. Given the variation in contexts that teachers work in, prescriptive models of practice are, in my view, of limited use. This means encouraging teachers to think of themselves as professionals who solve pedagogical problems for themselves. For some, as we found, this requires a reorientation of their own thinking before they hand control of (and this development of) their own learning to their students. (http://www.erej.ua.es/rdd/article/view/54)

Thanks, Colin., for adding to the discussion. However we define the concept of metacognition, I wish we had better data on who is doing it, how, and on what kind of schedule.

Hi all. What a lovely discussion. I use quizzes as a formative assessment tool together with metacognitive training/feedback during a large compulsory advanced statistics course at Uni to promote self-regulated learning. It's proven to be a wonderful resource for me as an educator: evaluations went up, I stopped having "criers" in my office before exams,and a number of students who did not agree with their mark went down. Some students did not like metacognitive feedback, but student who struggled with the course found it to be very useful. I even included their unsolicited comments into the paper. Overall, having metacognitive feedback helped students to have more realistic predictions of their exam performance. Hope this helps.