A Dozen Simple Metacognition Strategies, Part 1
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #64
Hi! This week, I visited a school in Midlothian, presenting a dozen simple ways that we can integrate memory and metacognition in the classroom and build a foundation for effective studying.
The purpose of the talk follows on really well from my last update about study skills, and I want to share some of the ideas with you (before getting on to motivation – that will be coming soon!).
Let’s dive in.
The Context
When I give a talk at a school, it can be hard to know how much prior knowledge to expect. I want to give value to those who are new to the ideas as offering something useful for those who have heard of things like retrieval practice before.
This time I started with the importance, the ‘why’ of metacognition, and also included some key principles about how memory works and why it’s hard to understand.
The strategies were then interwoven with five main things:
Memory principles
Planning
Monitoring
Reflection
Independent study
I’ll share the first six strategies here, and to avoid this post getting too long, the next six plus some follow-up thoughts next week.
The Strategies
Strategy 1: Begin lessons with a quiz or other activity that revisits earlier content in an active way.
This is such an easy strategy that anyone can do. It’s not unusual to review a previous lesson, but much less common (at least from many lessons I’ve observed) to link in older content. But revisiting such content provides valuable spacing.
Strategy 2: Set homework that makes consolidation/revisiting topics inevitable.
Another way to build in the spacing effect in a way that is almost effortless is to work elements of older content into homework tasks. Rohrer et al. (2015) give the example of a maths homework task with is 1/3 consolidation of new content and 2/3 interleaved content from previous lessons.
Strategy 3: Things will stick better in LTM when they are actively retrieved, and when this retrieval is varied.
This strategy has many strands, but the key principle is based on desirable difficulties – moving away from passive repetition in similar contexts, and making practice more active and varied.
Strategy 4: Emphasise the role of forgetting, and how it is much faster and deeper than people expect.
It’s always helpful to remind teachers of how much learners forget. In my talk I shared a great quote from Roediger, which you can find here: “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material when they move to a more advanced class… it’s like they’ve never seen it before.” (That thought really hit home with me when I read it, and is one of the main reasons I started researching the spacing effect!).
Strategy 5: Build up students’ knowledge about learning over time, so that they can make decisions for themselves.
Metacognitive knowledge is what we know about learning, and we can’t expect students to develop this overnight. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this is like developing any skill – playing a musical instrument, for example. It takes time and feedback.
Strategy 6: Allow more silent planning time. This also provides opportunities for retrieval of prior knowledge.
Another incredibly easy thing to build into existing lessons – asking students to stop and think about a classroom task for 1–2 minutes before they start. As well as nudging them to focus on strategy, they will tend to think back to previous occasions when they tried a similar task, thus engaging in covert retrieval.
Next Week
As I mentioned, these came from a dozen strategies that were part of my recent CPD talk, and I will share strategies 7–12 next time.
Granted, some of these may be easier within the context of the talk itself, and so I will also share some further details next time, as well as a fun announcement!
In the meantime, all the best, and I hope you have a great week,
Jonathan
Last week: Effective Note Taking
Another shout-out for ‘Teaching Hacks: Fixing Everyday Classroom Issues with Metacognition’, edited by Nathan Burns. I believe that the discount code UKAUTHR25 should work for most buyers if getting it direct from the publisher. And more info on the SAGE site here.
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.