· Discuss one or more questions or confusions that you have from reading the module (on social cognitive theory). You should comment on these within others' posts.
It’s not so much of confusion but on page 247 of module 14, it states that Raymond Nickerson first noted the value of writing as a tool for higher thinking, and this only happened in 1984. Since this only happened in 1984, does this mean that college students and high school students didn’t have to write papers as often as we do now? What did they do instead of writing papers when teachers assigned a bigger assignment? It just blows me away that writing was only thought to enhance higher level thinking in 1984.
· Describe in detail how you could involve metacognitive knowledge and regulation (such as self-interrogation or theory of mind) while teaching within your content area. Metacognition in music and art education, for example, should look very different from reading comprehension strategies.
In my content area, Spanish, I could involve metacognitive knowledge through having students use strategies to learn information. Using strategies to learn the verbs of verbs in Spanish could help students more easily remember the conjugations of verbs, and they could strategies to help them remember vocabulary like if a word starts with the same letter in English and Spanish. Also students should know how language is learned through the brain and what parts of the brains pertain to learning language. Students could use self-interrogation a lot while learning a foreign language. Students could make note cards for vocab mostly, but also for verbs and conjugations of irregular verbs. When students use flash cards, they see one side and then ask themselves what the word or phrase means, and then they can gauge how much they know about the subject or verb, etc. Through flash cards, they question themselves and learn how much they do and do not know.
· Critical thinking involves primarily the control of information, the ‘analysis, synthesis, and evaluation’ of information to solve a problem or reach a goal. Metacognition involves the control of thinking, or monitoring and evaluation of thinking and learning strategies. Which do you feel is more relevant to your content area? Why? Give an example if possible.
I feel that critical thinking is more important for my content area of Spanish because students need to be able to write papers in Spanish, and that involves a great amount of critical thinking. Writing a paper requires a lot of critical thinking in English, but when a paper is in Spanish, it requires even more thinking in general, but also more critical thinking because students have to think of the grammar, word choice, etc in Spanish, and it is harder to think of these things in Spanish than English, or any language that is one’s native language. For any Spanish class, students need to be able to speak, write, listen, and write the language and all of these combined require a great level of critical thinking when an assignment combines all or close to all of these aspects of the language.
I left the book in my office, but I think that line was saying that writing was considered a tool for IMPROVING thinking, not just a method of expressing higher order thinking. Writing acts as practice for expressing and reflecting on thoughts.... So, writing has been used as product of thinking for a long time, but not as a method of learning.
ReplyDeleteYour description brings up an important part of metacognition: knowing what you do not know. Many people don't even realize this is important.... Also, as you seem to understand, a lot of the information processing encoding strategies can be used for metacognition.
I agree that in using a foreign language, there's a great deal of synthesis that's required.... the right word choice, the spelling, the relation to English words.... perhaps while LEARNING spanish, more metacognition would be helpful, and when using the language, critical thinking is more relevant.