le opportunities to practice these skills. They simultaneously signal that higher-order thinking and metacognition are part of the ebb and flow of the education experience.
Mynlieff, Manogaran, St. Maurice, and Eddinger discuss the use of metacognitive writing exercises in large biology classes. Students were asked to explicitly consider why they made mistakes on exams and discuss why another answer would have been more appropriate. Students completing these assignments showed marked improvement in subsequent course assessments. Mynlieff, M., Manogaran, A. L., Maurice, M. S., & Eddinger,… Read more »
John Draeger discusses five sources of discomfort he has observed through years of teaching moral philosophy. He argues “that all of us (instructors, students, those outside the classroom) need to be aware of our own sources of discomfort with moral matters if we hope to move beyond them and towards a healthy engagement with these important issues.” I believe that these sources of discomfort will apply to many topics outside of the moral philosophy classroom – hot topics abound across the disciplines!
In this post, John Draeger shares some of the approaches he uses when teaching his philosophy course. I especially like his summary of the outcome, “students can begin to ‘think like a philosopher.’ It puts them in a position to move beyond mere coffee shop conversation and the rehash of media pundit drivel towards a more careful consideration of the issues.”
In Part 2 of this two-part post, John Draeger and Lauren Scharff further explore responses to WHY it might be useful for both instructors and students to learn about and incorporate metacognition. Faculty and student responses qualitatively fell into two categories of responses: metacognition was reported to be beneficial because it “improves student learning” and “improves teaching.”