مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد دستیابی به فراشناخت از طریق ساختار استراتژی فراشناختی – امرالد ۲۰۱۷

Learning is an essential part of human life, especially at a young age. We start learning on an instinctive level with our first breath, but only later do cognitive processes develop both naturally, through contact with the external environment, and explicitly, through structured instruction in various educational institutions. These institutions intend to accelerate and improve on the natural learning process. In order to assess the effectiveness of learning, scholars in the educational field have developed a taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), which presents the learning process as a progressive acquisition of knowledge and skills starting from the remembering and understanding of new information – to the application, analysis and evaluation, and finally, creation of new knowledge which culminates Bloom’s learning pyramid (see Exhibit 1). Various instruction methods have been used to accelerate the progression of a student towards higher levels of learning. In the recent years, several interactive methods gained popularity including flipped classroom (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998), inverted classroom (Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000), the case method (Apaydin, 2008), and peer instruction (Mazur, 2009) to name a few. The common feature of these methods is their interactive nature whereby the students interact with instructors and peers, as opposed to just being passive recipients of knowledge in oral or visual form. The key feature of interaction is verbalization of thoughts by the students, which leads to better cognitive comprehension of the concepts. As Karl Weick (1995: p. 176) aptly put it, “we don’t know what we think until we hear what we say.” Moreover, another important feature of these methods is an immediate feedback from peers and instructors, which helps students to rectify their misconceptions and organize their new knowledge therefore making it more cognitively accessible in the future. Potentially, this process could lead them to think about their own growing understanding of the material. However, explicit thinking about their own learning process and moving from the metaphorical ‘passenger seat’ to the ‘driver seat’ is not part of these methods. Controlling thinking processes and becoming more aware of one’s learning is called metacognition (Sindhwani, & Sharma, 2013). “A ‘metacognitive’ approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000: p. 18). Students’ thinking about their own learning is not an inherent part of the above-mentioned methods. Therefore, an additional component should be added to already quite effective interactive settings to achieve the top of Bloom’s taxonomy faster. In this paper we suggest one possible way to introduce metacognition into a classroom. The novelty of our research lies in bridging between the metacognitive thinking about learning, and the application of conceptual frameworks learnt in class to issues with which students are grappling in their own lives. We argue that this introspective task enables them to achieve higher levels of Bloom’s learning taxonomy, such as synthesis and evaluation. To our knowledge, such connection was not explicitly covered in previous research on the subject.