Entry #1 

Hi readers!  

I’d like to begin by introducing myself, my name is Kaitlin Owens and I am from Halifax Nova Scotia. I have a double major in French and History from Acadia University. I’ve recently finished my first year of my Bachelor of Education degree at St. Francis-Xavier and am going into my second and final year.  

I decided to enter the teaching profession because I had many moments during my schooling of self-doubt, and I didn’t want that for others. I want to give my students the tools they require in order to have confidence in their abilities. One of the main goals in teaching is creating lifelong learners but how is this possible when there are students who doubt their own abilities? No amount of saying “you’re smart” is going to help unless they truly believe it themselves. You might be asking yourself how can we convince students that they are smart and capable of learning? I don’t think there is a simple answer to that question, but I think it is something that we should always be thinking of and striving to accomplish.  

This brings me to the reason of this blog. This summer I have the honour of working as Dr. Jennifer Mitton-Kükner research assistant and I’ll be exploring metacognition in relation to classroom teaching in rural areas, focusing on junior high and high school. For those of you who are unaware Metacognition is described as “thinking about thinking.” That’s the simple version of it, but I think it’s too broad and to truly understand the concept, you need to explore it further. According to Hüseyin Öz (2005) "metacognitive process enhances learning by guiding students’ thinking, and by helping them follow a wise course of action as they think through a problem, make decisions, or attempt to understand a situation or text” (p. 151). Anderson (as cited in Hüseyin Öz, 2005, p. 150-151) believes there are 5 steps in the metacognition process: 

Step 1: “Preparing and planning for learning” (Öz, 2005)- An individual will form a mindset of the task, determine learning goals, think if they’ve encountered a similar task in the past and the use of self-questioning (What background knowledge will help with the task, the order of steps within a task, etc) (Öz, 2005). 

Step 2: “Selecting and using learning strategies” (Öz, 2005) - This one is fairly straightforward, an individual will select strategies that they believe will help complete a task. Some examples of such strategies are selecting and using relevant clues/information, memory techniques, etc.  

Step 3: “Monitoring strategy use” (Öz, 2005) - An individual will evaluate whether or not the strategy they have chosen is helping them to complete a task. If the strategy is not, they will change to a strategy better suited for the task.  

Step 4: “Orchestrating various strategies” (Öz, 2005) - This strategy is connected to step 3. Through this step an individual will realize that a task requires more than one strategy at a time. Hüseyin Öz (2005) gives the example of becoming stuck on a word. In order to understand the meaning of a word, an individual may use relevant clues and word analysis (p. 150).  

Step 5: “Evaluating strategy use and learning” (Öz, 2005) - The final step in completing a task is reflecting. An individual will reflect on whether they completed the task effectively “One asks him/herself how well s/he did, what alternatives would have changed the outcome, and whether the knowledge is transferable” (Öz, 2005, p. 151).  

I think I’ll leave it there for now. I hope you have a basic understanding of what metacognition is. Throughout part of the summer I will be reading peer-reviewed sources to learn their interpretation of metacognition and whether metacognition can help students in their learning process. I will be creating weekly blogs to let you all know what I’ve read and learned. Let me know what you think, if you need clarification or if you have any questions.  

Until next time, 

Kaitlin Owens 

Oz H. Metacognition in foreign/second language learning and teaching. Hacettepe University Journal of Education. 2005;29:147-156.