HLP 14: Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies

By Alician Humes, Lindsey Sharp and Melissa Blue

What Is It?

Teachers explicitly teach strategies that give students thought processes or engage students in analyzing their thoughts.

Why Does It Matter?

The goal of teaching these strategies is for the students to:

• Differentiate when and how to use strategies
• Enhance their learning and understanding of a topic 
• Analyze their own thought processes

Metacognition vs. Cognition

Cognitive strategies and education is teaching that gives students a thought process or thinking pattern like task analysis or mnemonic devices. Metacognitive strategies and education is teaching that engages students in analyzing their own thought process through things like self questioning or positive self talk.

Strategies for math

Think Pair Share

For this strategy, the teacher asks the class open-ended questions. Then, the students discuss the answers with their partner. Finally, the students share what they have found with the class.

Example

This can be helpful when teaching students how to solve word problems.

• The students are presented with a problem and asked to think about it independently.
• The students work together in pairs or groups to solve the problem. 
• Each pair or group demonstrates their work for the class.

Task Analysis

In this cognitive strategy, students are taught steps to a larger process in sequential order. This allows students to break up the task into smaller, more manageable steps. It also gives students an exact pattern to follow when solving similar problems. Visuals may be helpful to assist students in working through the mathematical process independently.

Example

To implement this strategy:

• The educator models the steps to solve the problem. 
• The educator then guides the class as they solve problems together.
• The educator gives the students a set of 3-5 problems to solve independently.
  • The educator can provide a list of steps to guide the student as they solve independently.
• The educator collects data on the problems the student solved independently.

Mnemonics

Mnemonics are a cognitive strategy that uses keywords to link new information into easy to remember words or phrases. These can be in the forms of acronyms and acrostics though a true mnemonic is a single word that represents the information. 

Example

An educator can teach the students to remember the order of operations using the acronym PEMDAS. With this mnemonic, each letter in the word represents the mathematical process that is necessary to solve problems with multiple operations.

An educator could use an acrostic, or a sentence in which the first letter of each word represents the order of operations the student should use. “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” is one common acrostic.

Positive Self-Talk

Self-talk is a metacognitive strategy that can be used to help students work through any academic process by developing a positive outlook on learning. In this strategy students can be taught to swap their negative or self-deprecating inner monologue about a subject with more positive phrases. This helps students develop self confidence and a growth mindset.

Example

• Students can be taught to say things like “I’m still learnin” rather than “I’m dumb.” 
• Students can be taught to tell themselves that they can always improve instead of what they’ve done wrong.
• The teacher can place the students into groups to allow students to improve learning outcomes through collaboration with their peers. 

Reading and Comprehension strategies 

Think aloud

In this strategy a teacher would model cognition or metacognition for the class explicitly by previewing the idea of metacognition and explaining to students that it means analyzing your thinking and thoughts. Then the teacher reads a short book or passage to the class stopping to verbalize their own thinking, usually focused on a specific topic like theme, character traits or elements of plot. This strategy can be used in conjunction with note taking strategies, mnemonics or students think-alouds. Students can also be encouraged to use this practice independently to help grow their metacognition skills.

 Self Questioning

This strategy is a metacognitive strategy that students can learn to use independently. After modeling or previewing metacognition, the teacher may give students a predetermined set of questions to ask themselves as they read. This helps students develop their own inner monologue.

These questions can be separated by: 

• Chapter
• Content area
• Timing (before, during or after the student reads). 

Example

One example would be a bookmark for students to use independently that helps them question their understanding and seek solutions to any difficulties. 

Graphic Organizers

This cognitive strategy gives students a way to catalog their thoughts. This can be done through graphics that help students visualize their thoughts and organize them in a more clear way. These double as notes for students to look back on.

The most important part of graphic organizers are: 

• To ensure they enhance students’ understanding
• Content is displayed logically

Example

Writing and Composition Strategies 

Graphic organizer: In this cognitive strategy students are given an organizer that helps students:

•  organize information in a logical way.
• Visualize what they are going to talk about
• Think about their writing before they begin. 

Modeling:

• The Teacher models this metacognitive strategy of the writing process. 
• The Teacher can go over self talk and think aloud during this part of the lesson. 

Example

A teacher writes the beginning, middle and end of the paragraph in front of the students while using self-talk and think-aloud to tell them why there is an introduction, examples and conclusion. 

Self-Questioning Frameworks

The teacher would teach students a set of questions to ask themselves.

• These  metacognitive questions should be focused towards a specific lesson like narrative writing.
• They should also help students with crafting their writing and meeting all of the requirements of the lesson.

Example

The teacher lays out questions about a story like, “Why am I writing this story?” “Who is in this story?” “What do they do in this story?” or “Where do they go?” 

Stage	Types of Questioning
Introduction	Why am I writing this? What message do I want to convey? What is this about?
Main Part	What content do I want to display? What do I want to argue?(if I want to) What is the explanation?
Conclusion	What did I talk about? How do I wrap it up?

Application Examples

Problem: The student will be able to add and subtract fluently within 10. 
Solution: The student will be taught to add and subtract using the task analysis below. The student will then have access to a card with the steps on it. As the student gains competency the teacher will gradually fade the use of the card.

Problem:After reading a short story, student will answer comprehension questions with 80% accuracy by the end of the current Individualized Education Program (IEP).
Solution:The student will be taught a self questioning framework to use when reading. These questions will be broken up into before, during, and after the reading sections. The teacher should model this through a think aloud while reading a story with the student.The student will then be given a card with questions that prompt thinking about what they will be reading.

Sources