Metacognition
To help students become better readers for comprehension, teachers should introduce metacognition to students. Students need to be aware of how they reading a text to make sure they gaining a full understanding of the material. When readers use metacognition, they think about the way they read before, during, and after. Before reading, students may define their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they may monitor their reading for understanding and make adjustments to their reading depending on the difficulty of the text. After reading, students will check for their understanding of the text (Adler, C., 2001).
Comprehension Monitoring Strategies
- Locate difficult parts of a text
- Identify the difficulty
- Restate difficult sentences or passages in own words
- Review the text
- Look forward at the text for information that may help resolve the difficulty
(Adler, C., 2001)
Metacognition can also be helpful for writing because student need to think about the way they write. It is helpful for students to ask themselves if their writing makes sense and will other readers understand what they are trying to communicate. It would be helpful for a teacher to have student complete draft copies of a paper and have other classmates proofread each other’s papers. Once students gain feedback, they could learn to edit their papers to make their writing clearer.
For a lesson, a teacher could introduce the meaning of metacognition to students and a metacognition Venn Diagram to help students gain a better understanding of the word’s meaning. After having students read a text, have them fill in the metacognition diagram with information they understood from the text and information they were thinking about during the text. This diagram will help student to really think and understand the information from the text. Once students are finished with their diagrams, the teacher could have students share with and elbow partner to compare their information (Reading Resource, 2009).
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A thinking bubble is another great activity for students to learn about metacognition and build comprehension skills. Before the lesson, the teacher could cut out a thinking bubble and find a text to use with students. The teacher will need to place students in pairs and explain the process. One partner will become the thinker and the other partner will read the text out loud. The thinker’s job is to verbally speak their thinking while the other student is reading the text. This is a great comprehension strategy because it encourages students think and understand the material presented in a text while they are reading. While the students are performing this learning activity, the teacher can observe students to check for their understanding (Reading Resource, 2009).
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Videos
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWEzQo1AbGg
Rebecca Pittorino teaches has her students about the meaning of metacognition through explainations, modeling, and student participation. The learning activity for this lesson is a learning salad. The learning consists of the text and thinking of the text. This activity is helpful for students to learn about metacognition to increase comprehension because all of the students are actively engaged in thinking about the text. This activity also makes it easy for Pittorino to assess the students based on the placements in the salad. Overall, Pittorino’s instruction really helps her students walk through the process of using metacognition to eventually use this strategy on their own (Pittorino, R., 2012). |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG5d6ZIycgY
This video presents a class of 6th graders using metacognition skills with partners and as a whole group. Students are engaged with reading a text and have the opportunity to collaborate about their thinking of the text. All of the students seem very enthused and engaged in what the text is trying to communicate. Conducting a lesson using this strategy allows the teacher to easily discover each student’s comprehension of the text based on their responses (Msgurthie, 2014). |