Improving metacognition in the classroom through instruction,training, and feedback

Accurately judging one’s performance in the classroom can be challenging considering most students tend to be overconfident and overestimate their actual performance. The current work draws upon the metacognition and decision making literatures to examine improving metacognition in the classroom. Using historical data from several semesters of an upper-level undergraduate course (N?=?127), we analyzed students’ judgments of their performance and their actual performance for two exams. Students were instructed on the concepts of overconfidence, received feedback on exams, and were given incentives for accurate calibration. We found results consistent with the “unskilled and unaware” effect Kruger & Dunning (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134, 1999) where lower performing students initially displayed overconfidence and the highest performing students initially displayed underconfidence. Importantly, students were able to change both judgments and performance such that metacognitive accuracy improved significantly from the first to the second exam. In a second study, two additional semesters for the same course used in Study 1 were examined (N?=?90). For one of the semesters feedback was not provided, allowing us to determine whether feedback can improve both metacognitive judgments and performance. Our findings revealed significant improvements in performance paired with decreases in overconfidence on Exam 2, but only for students who received feedback about their performance and judgments. We postulate that feedback may be an important component in improvement metacognitive judgments.     

Personal and contextual factors related to teachers’ experience with stress and burnout

Teaching has been characterised as a stressful profession that is prone to burnout. Less is known about the specific ways in which teachers experience and navigate stressors associated with their work. This study aimed to qualitatively understand how teachers who perceive high and low levels of burnout characterise their lived experiences in school environments. Data were collected through interviews with 28 inservice teachers (11 male, 17 female) from the US Midwest who reported high- or low-burnout on a psychometric survey. Data were analysed by two experienced qualitative researchers. Results indicated that (a) low-burnout teachers perceived nurturing teaching environments, (b) high-burnout teachers perceived combative and constraining teaching environments, and (c) all teachers had to manage workplace stress. Building from these findings, we present a model for understanding how the school environment influences teacher burnout. This model highlights the importance of developing optimal working conditions that nurture teacher development.

Abbreviation: MBI-ES = Maslach Burnout Iventory-Educators Survey; IEP = Individualized Education Plan     

Investigating teacher presence in courses using synchronous videoconferencing

This research examines teacher presence in high school distance courses that are delivered by synchronous videoconference. In rural and remote areas, many school districts are using videoconferencing as way to reach dispersed students. This collective case study uses mixed methods to unpack the notion of presence from the perspective of teachers and their students. This study reports four key findings which have implications for building presence in a videoconference course: teachers’ confidence and experience aligned with higher presence; teaching videoconference and face-to-face classes simultaneously led to challenges with developing presence; immediacy behaviors correlated with higher presence; and, students’ learning preference related to perceived teacher presence. These findings confirm many of the issues raised in the literature about technology integration but also contribute new perspectives on teaching presence in a videoconference.     

Changes in Preference for and Perceptions of Relative Importance of Subjects During a Period of Educational Reform

This research formed phase 1 of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project ‘Pupils’ Approaches to Subject Option Choices’ and is a near repeat of a project carried out in the mid-1980s, thus allowing for a comparison of approaches to subject choice a decade apart, comparing the situation pre- and post-National Curriculum implementation. The simple two-part questionnaire, completed by 1600 children in 11 schools, shows the differences across time and between-school differences in subject preference, but little instability in perceptions of subject importance. Some useful additional data, giving student's reasons for liking subjects and finding subjects important, were obtained from interviews in four schools which formed phase 2 of the project. Comparisons are drawn with the data collected in 1984 on a similar basis. Issues of concern are highlighted with respect to particular subjects and to students’ stated reasons for liking subjects or finding them important, with regard to how this might relate to their subsequent subject choices and career development.     

Approach and Avoidance Motivation

In this article, we introduce this special issue by establishing a conceptual foundation for the distinction between approach and avoidance motivation. We do so primarily by explicating several reasons why the approach–avoidance distinction should be viewed as fundamental and basic to the study of human behavior. In addition, we compare and contrast the approach–avoidance designation with other designations that have been used in the motivational literature to cover the same or similar conceptual ground. Finally, we conclude by briefly overviewing the other contributions to this special issue, specifically highlighting how they make use of the approach–avoidance distinction.     

Role of questions in inquiry-based instruction: towards a design taxonomy for question-asking and implications for design

Many theories and models describe the various cognitive processes individuals engage in as they solve ill-structured problems. While diverse in perspectives, these theories and models uniformly agree that essential aspects of complex problem solving include iteration and inquiry. This paper further argues that an important yet overlooked component of knowledge construction during problem-solving is the ability to ask meaningful questions. What is needed, but not adequately articulated and validated, is a theoretical taxonomy of question-asking to better understand and guide a learner’s reasoning process. Based on the expert–novice literature, we proffer the following question taxonomy: shallow/simple (verification, disjunctive, concept completion), testing (example, feature specification, quantification, definition, comparison), and deep/complex questions (interpretation, causal antecedent, causal consequence, goal orientation, instrumental/procedural, enablement, expectation, and judgmental). We, therefore, build on existing theories/models of problem-solving, failure, and reflection and their implications towards a taxonomy of question-asking. Given this taxonomy, researchers and designers can better understand learners’ level of understanding and problem-solving trajectories.

     

Integrating multiple perspectives on the human-nature relationship: A reply to Fletcher 2017

The concept of “connectedness with nature” is increasingly used in environmental and sustainability discourse. However, this construct has also been critiqued and proponents charged with harboring an ambivalence that paradoxically reinforces a sense of separation from “nature”. We respond to one critique by demonstrating that whilst problematizing aspects of “connectedness with nature” has merit, selective use of examples misconstrues efforts in this field, undermines common ground and conflates theoretical conceptualizations with practical implementation. In addressing problems of perception and praxis, we emphasize the primacy of direct experience in shaping ways of knowing and recommend integral ecology (based on Wilber’s integral theory) as an inclusive framework for attending to multiple perspectives on the human-nature relationship.