– Hi, everyone. I’m Niya Bond, the faculty developer here at OneHE, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Joey Woldman. Joey, we are gonna be talking about the metacognitive lab report. That’s a mouthful. Can you tell the OneHE community what this is and how you got involved?

– The metacognitive lab report came out of a desire to share an idea about how to prompt students to be a little bit more intentional about how they’re studying for big exams. I was thinking particularly in the context of STEM, because I’ve seen so much on the benefits of careful metacognitive work and how it improves students’ performance in STEM courses, and I wanted to provide faculty members with an idea for an assignment that didn’t feel too far off of the content that they would normally offer students during a semester, or the types of assessments that may be more traditional in a STEM context. So in this setting, it was scientific writing, and particularly the writing of labs.

And I really touched upon my own undergraduate experience doing my core courses in scientific reasoning and quantitative reasoning as a humanist. And I never really understood as a writer the format of a scientific lab report. So what I wanted to do is to marry that type of scientific writing with something that really connected learners with their thinking process. So what would it look like if their data was so personal and specific to them that the active metacognition also meant learning a little bit more of themselves as learners in a STEM context and how it can make them stronger in all future STEM courses that they might take. So it was kind of a blend of an interest in offering faculty members a template that they could take and redesign for their specific course, and an interest in helping students feel more connected to their own thinking in a way that didn’t feel like an added on activity, that felt very embedded in the course.

– Well, I’m really glad that you said that, and I really think the bringing in the lived experience is so important, especially as you noted in STEM, because it can increase engagement, it can increase motivation, and like you said, it can increase interest and build those connections and contextualization that are so important for successful learning.

– Absolutely. And I think a lot of times, there’s this sort of fear to incorporate feelings of self-efficacy and feelings of the person in a STEM context. It feels a lot of times it errs on the side of memorization or knowing how formulas are applied, and the human element can sometimes get lost or overshadowed. So I really wanted to develop some kind of activity that centered the human in it, but still felt productive toward the learning objectives of developing scientific writing skills and thinking about hypothesis formation, how to use evidence and data to support or go back to the drawing board and formulate some logic slash reasons/conclusions based on the evidence. And I can also see it being adapted to a non-STEM context. I think my whole prerogative was, instead of an exam wrapper that usually happens after a learner has received a kind of graded assessment, there are a series of questions or some kind of no stakes questionnaire to have them reflect on what that is, like how they did, if they met their goals, how they feel about certain content that appeared on the exam, et cetera.

That to me fell into, so Flavell, when he came up with metamemory and this idea of metacognition in the 1970s, there’s this idea of online metacognition and offline metacognition, and we’re, I feel like, more familiar with that offline metacognition, which is distance from the actual activity, time spent reflecting on what happened, how we were thinking, the processes that we used to meet a certain challenge, and that gives us time to switch directions. I wanted to do something that was a little bit closer or in the moment. So in the metacognitive lab report, there’s this kind of pre-study period or during study period where they’re writing and they’re documenting what they’re doing to set them up for the post-exam phase, which is looking at how those strategies impact their ability to perform on the exam, whether that was a positive or a negative, and giving them time to then course correct with some real data, right? Or data that they feel is so connected to process.

So I think this can be done in various contexts. Like what I wanted to do is blend the kind of thought process and intention in the act of studying or in the act of preparing and connect it so deeply to a learner’s sense of goal fulfillment success at the end point. So that they’re not just looking at the grade and trying to backtrack and really remember what they did in the moment. I wanted it to be a little bit more fluid and timely. So I can see that happening in any kind of preparatory questions for article analysis, or preparing a kind of reading response, or doing some initial historical analysis of primary source material. What are my initial questions? How am I reading the source material? What questions am I asking in the moment of myself? Am I understanding what the significance of the source is? And then following the kind of written submission, let’s check in with that. Like, do my methods have to change? Were my note taking skills adequate to help me respond fully? What are the processes that I’m using to problem solve or meet these academic challenges? So I do see it broadly applicable, but in this sense, like I tried to really be as focused and contextualized as possible for those STEM courses that really do rely on careful lab reporting or teaching the skills of scientific writing. But yeah, I absolutely agree. I think these skills are broadly applicable and will serve our learners far beyond their academic careers, because the more they know how they think in different contexts and know how to regulate that thinking and the processes that they use to tackle challenges, the more resilient individuals they’re going to be and the more intentional thinkers they’re gonna be.

– Well, that was almost a beautiful ending, but I’m gonna put you on the spot one time here. That was a lovely sentiment, and I think so true. We usually end with, what’s one thing to get started? It sounds like maybe for our community, it’s access your resource, but then after that, what’s one tip you have for someone interested in this? What’s one idea you want to share with them about how to make it happen?

– I do think that the first step is just inviting a little bit of mess, right? Like being open to different strategies. I think a lot of times, we are so connected to our own thoughts and our own processes that helped us excel in academia or helped us overcome challenging materials or concepts that it’s very easy to think of our process as the only process. And really, the beauty of the human brain is that everyone can approach the world differently according to their perspectives, their lived experience, how their brain works. So inviting the kind of messiness and allowing them to chart their own path, you know, really giving them the agency of their own thinking and letting them discover what process works best for them in a safe context can be really empowering. So I think the first step is to determine what you really want your learners to develop as independent thinkers. And then giving them the safe space to explore that, right? Like giving them some latitude to allow them to get messy in their own thinking and test what may or may not work. So that could be done with very simple things like identifying one activity that may not be worth a lot of points, or giving them an opportunity to revise something that was high stakes in the context of your course. You know, just giving your learners a little bit of a safety net to show them that thinking doesn’t have to be high stakes all the time. It can really be a process of exploration.

– I thought we had the most perfect ending, but now we really do. You heard it here first, everyone: mess is magical. Pedagogically, human to human, beyond the classroom, mess is magical. Well, thank you Joey so much for your time. It’s a pleasure chatting with you. I’m really excited for everyone to dig into this resource, think about how they can use it in their context, and hopefully, we get to chat again.

– I would absolutely love that, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. And for those of you out there who decide to use the metacognitive lab report, definitely be in touch, ’cause I’d love to hear about it.