Pre-assessments to help students plan
Pre-assessments that help students understand their existing knowledge about a topic can help them plan their approach to learning. The pre-assessment could take the form of homework, a quiz, or clicker questions. Timely and specific feedback is key.
Regulatory checklists
An explicit list of prompts about planning, monitoring, and evaluating can help students better regulate their learning (Schraw, 1998):
Reflecting on learning experiences
Reflecting on learning experiences is an important part of metacognition. Reflection helps learners build and fine tune their metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation skills.
After a learning experience (e.g., a class session; after an assignment, project, or exam is complete and feedback has been received), self-regulated learners reflect on the learning strategies they used and their resultant performance to better inform their approach to future learning experiences. This reflection can be facilitated by:
Learning to Learn Course
In 1982, the University of Michigan began offering a Learning to Learn course through the department of psychology (Hofer & Yu, 2003; Hofer, Yu, & Pintrich, 1998; McKeachie, Pintrich, & Lin, 1985) Students who struggle in their first term and/or in their first year are actively encouraged to enroll, but the course is open to anyone. Completion of the course fulfills a university distribution requirement in the social sciences.
The course meets for two hours per week in lecture (75-100 students, led by faculty) and two hours per week in discussion section (20-25 students, led by grad student TA). Demand for the course exceeds capacity.
Students in the course become familiar with basic concepts of cognitive and motivational psychology and develop a variety of learning and regulatory strategies. As part of the Learning to Learn course, students are asked to apply the strategies they are learning in the Learning to Learn course to another course they are taking and reflect on those experiences.
Analysis of pre- and post-data collected from students who had participated in the course indicated positive outcomes for the students: decreased test anxiety, increased self-efficacy, increased mastery orientation to learning, and increased strategy use (Hofer & Yu, 2003; Hofer, Yu, & Pintrich, 1998; McKeachie, Pintrich, & Lin, 1985).
Strategic Resource Use Intervention
A study by Chen and colleagues (Chen, Chavez, Ong, & Gunderson, 2017) presents a discipline agnostic, external intervention that can be paired with any course without relying heavily on faculty buy-in or involvement.
In the study, undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory statistics course were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Students in the treatment condition completed an online survey that asked them to select from a list of available course resources those that they thought would facilitate their studying for an upcoming exam. The list of resources was determined in collaboration with the teaching faculty. Students were also asked open-ended questions about why each resource would be useful and how they planned to use each resource. Students in the control condition simply received a message stating that their exam was coming up and they should prepare for it.
Students in the treatment condition outperformed the students in the control condition by one third of a letter grade. Students in the treatment condition actually used fewer resources when studying and were hypothesized to be more strategic in their approach.
Detailed Timesheets
MIT Professor Stephan L. Chorover asked students to complete detailed timesheets of their learning activities in 9.68: Affect: Neurobiological, Psychological and Sociocultural Counterparts of Feelings. On the timesheets, students documented the amount of time they spent on various activities as well as their level of effort and engagement. Students were asked to fill in their timesheets at least 3x/week and bring them to class.
Journaling
MIT Professor Stephan L. Chorover required students in 9.68 and 9.70: Social Psychology to keep journals to document their progress throughout the subjects, and to record their thoughts, feelings, and questions about the subjects. Professor Chorover stressed the utility of journaling in preparing for in-class and study group discussions. Out of respect for personal privacy, the journals were not collected or graded.
Reflecting on learning experiences
MIT Senior Lecturer Anjali Sastry’s project-based subject 15.S07: Global Health Lab intentionally allots time in the syllabus for students to come together and reflect on their projects – what worked well, what did not, which assumptions were valid, which were not, what they learned overall, and how their projects connect to bigger themes.
Portfolios
Olin Professor Helen Donis-Keller has students in her introductory biology course complete a portfolio instead of a final exam. The portfolio is intended to encourage a mastery orientation towards learning and provide opportunities to engage in metacognition. Students are required to include quizzes and selected assignments in their portfolio. Students are asked to reflect on the questions/assignments they had difficulty with, submit corrections, and then reflect on what they learned in doing their corrections. Students also self-assess their progress towards the measurable outcomes of the course and provide evidence to support their assessment.