College of Education
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Item PANCAKES, DUCKLINGS, THINKING IN YOUR BRAIN: MANIFESTATIONS OF 4-YEAR-OLDS’ EMERGING METACOGNITION DURING JOINT PICTURE BOOK READING(2019) Faust, Brecca Berman; Afflerbach, Peter; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Developmental psychologist John Flavell (1979, 1981) used the term metacognition to encompass any form of thinking about one’s thinking. Flavell did not consider this second-level capacity to be a regular part of the thinking and learning of preschool children. However, research using developmentally-appropriate tasks, especially early literacy tasks, has suggested otherwise. Therefore, through this qualitative and exploratory study, I investigated whether and how seven 4-year-olds attending full-day preschool were metacognitive as they read narrative picture books with me in their classroom. Over the course of their pre-kindergarten school year, during free choice morning centers, I engaged the participants in three joint readings of commercially available, narrative picture books. Throughout the informal dialogue of each joint reading session, I posed questions meant to encourage metacognitive processing. I transcribed the dialogue from these sessions and coded each researcher and participant speech turn. I then utilized a constant-comparative process to analyze transcriptions throughout the data collection process while referring to Flavell’s (1979, 1981) conceptualization of metacognition and prior studies of metacognition with preschool participants. This process resulted in the articulation of seven categories of metacognition relevant to preschoolers’ joint reading processes: Feeling of Knowing Story Content, Judgment of Difficulty, Reflecting on Reading, Verbal Self-Revising, Expanding Storytelling, Task Planning, and Justifying Verbalizations. Participants engaged in a total of 219 instances of these forms of metacognition. Approximately 60% of these instances were prompted—occurring in response to a question that I posed within the joint reading dialogue. However, approximately 40% of recorded instances of metacognition occurred spontaneously. All seven participants were metacognitive in at least five of the seven categories, across all four books, and through both prompted and spontaneous verbalizations. Consistent with Flavell’s (1979) conceptualization, metacognition functioned as a transactionally-relevant resource for each joint reading participant, manifesting in ways that reflected varying efforts to participate in the task and construct meaning from the story. My results challenge the notion that metacognition has limited relevance before proficient or conventional print reading (Baker, 2005; Hacker, 1998; Pressley & Gaskins, 2006; Veenman, et al., 2006) and provide further support for Whitebread et al.’s (2009) conclusion that underappreciation of the metacognitive capabilities of preschoolers is becoming an “increasingly untenable” position (p. 64). Given my findings, I discuss implications for metacognitive theory and for future research on reading-relevant metacognition with preschool children.Item IDENTIFYING THE NATURE OF METACOGNITION INSTRUCTION IN READING CLASSROOMS(2017) Ozturk, Nesrin; Afflerbach, Peter; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Metacognition helps control cognitions through the actions and interactions of metacognitive knowledge, experiences, and strategies. Since 1979, metacognition has been extensively studied and found to be an effective tool for learning. In reading, metacognition is associated with improved vocabulary, reading awareness, strategies, comprehension, and task performance. Research confirmed metacognition can be successfully taught. However, it has limited influence on mainstream classrooms; classroom instruction lacks pedagogies of metacognition. Paradoxically, teachers’ practices have been assessed inconsistently and independent of students’ metacognition. For these problems, this study developed a pedagogy of metacognition (PMR) and examined the structural validity of its measurement instrument (ITMR). Following a comprehensive literature review, a PMR consisted of fostering students’ metacognitive knowledge, adopting goal-directedness, integrating language of thinking, scaffolding students’ strategic reading, encouraging their independence with strategic reading, assessing metacognition, and prolonging instruction. Then, scale validation procedures were followed. After scale items were generated, QUAID examination, expert, cognitive, and focus-group interviews were conducted for content and construct validity. Following the ITMR’s initial simulation, the data were collected from reading teachers in the United States of America. The data were collected by a computer-assisted survey method and a non-probability sampling technique. Then, the data were analyzed by a factor analysis method, Welch’s, and Spearman’s tests. The ITMR at elementary school level was found to have a unidimensional model accounting for 60% of the total variance (α.97). There were no mean differences in teachers’ self-reported metacognition instruction practices at any grade levels. All dimensions of the ITMR were strongly and positively correlated. By these findings, the significance of this study was recognized and its contributions to the literature were summarized. Also, the discrepancy between the literature and the ITMR and the congruence of metacognition instruction practices across elementary grades was discussed. Assessment practices were recognized as potential aids for classroom metacognition instruction. Future studies were recommended to improve the validity of the ITMR and understanding of classroom metacognition instruction. Educational implications aimed to support both in-service and pre-service teachers as possible. Finally, limitations with scale development, scale’s generalizability, data collection, and analyses were discussed.Item Adult Readers' Calibration of Word Learning(2011) Parkinson, Meghan; Alexander, Patricia A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The current study examined undergraduates' metacognitive processes during word learning, a crucial component of building representations of key concepts from text. Noticing the need to construct meaning for unknown words requires metacognitive monitoring. Constructing meanings for those words requires regulation of cognition. Fukkink (2005) provided a model for word learning, based on think aloud data that represented a series of metacognitive activities word learners engaged in when faced with an unknown word. The evaluation process within Fukkink's (2005) model related to the judgments learners made about new word meanings and how accurate they believed those judgments to be. A specific aspect of metacognitive evaluation is calibration, or the accuracy with which learners asses their knowledge on a particular cognitive task (Glenberg & Epstein, 1985; Lichtenstein & Fischhoff, 1977). The current study more closely examined word learning and calibration, while addressing some gaps in the literature and offering a model of influences on word learning to complement Fukkink's process model. The current study sought to answer questions related to the following goals: 1. To determine the influence of several factors related to adult readers' word learning and calibration of word learning. 2. To assess empirical evidence relative to a model of reading skill, vocabulary knowledge, passage comprehension, and metacognitive evaluation related to word learning using methods that directly measure word learning and metacognitive evaluation. 3. To determine which text factors influenced the ease with which word learners could derive meaning while reading and evaluate their level of performance on a word knowledge test. A measured variable path analysis showed a similar goodness of fit for both the incidental word learning condition and the intentional word learning condition. Prior word knowledge was found to be positively related to judgments of learning, but negatively related to calibration of word learning within the path model. Think-aloud data did not illuminate a connection between passage comprehension, strategic processing, and word learning. However, think-aloud data did reveal that students who decreased in performance from word knowledge pretest to posttest self-reported challenge while reading more frequently than other students. Finally, repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed differences in passage comprehension and JOLs between passages, prompting an analysis of specific text features underlying text difficulty that were not represented with a readability formula.