Metacognition can be thought as a higher order mental task where students think about their learning, ways, and options for approaching learning tasks. In other sense, metacognition is about knowing they self in terms of one’s ability to learn and it means the student can self-manipulate in order to achieve a positive learning outcome. In this context, supporting the development of metacognition is a powerful way to promote student success. In fact, students with strong metacognitive skills are positioned to learn more and perform better, they can identify concepts they do not understand and select appropriate strategies for learning those concepts, they know how to implement strategies they have selected and carry out their overall study. However, many students struggle to meaningfully engage in metacognition processes. To solve this challenge and to encourage students to engage in inquiry and think things for themselves, by enhancing their capacities to build connections and relations between concepts, I developed an interesting practice, entitled “Fostering ontological teaching: an andragogic imperative to improve metacognition abilities of students”
My method of practice to encourage monitoring and control of learning, consists to design an ontology to specify and graphically represent the core content and cognitive demands inherent in standards and their inter-relationships. The ontology is used to guide students to understand the organization of their own learning and to self-assess their own progress. An ontology is a representation that provides a shared and common understanding of a domain (Engineering statistics course for my case). To design an ontology, the elements and their relationships have to be identified and defined. Students are asked to create a knowledge map of their understanding of some domain (Engineering statistics for my case). A knowledge map is a network representation of nodes and links, where nodes represented concepts and links represented relationships. A core aspect of the ontology is the inclusion of cognitive demands that relate the domain content to what learners are expected to do with the content. The network representation can support communication among students by showing visually how the concepts relate to each other. The network representation itself imposes a kind of standardization, both in the language, as well as the structure of the domain.
My innovative strategy to implement the practice is to encourage student to create their own ontologies ( different version from the initial one). Students are randomly assigned to different groups, to give them a chance to get comfortable with the content and to provide all students with opportunities to make valued contributions and to design ontologies. Students start to work together, to develop their collaborative intelligence abilities, and to succeed in unifying their ideas, to accept differences and to converge toward a good quality deliverable (collaborative work).
My practice has the transferability potential. In fact, the practice can be easily adapted and used in other context, such as other courses in mathematics, physics or economics. We can also upscale the practice in order to expend the effects to a larger group of students.
Innovator: Amine AMAR, Al Akhawayn University (AUI)