Developing Metacognitive Questioning Skills
By Nathan Burns
Metacognitive questions force students to think in a particular metacognitive way and provides us with insight as to students thinking. Here are some suggestions for implementation…
This article examines questioning strategies, designed to improve the metacognitive abilities of our students. Unlike my other articles for HWRK Magazine on metacognition, there are only three strategies this time, but, as they are questioning strategies, exemplar questions are provided. This hopefully means that these strategies are ready to be used in your classroom right away!
Before moving on to the strategies themselves, it must be noted why metacognitive questioning is so important. Questioning is one of our most effective tools in evaluating the understanding of our students, as well as directing student thinking. The same is true for metacognition. Metacognitive questions force students to think in a particular metacognitive way and provides us with insight as to students thinking.
So, let’s get cracking with these three strategies!
Comprehension, Connection, Strategies, Evaluation
Comprehension, connection, strategies and evaluation describe the cycle that we go through (or at least, should go through!) when we are completing cognitive tasks. To begin with, we consider the comprehension of the task – this is what is it asking us to do. Secondly, we should consider when we have completed other similar tasks and how we went about it on those occasions (connection). Thirdly, we consider appropriate strategies that we can use to complete a task, especially considering our previous attempts and our comprehension of the task. Finally, once we have completed the task, it is crucial to evaluate – considering what went right, and what needs to go better next time, often in relation to the comprehension of the task and the strategy employed.
One of the best ways to ensure that students are thinking about these different areas is through direct questioning in relation to these areas. To begin with, and to support the explicit nature of the questioning, you could include the name of the areas you are focussing on (such as comprehension), but over time the focus on these may diminish as they become second nature to students.
So, here are some questions that you may wish to use:
Comprehension
What is the task asking you to do?
What pieces of information ought you include in you answer?
How do you know that the task is asking you to do that?
What layout for your response should you use considering the criteria given in the task?
What key pieces of information is the task focussing on, and how do you know?
Connection
When have you come across a similar, or identical task to the one just given to you?
How did you approach the similar task previously, and what was successful about that approach?
What are the similarities and differences between this task and the previous one that you have seen?
What strategy did you utilise last time you approached this type of task, and how successful was that for you?
What were some of you ‘even better if’ points from the similar task, and how may they be relevant in the response that you produce now?
Strategies
What are the different approaches that you can take to completing this task?
What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different strategies?
What are the criteria for ‘usefulness’ of the different strategies?
Do you favour one strategy over another? Why?
When have you utilised a given strategy in a similar task?
Evaluation
What was successful about the approach that you have just taken, and how do you know?
What would you do differently if you completed this task again?
How do you know you have fulfilled the task criteria?
How do you know that there is not more that you can add?
Do you have any common misconceptions shown in your answer/response that you ought to change now? How do you know that they are mistakes
Metacognitive Processes
If you haven’t read the previous article on the metacognitive process strategies, then it may be of some use to you to read that before you consider this strategy (link), but it is not crucial.
The metacognitive processes are:
Plan; Monitor; Evaluate
Knowledge of: Self; Task; Strategies
Much as with the previous strategy, making these different areas explicitly is one way of ensuring that your students are thinking about these important metacognitive areas. It also provides you with a high-quality way of ascertaining how deep students understanding is, both from a content point of view, as well as a metacognitive point of view. Additionally, you’re going to be asking questions in a lesson anyway, so you may as well ask ones which are going to develop a student’s metacognitive understanding, and help to make the invisible, visible!
Due to the number of different sub-categories here, example questions will be grouped together, and presented as they were with the strategy above:
Plan/Knowledge of Task:
What do you need to do in order to successfully complete the task?
What approach will you take to complete the task?
What preparation do you need to take before beginning the task?
Monitor:
Is the task heading in the correct direction? How do you know?
Is your strategy working? How do you know?
Are there are changes you could make now to improve the outcomes of your task?
Knowledge of self:
What content requirement does this task have, and do you know this content?
What sources of information do you have to complete this task?
How confident are you that your knowledge of the content for these tasks is accurate, and what evidence do you have to prove this?
Knowledge of strategies:
What are the different approaches that you can take to completing this task and what are their relative strengths and weaknesses?
What is the relative utility of one strategy over another for this type of task?
Is that an ideal strategy that you ought to use but are not confident using? How could you address this confidence issue?
Evaluation:
As with previous strategy described above
Comparing Strategies, Plans and Answers
The final strategy in this article focuses in on comparison. One of the most important parts of metacognitive thinking is in the comparison of different strategies or approaches, to evaluate the best approaches and refine future practice. The nub of metacognition is to evaluate the cognition that you are doing to improve your methods for utilising this cognition (I.e., the strategies that you use and the approaches that you take).
This type of thinking is some of the most invisible, so again, questioning students in relation to this comparison is a great way of shining a light on this important metacognitive thinking.
As with the two previous strategies, here are some example questions that you could use:
What are the strengths and weaknesses of strategy x?
When would strategy x be more efficient/effective to use than strategy y?
Why did this planning method work more effectively than the other planning method, and how do you know?
What key features show you that answer x is superior to answer y?
Considering the relative strengths of the two given answers, what changes are you going to make to your response next time?
So, there we have it – three different questioning strategies for you to use in your classroom – along with many questions that you can use, straight away. As mentioned, questioning is something that is used in every single lesson, so these strategies and example questions should be very easy to incorporate into your lessons very quickly. Best of luck!
You can read other HWRK Magazine articles by Nathan Burns here.
