Over the semester I’ve really enjoyed researching different areas of Education, some more than others! Looking back through the blogs, from my perspective it looks like they can be split in to a few umbrella categories: Teaching methods; Learning methods; Barriers to learning; Educational Environment; and Teacher vs Student centred education. For my final overview I’m going to focus on learning methods, and more specifically, metacognition and self-regulated learning. This is because I still personally feel that these two techniques could have the most effect on students’ ability to be more aware of their knowledge, practice the areas that they’re knowledge is lacking in, and therefore be more proficient at learning effectively.
At the start of the semester there was a lot of discussion about learning styles and the use of them in the classroom. It was generally agreed by most of the class that the lack of evidence for the styles, and the negative implications on the child, such as being pigeon-holed in to only being able to accomplish certain things due to the restrictions of their learning styles, meant that they shouldn’t be used in the classroom, and definitely not taught to teachers as a standard part of training,as they are at the moment.
Flavell (1979) talked about the different parts of metacognitive monitoring: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences, goals and actions. Although these all focus on different areas of self-regulation and monitoring, I believe that implemented effectively, these could all be used in the classroom and at home to aid children in learning, retaining knowledge and being aware of what they have learnt. Obviously, the main implication of this is that if children are aware of what they know and what they don’t, they are able to focus on what they don’t know. And isn’t this one of the main problems in school? If you’re worried about a subject,you focus on what you do know to make yourself feel better. If children had high metacognitive skill, they would focus on what they don’t know, therefore increasing what they do know, and their awareness, giving temselves more motivation and confidence to do well in school.
Personally, I feel this is invaluable in a school environment, and is what I would want to focus on first if I was to implement anything in schools.
As an end note, classes such as the one we’ve participated in could really aid the process of metacognitive knowledge, as its reflecting on what we’ve learnt, and forcing us to find out information for ourselves, and ensure that we know the information well enough to talk about it.