Metacognition and STEM Literacy
Making the Invisible Visible to our students
Lilit Haroyan
I am the one who…
Evidence
I am the one who listens
to a book called “The
Future of the Mind” by
Michio Kaku who is a
Theoretical Physicists
and co-founder of String
Theory.
Interpretation
I am the one who…
Evidence
Interpretation
I am the one who listens
to a book called “The
Future of the Mind” by
Michio Kaku who is a
Theoretical Physicists
and co-founder of String
Theory.
• She doesn’t have time to
read so she listens them in
car
•Probably long drive
•Interested inMind
•Physicist
•Knows about String
Theory
Metacognitive Reading Log
• Reading Logs in RA infused classroom are employed
as a tool for ground thinking in the text, and
sometimes as a metacognitive conversation routine to
alert students to how the text is causing then to
respond to it
• The Logs supports not only metacognition and
learning but also provides a record of student work
that increases accountability for reading and allows
the instructor to gauge students’ progress
Debrief: Reading Logs
• Share some highlights about your or your
partner’s experiences about this activity
• What are some of the benefits and
challenges of doing MRL with your students?
WestEd’s
Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI)
• A professional development and research
organization focusing on improving academic
literacy in diverse populations of adolescents
and post-secondary students using Reading
Apprenticeship, a research-based
instructional framework.
Reading Apprenticeship
• A partnership of expertise between the
teacher and students, drawing on what
content area teachers know and do as skilled
discipline-based readers and on learners’
unique and often underestimated strengths
Dimensions of Reading Apprenticeship
Community College Physics Classroom
Apply Kirchhoff’s Rules
Oh, shall I explain it again?
Capturing your Reading Process
• Read the text silently as you normally
would when you want to understand
something.
• You’ll have about five minutes to
read, and we’ll do a short writing
piece afterward.
• Please reread if you finish early.
Capturing your Reading Process
• What strategies did you use to make sense of
the text?
• What got in the way of your reading?
• What, if any, comprehension problems did
you solve?
• Which, if any, problems still remain?
Opening a window into our
thinking:
• What did I do?
• Where did I do it?
• How did that affect my reading and
understanding?
Debrief: Reading Process Analysis
• What did you notice about your or
someone else’s reading that is new
or surprising?
• What are some of the benefits and
challenges of doing RPA with your
students?
Community College Math
Classroom
Think Aloud
• Helps students to notice and say when they are
confused, and use each other as resources for
making meaning
• Helps you to practice making your thinking
visible, so you can model effective ways of
reading texts in your discipline for students
• Helps to give names to the cognitive strategies
that we use to comprehend text
• Helps to notice text structures and how we
navigate various genres to build confidence,
range, and stamina
Talking To the Text
• This strategy is basically a think aloud on
paper. It differs from think aloud in two key
ways:
• the individual reflection on the reading process is
written, not spoken
• the metacognitive conversation is delayed until
after the individual reading and reflecting.
TttT with Math Problem
You are planning a driving vacation, and you
want to estimate the cost of the gas. While on
vacation, you are planning to drive 3000 miles.
Your car gets about 30 miles per gallon, and you
estimate that the cost of gas is $4 per gallon.
What is your estimate for the cost of the gasoline
for the vacation?”
Talk to the Text
• Take a fiew minutes to try “Talking to the
Text” with problem number 2 on the handout
Problem # 2
You are invited to your boss’s house at 8:00 pm. At 6:30 pm you
have just left the candy shop in your neighborhood where you
picked up a box of candy for a hostess gift. You notice that your
favorite store is having a sale. You have had your eye on a designer
leather jacket for a while now. There is a line outside the store and
the manager says there cannot be more than 10 people in the store
at any time. You decide to wait in the line. There are 22 people
ahead of you. People are leaving the store at a rate of 2 people
every 5 minutes and once you get in the store, it takes you 10
minutes to find the jacket in the right size and 15 minutes to pay for
it. Will you make it to your boss’s house on time? Don’t forget you
have a 12-minute drive from the shopping center to her house.
Think-Pair-Share
• What roadblocks did you face?
• How did you work through them?
Debrief Talking to the Text
• What did you mark?
• How did that help you gain access into the
problem?
• How did talking to your partner help?
Debrief Metacognitive Routines
Our Goals with Reading Apprenticeship:
• Help students learn to read and think like
insiders (experts) in a subject area
• Overcome our own expert blind spot –
blending subject-area knowledge with
important understandings of how novices
acquire the conventions, rituals, and
expectations of discourse in that field
In a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom,
one will notice:
• The teacher briefly modeling to make his
or her thinking visible
• The students engaging in guided practice
of what the teacher has modeled
• Students talking with one another about
their experiences with the reading
In Reading Apprenticeship
Classrooms, Teachers
• Focus on comprehension and
metacognitive conversation
• Create a climate of
collaboration
• Provide appropriate support
while emphasizing student
independence
This conversation is a critical
dynamic in the classroom:
• Students learn from the teacher and from
each other new ways to engage with and
comprehend academic text.
• Teachers learn from students what they
are currently doing to make sense of a
text, what knowledge they bring to the
text, and what difficulties they are
having.
The metacognitive conversation provides a
powerful and productive window:
• For students, into the teacher’s and other
students’ reading processes, so they can
broaden their repertoire of strategies and
deepen their subject area knowledge.
• For teachers into students’ reading
processes, so they can plan instruction to
focus on students’ actual learning needs.
Q+A
Lilit Haroyan,
haroyal@lamission.edu