The next Science Education Journal Club will take place next Monday, April 27th from 12pm to 1pm at Mission Bay in Mission Hall room MH 2108.

This event is open to all students, and pizza will be provided. Please register here: http://bit.ly/SEJC1

What is it?

The SEJCs are small, informal discussions around an education topic hosted jointly by the Office of Career and Professional Development (OCPD) and the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP).

This month's topic: How teaching students about learning strategies can help improve performance.

Why is this topic important?

Many new college students struggle in introductory courses because they do not know how to study effectively. The paper selected for the Journal Club focuses on a successful and easily implementable intervention to increase first-year undergraduate students’ mastery of learning strategies, which impacts student success in a “gateway” course (a required course that many students fail).

The paper for this Journal Club (attached at the bottom): Cook, E., Kennedy, E., & Mcguire, S. Y. (2013). Effect of Teaching Metacognitive Learning Strategies on Performance in General Chemistry Courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 90, 961–967.

Discussion questions :

1. In their intervention, the authors decided to focus on teaching students “learning strategies that directly use metacognitive skills” with a focus on Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of learning (Figure 1).

a. Thinking back to your own science education in high school, undergraduate and graduate school, identify the Bloom’s levels on which you were tested for each level of education.

b. When tested on the higher order levels (analyzing, evaluating or creating), how were you taught these skills? Were there situations where you were tested on higher order levels of learning without adequate in-class preparation?

2. Because of students’ beliefs about what had helped them succeed as high school students, the authors were very strategic about how and when they presented these tools and strategies (p. 963, p.966).

Which of the successful practices described in the paper would you use to motivate your own students and convince them to try using these strategies?

3. What other strategies could instructors use in class to help students develop these higher order thinking and metacognitive skills? How could some of the metacognitive strategies recommended in this study be integrated the curriculum and their use monitored throughout the semester as an integral part of the course?