FIN Commons

This is a one-page description of our inquiry project. It’s a document that will periodically be updated to help us keep track of where we started and where we’re headed.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF PROJECT (draft):

Transference of Skills and Confidence
When we first started, we wanted to understand how students transfer the skills in a basic skills writing course and the self-efficacy achieved in that course to other skills. Our initial research brought us to focus on developing metacognitive skills for students, which would help them appropriately plan, implement, reflect, and problem solve for future assignments and tasks. As we discussed this idea further, the team realized that such an approach only partially addressed the issues of many students. Students also face a gap in confidence, or ability to believe that they can achieve their goals, which affects their ability to apply metacognitive strategies to their learning. Similarly, the identities they claim are often at odds with the institution that is trying to help them. By building their confidence and helping them cultivate an self-aware identity, we hope they will then begin to apply metacognitive strategies that will help them transfer skills to other classes and environments.

Building New Narratives (and identities)
The team then began to develop an inquiry that connected the Hero’s Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell, to students’ identity as the narrator in their own journey. We realized that intuitively teachers rely on positive and inspirational examples of writers who have overcome seemingly insurmountable problems and have written about them (i.e., The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Cooked by Jeff Henderson, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Richard Rodriguez, etc.). We decided that by using these types of stories and having students reflect on their own lives and identities in relation to these other stories, they might begin to develop both the skills of reflection needed for successful metacognition and a have a model for developing the confidence to achieve success outside of our classrooms.

These ideas coincide with the research found by our institutional researcher in a study, “Cognitive and Personality Factors in Relation to Timely Completion of a College Degree.” The study claims that metacognition was related to GPA and that an internal Locus of Control was related to the time taken to obtain a degree.

Developing an inquiry
To look more carefully at these issues, the team will assign students narratives to read and a writing assignment to discuss their own issues around learning. Students will develop a rubric with their teachers to evaluate the quality of their narratives, looking at both the quality of the narrative and their ability to reflect on it, while we try to record their own reactions and epiphanies while they look at their own writing and experiences. The team will record the lesson, student interactions with the rubric, students’ narrative papers, and survey their metacognition to understand how such an assignment might build the metacognitive skills and self-efficacy necessary to transfer skills to other classes and into their lives. Additionally, a pre and post survey on metacognition (and possibly Locus of Control) will be administered in 2 -3 classes, a quantitative comparison of student performance against the rest of the school (retention, grades, HARVEE tests, and persistence) and focus groups will help us better understand this issue in this first semester.

Key Questions:
•    How does the reading and writing of narratives help students gain self-efficacy and metacognitive skills that will transfer? How do will we know if they transfer? What does such autobiographical storytelling do to develop or change a student’s self-perception and identity?
•    How will our studying this upcoming lesson help us understand student’s self-efficacy (or confidence in achievement) and ability to apply metacognitive strategies to their lives?
•    What does metacognition and self-efficacy look like in real life? When we’re interviewing students or working with them one-on-one, what kinds of things are we looking for? What are we looking for in their writing? Phrases, metaphors, levels of detail, truth and honesty, epiphanies?
•    How does self-awareness fit into the taxonomy of metacognition?

Cognitive and Personality Factors