Thinking about thinking

A topic that arises occasionally during conversations is student self-reflection and metacognition. An article published recently by a Stanford Professor, entitled “Thinking about Thinking: A Professors 15 minute study hack lifts B+’s into A’s.”

The author states, "students jump mindlessly into studying before they have strategized what to use, without understanding why they are using each resource, and without planning how they would use the resource to learn effectively. Students were offered a variety of prompts to help them think carefully about how they studied. The control group—received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should prepare. Those who reflected on how they wanted to perform and what they needed to do to perform better outperformed those who did not, by an average of one-third of a letter grade. There was also no statistical difference in the grades the two groups of students hoped to achieve, ruling out the role of motivation as a driver of performance versus reflection and thinking about thinking."