SLB-053 & 05403/11/07

Thinking and Communicating

“Above all else guard your heart, for it affects everything you do.” Proverbs 4:23

(NLT)

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Think• 1 Cor 14:20 (2) Brothers, do not be children

in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.

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Think

• Definition | Concise Oxford English Dictionary

• think

• v. (past and past part. thought)

• 1 have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something.

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Think• Definition | Concise Oxford English Dictionary• think• 2 use one’s mind actively to form connected ideas

about someone or something.• † have a particular mental attitude.• † (think of/about) take into account or consideration.• † (think of/about) consider the possibility or

advantages of.• † (think of) call to mind. • 3 (think of) have a specified opinion of.

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Think• Rom 12:3 For by the grace given to me I say

to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

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Think• Phil 3:15 Let those of us who are mature

think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.

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Know

• 2 Pet 3:17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Thinking - thinking refers to the process of creating a structured series of connective transactions between items of perceived information.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition - a dimension of thinking that involves knowledge and control of self and knowledge and control of process.

• Metacognition refers to awareness and control of one's thinking, including:– commitment, – attitudes and – attention.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:• Commitment: an aspect of knowledge and

control of self that involves a decision to employ personal energy and resources to control a situation.

• Attention: conscious control of mental focus on particular information.

• Attitudes: personally held principles or beliefs that govern much of one's behavior.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:

• Executive control: evaluating, planning, and regulating the declarative, procedural, and conditional information involved in a task.

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Understanding Effective Communication

• Metacognition: • Executive Control:• Declarative information: factual information.

• Conditional information: information about the appropriate use of an action or process important to a task.

• Procedural information: information about the various actions or processes important to a task.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:

• Procedural information: information about the various actions or processes important to a task.

• Regulating: checking one's progress toward a goal.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Metacognition:

• Self-knowledge and self-control: a component of metacognition that involves commitment, attitudes, and attention.

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Core Thinking Skills

• METACOGNITION consists of three basic elements:

• Developing a plan of action

• Maintaining/monitoring the plan

• Evaluating the plan

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• Before - When you are developing the plan of

action, ask yourself:

• What in my prior knowledge will help me with this particular task?

• In what direction do I want my thinking to take me?

• What should I do first?• Why am I reading this selection?• How much time do I have to complete the task?

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• During - When you are maintaining/monitoring the plan of action, ask yourself:

• How am I doing?

• Am I on the right track?

• How should I proceed?

• What information is important to remember?

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• During:

• Should I move in a different direction?

• Should I adjust the pace depending on the difficulty?

• What do I need to do if I do not understand?

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• After - When you are evaluating the plan of action

ask yourself:

• How well did I do?

• Did my particular course of thinking produce more or less than I had expected?

• What could I have done differently?

• How might I apply this line of thinking to other problems?

• Do I need to go back through the task to fill in any "blanks" in my understanding?

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• Metacognition is an important concept in cognitive

theory.

• It consists of two basic processes occurring simultaneously: monitoring your progress as you learn, and making changes and adapting your strategies if you perceive you are not doing so well. (Winn, W. & Snyder, D., 1998)

• It's about self-reflection, self-responsibility and initiative, as well as goal setting and time management.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• "Metacognitive skills include taking conscious control of learning, planning and selecting strategies, monitoring the progress of learning, correcting errors, analyzing the effectiveness of learning strategies, and changing learning behaviors and strategies when necessary." (Ridley, D.S., Schutz, P.A., Glanz, R.S. & Weinstein, C.E., 1992)

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• KNOWING HOW TO LEARN, and knowing which strategies work best, are valuable skills that differentiate expert learners from novice learners.

• Metacognition, or awareness of the process of learning, is a critical ingredient to successful learning

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• How Does a Novice Learner Differ from an

Expert Learner?

• Novice Learners don't stop to evaluate their comprehension of the material.

• They generally don't examine the quality of their work or stop to make revisions as they go along.

• Satisfied with just scratching the surface, novice learners don't attempt to examine a problem in depth.

• They don't make connections or see the relevance of the material in their lives.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Expert learners are "more aware than novices of when they need to check for errors, why they fail to comprehend, and how they need to redirect their efforts." (Ertmer, P.A. & Newby, T.J., 1996)

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:• Take reading for example.

• We've all experienced the phenomenon of reading a page (or a whole chapter!) in a textbook and then realizing we haven't comprehended a single thing.

• A novice learner would go on to the next page, thinking that merely reading the words on a page is enough.

• An expert learner would re-read the page until the main concept is understood, or flag a difficult passage to ask for clarification from an instructor or peers later.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Metacognition refers to higher order thinking that involves active control over the thinking processes involved in learning. 

• Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are metacognitive in nature.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Because metacognition plays a critical role in successful learning it is important for both students and teachers.

• Metacognition has been linked with intelligence and it has been shown that those with greater metacognitive abilities tend to be more successful thinkers.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Most definitions of metacognition include both knowledge and strategy components. 

• Knowledge is considered to be metacognitive if it is actively used in a strategic manner to ensure that a goal is met. 

• Metacognition is often referred to as "thinking about thinking" and can be used to help students “learn how to learn.” 

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Cognitive strategies are used to help achieve a particular goal while metacognitive strategies are used to ensure that the goal has been reached.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Metacognitive knowledge involves executive monitoring processes directed at the acquisition of information about thinking processes.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• They involve decisions that help: 

• to identify the task on which one is currently working, 

• to check on current progress of that work, 

• to evaluate that progress, and 

• to predict what the outcome of that progress will be.

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• They involve decisions that help:• to allocate resources to the current task, • to determine the order of steps to be taken to

complete the task, and • to set the intensity or the speed at which one should

work the task.• References:

• Livingston, J. (1997) Metacognition: An Overview State Univ. of New York at Buffalo:  http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/cep564/Metacog.htm

• Hacker, D. J. Metacognition:  Definitions and Empirical Foundations  The University of Memphis: http://www.psyc.memphis.edu/trg/meta.htm

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Core Thinking Skills• Metacognition:

• Metacognitive strategies are sequential processes that one uses to control cognitive activities, and to ensure that a cognitive goal (e.g., understanding a text) has been met.

• These processes help to regulate and oversee learning, and consist of planning and monitoring cognitive activities, as well as checking the outcomes of those activities.

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Core Thinking Skills• For example, after reading a paragraph in a text a

learner may question herself about the concepts discussed in the paragraph.

• Her cognitive goal is to understand the text. Self-questioning is a common metacognitive comprehension monitoring strategy.

• If she finds that she cannot answer her own questions, or that she does not understand the material discussed, she must then determine what needs to be done to ensure that she meets the cognitive goal of understanding the text.

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Core Thinking Skills• She may decide to go back and re-read the

paragraph with the goal of being able to answer the questions she had generated.

• If, after re-reading through the text she can now answer the questions, she may determine that she understands the material.

• Thus, the metacognitive strategy of self-questioning is used to ensure that the cognitive goal of comprehension is met.

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Core Thinking Skills• Knowledge is considered to be metacognitive if it

is actively used in a strategic manner to ensure that a goal is met.

• For example, a student may use knowledge in planning how to approach a math exam: "I know that I (person variable) have difficulty with word problems (task variable), so I will answer the computational problems first and save the word problems for last (strategy variable)."

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Core Thinking Skills

• Simply possessing knowledge about one's cognitive strengths or weaknesses and the nature of the task without actively utilizing this information to oversee learning is not metacognitive.

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Core Thinking Skills• Although most individuals of normal intelligence

engage in metacognitive regulation when confronted with an effortful cognitive task, some are more metacognitive than others. Those with greater metacognitive abilities tend to be more successful in their cognitive endeavors. The good news is that individuals can learn how to better regulate their cognitive activities. Most often, metacognitive instruction occurs within Cognitive Strategy Instruction programs.

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Core Thinking Skills

• Cognitive Strategy Instruction (CSI) is an instructional approach which emphasizes the development of thinking skills and processes as a means to enhance learning.

• The objective of CSI is to enable all students to become more strategic, self-reliant, flexible, and productive in their learning endeavors (Scheid, 1993).

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Core Thinking Skills

• CSI is based on the assumption that there are identifiable cognitive strategies, previously believed to be utilized by only the best and the brightest students, which can be taught to most students (Halpern, 1996). Use of these strategies have been associated with successful learning (Borkowski, Carr, & Pressley, 1987; Garner, 1990).

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Thinking skills are relatively specific cognitive operations that can be considered the "building blocks" of thinking.

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