Self-regulation part 2: Linking Metacognition and Self-regulation

Executive Functioning
This blog follows on from an earlier blog that I wrote after Christmas where we looked at the idea that children, when they are very young, develop self-regulation when faced with the situation of having to deny immediate self gratification in order to achieve a greater goal over time. It was obvious that children develop different degrees of self-control and the lack of self-regulation can lead to a diminished ability to learn independently. In school many children with literacy-related learning difficulties are at a disadvantage because the delay in development of adequate self-regulation becomes an executive functioning problem.

Metacognition is a type of executive functioning that enables learners to control their own learning behaviours and develop more effective self-regulated strategies. Matt Bromley has written a very good summary  of the "Educational Endowment Foundation's" (EEF) Teaching and Learning Tool kit report which outlines much of the recent work on metacognition and parallels my own  research since 2006.  In "Reading Comprehension: Assisting children with learning difficulties "(2011) I used similar ideas to help children who were struggling with reading comprehension and self-regulation.  Around this time I developed an intervention comprehension program that utilised a conceptual framework that could be applied in multiple learning contexts. The program became known as the "COR Literacy Framework"  and was implemented in many schools in Queensland with Independent Schools Queensland in partnership with Griffith University.

Literacy framework incorporating metacognition & self-regulation 
At first it was envisaged to be used to train teachers and teacher aids during 2008 but it was such a huge success that it was extended for another three years. During this time the framework was improved through a number of iterations, due, impart to the feedback I received from many teachers that took part in the research. Initially it began as an intervention program for children with reading comprehension difficulties for upper primary students but it was found to include a much wider application for children in lower primary and also in some high school settings. This was because the framework is not content specific but was built upon a metacognitive and self-regulation structure. I have a 12 part series of blogs, called "COR Literacy Framework Part#", where I discuss a number of teaching and learning principles and strategies that have contributed to the success of the program.

Product OR process ?
Many of the ideas that resulted from this research were applied in my first book (above) and also in "Developing literacy in the primary school" and "Developing literacy in the secondary school". I consider that metacognition, self-regulation and comprehension strategies should be taught explicitly in all school contexts from lower primary to secondary classrooms. However, often teachers are so focussed on teaching content (or product) that they neglect to concentrate on the process as well. The links above may help teachers have a more informed understanding of executive functioning in learning and when to apply the skills appropriately.

Woolley, G. E. (2011). Reading comprehension: Assisting children with learning difficulties. Dordrecht: Springer.

Woolley, G. E. (2014). Developing literacy in the primary classroom. London: Sage.

Barton, G. & Woolley, G. E. (2017). Developing literacy in the secondary classroom. London: Sage.

                     

                                                       

Working-memory, attention control and reading comprehension.

There is a condition often referred to as the year four slump which affects a large number of students and their reading ability. Many of these children enter grade four with identified reading difficulties despite having adequate phonic and decoding skills.  One reason for this is the increased complexity of sentence structures at this stage and that reading for understanding rather than learning to read becomes the focus.

Often general language problems are the basis for student difficulties rather than inadequate phonic skills. Research suggests that these children have inadequate oral language skills including verbal knowledge, and listening comprehension. This is because listening comprehension requires the learner to encode incoming words using aural signals, transform the coded information into a mental representation, integrate this representation into existing knowledge structures and store the new knowledge into long-term memory. Poor listening comprehension has a negative impact on the ability to read for understanding. This is because listening comprehension facilitates reading comprehension and shares many of the same cognitive processes.

Working memory also influences the ability to process incoming information during listening or reading. It has a limited capacity for holding information while readers process aural or written meanings, particularly when it is necessary to think about or solve problems while mentally processing the message. One factor that limits working memory capacity is the ability to attend to information that is central to the reader's learning goals. Obviously, if working-memory has a limited storage capacity then it is absolutely imperative that the reader/listener is able to filter and attend to the most important information. One major problem is that many students either attend to unimportant information or mind-wander while reading. Obviously, if readers do not have clear goals and are not motivated to achieve them they will be more likely to take in superfluous information or develop mind-wandering tendencies while reading. Mind-wandering takes place when the reader/listener entertains thoughts that are irrelevant to the task at hand. This will occur in individuals who lack prior experience with the topic or interest.

Self-efficacy influences reading attention effort, reading engagement, and persistence in the face of distractions. It is related to a person's belief in his or her own ability to perform a task at a desired level.  As students become more self-aware those with learning difficulties will, most likely, have lower self-efficacy. This will affect the willingness of individuals to develop adequate goals, persist at attaining those goals and allocate attention effort.

How then can we support the student who is affected by this reading comprehension slump?

1. Give the student reading material that is at a reasonable level of ease. A rule of thumb is that word accuracy should be around 90-96% accuracy level. 
2. Develop an interest in the topic, or develop a topic around the student's interest. 
3. Make sure that the student is familiar with the language and that unfamiliar words are discussed. Adequate discussion before a reading activity is just as important as the reading activity itself.
4. Fill in the knowledge and experience gaps before reading e.g. go on an excursion or watch a video and follow-up with lots of discussion. Students can learn a lot from each other if they are given an opportunity to share their experiences.
5. Develop shared and clear learning goals. Make sure that the students are taking responsibility for their goals. Readers will generally persist in the face of difficulty if they have a goal that they value.
6. Develop self-efficacy by encouraging them to be reflective learners. Always give feedback by relating success to the amount of effort that students expend.

For more about this topic read:

Cho, E., Roberts, G. J., Capin, P., Miciak, J., & Vaughn, S. (2015). Cognitive attributes, attention, and self-efficacy of adequate and inadequate responders in a fourth grade reading intervention. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 30(4), 159-170.

Robinson, M. K., & Unsworth, N. (2015). Working memory capacity offers resistance to mind-wandering and external distraction in a context-specific manner. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29, 680-690.

Vocabulary Development for Readers with Autism

Reading expands the breadth of a reader’s vocabulary, which in turn contributes to reading efficiency.  In other words, the more you read the better reader you will become because a richer vocabulary gives more meaning to what is read. The opposite is also true, the less you read the poorer will be your vocabulary and the harder it will be for you to bring meaning to text. Normally, good readers learn most of their new words by using the context and their own experience of the world to add meaning. Often this meaning will initially be a gross approximation to the actual meaning of the word. However, after many encounters with the same word in a variety of contexts the reader will refine the depth of meaning and also see how meaning can change from one context to another.

Many children who have mastered decoding may have difficulty with reading comprehension, particularly after year four. This is because the language structures are much more complex, much of the vocabulary is unfamiliar, the types of texts differ from the more familiar narrative structures that they have been accustomed to in the lower grades, and the emphasis or focus shifts from decoding to comprehension. Often children with language deficits will struggle and appear to fall behind at this point. Reading becomes harder and they tend to avoid reading, which then contributes to poorer vocabulary through lack of exposure to new and unfamiliar words. This becomes a self-defeating cycle of poor reading comprehension and reading disengagement.

In addition, many children with high functioning autism have good to very good decoding skills and have a reasonable amount of reading practice. However, they have more difficulty connecting meaning to new words. They tend to concentrate on the detail and not so much on connected text such as; phrases, sentences, paragraphs and longer discourse. They often have language deficits that hinder this process and have difficulty making appropriate inferences. This may include their inability to develop text coherence, understand emotion and other character traits in narrative texts and have difficulties with executive functioning in working memory. These problems make it difficult for them to connect with prior knowledge, use the sentence and story context, and make appropriate inferences about the meanings of unknown words. Thus, they may read more but their vocabulary suffers as they progress through the grades. Usually these children are very intelligent and are able to cover their comprehension deficit but there will come a time when the texts that they are assigned become too difficult to adequately comprehend. What also makes detection difficult is the fact that they may appear to be reading fluently with expression but without adequate comprehension.

To help these students there are some very practical ideas that have been suggested by Susan Gately (2008 see article for more details). I have listed many of these ideas below but have structured the methods in terms of my COR Literacy Framework (See earlier Blog) (also see my earlier Blog series on Fluency).

Perceptual Level:

•     Visually cued instruction – helps focus on relevant parts of information
•     Graphics
•     Colour
•    Provide concrete and tangible information
•    Focus in relevant parts of the story or information

Cognitive Level:

•    Priming background knowledge
•    Picture walks
•  Visual maps
•    Understanding narrative text structure
•     Emotional thermometers

Metacognitive Level

•    Think-alouds
•      Reciprocal thinking (also refer to reciprocal teaching - Google)
•     Goal-structure-mapping
•     Decrease reliance on other prompts and increase independence

Details about these ideas can be found in:

Gately, S. E. (2008). Facilitating reading comprehension for students on the Autism Spectrum. Teaching Exceptional Children, 40(3), 40-45.

For a more detailed explanation of vocabulary difficulties see pages 83-84 in:

Woolley, G. (2007). A comprehension intervention for children with reading comprehension difficulties. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 12(1), 43-50.

A very informative article and book chapter related to problems with vocabulary for children with ASD:

Lopez, B., & Leekham, S. R. (2003). Do children with autism fail to process information in context? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44(2), 285-300.

Leekam, S. (2007). Language comprehension difficulties in Children with autism spectrum disorders. In C. Cain and J. Oakhill (Eds.), Children’s Comprehension Problems in Oral and Written Language: A Cognitive Perspective (pp. 104127), NY : Guilford Press.

Working Memory and Mental Imagery

• Mental imagery training enhances comprehension and is easy to teach
• Pronouns provide cohesion and coherence for text comprehension

I have just returned from recreation leave and read an interesting article entitled 'Effect of imagery training on children's comprehension of pronouns' by Francey and Cain, two researchers from Lancaster University, United Kingdom.  The researchers were investigating children with good and poor listening comprehension, and their ability to identify the antecedents of personal pronouns in individual sentences and also to select the most appropriate pronoun in a story close activity.

Normally, as they read,  good comprehenders will construct an integrated situation model of the perceived sentence and story meanings as a cohesive and coherent mental representation. What usually underpins this process is the resolution of pronouns with their antecedents in the same sentence or previous sentences. Pronouns such as 'he', 'she', 'they' or 'it' are strategic in integrating information within and between sentences. This, however, may require the reader to use extra mental resources to make inferences particularly in situations where 'he' refers to one of two protagonists in the previous sentence. Poor comprehenders often have considerable difficulty with this process and consequently have difficulty with text integration and comprehension of the text discourse.

Good readers tend to generate mental imagery as they read, which benefits their text recall and extends their capacity to hold information while processing text during reading. Poor readers, on the other hand, seldom generate mental imagery while reading. However, in my own research I have found that imagery training is relatively easy and enjoyable for struggling readers. It is assumed that by generating mental imagery during reading the reader is enabled to carry over complex ideas embedded within an image while, for example, decoding, connecting text propositions, making inferences across text and linking ideas to the reader's background  experiences. Thus, mental imagery enhances working memory efficiency by utilising the visual mode of working memory to enhance the ability of the poor comprehender to retain detailed information.

The research findings confirm the notion that poor comprehenders have difficulties with language comprehension apart from decoding. Most poor comprehenders have good decoding but have poor language comprehension and this can be evidenced in the fact that they have significantly more difficulty with pronoun resolution. The research demonstrates that minimal mental imagery training can improve the reading comprehension performance of students with poor comprehension. Another finding is that there is strong evidence to support the notion that pronouns play a crucial role in comprehension and the construction of a cohesive and coherent understanding of text ideas. The findings of this study also give some support for Paivio's (1991) Dual Coading theory of cognition.

Francey, G., Cain, K. (2015). Effect of imagery training on children’s comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Educational Research, 108 (1) p. 1 – 9.

Paivio, A. (1986). Mental representations: A dual-coding approach. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Teacher Talk Enhances Learning

The 9th Australasian Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Conference (November 20th & 22nd), the University of Waikato.

When quantitative and qualitative research methods are used quite often it can result in better insights. In this case dual analysis appears to reinforce the COR Literacy Framework notion that teacher talk contributes to student learning at three levels.

I recently had the privilege of presenting at this conference held in Hamilton, New Zealand. Hamilton is a beautiful city situated along the Waikato River (see the river walk in the picture). The city's Hamilton Gardens, which won the International Garden of the Year - 2014 award for their internationally unique concept of telling 'The Story of Gardens' (in picture), is well worth a visit. Although New Zealand and Australia are close, I noticed many contrasting details. In Kiwiland the grass and the gum trees are greener and more uniform. The farms are neater with huge hedges instead of barbed wire fences enclosing them.

Associate Professor Rod Gardner (an accomplished author and researcher in the field of conversational analysis) and I presented some preliminary findings from our continuing research centred around the COR Literacy Framework. In the research project we video taped six small group lessons using three camcorders and two voice recorders. There were two teachers trained in using the COR Literacy Framework who consented to teach three small group lessons each. Some of the recordings have been transcribed and coded according to conversational analysis conventions. This methodology is quite a contrast to my previous research where my perspective has been from a cognitive psychology approach. The cognitive psychology methodology is primarily a top-down approach based on theoretical assumptions whereas the CA methodology is a bottom-up approach that attempts to make no prior assumptions but is more concerned with close observation of meaningful conversations.

The presentation of our ongoing research project was in two parts: I presented the background to the COR Literacy Framework and the research findings to date from a cognitive psychology perspective and Assoc. Prof. Gardner presented the preliminary findings using  the Conversational Analysis methodology.  One of the research questions was: Do good teachers focus their questions on the three COR levels: perception (factual), cognitive, and metacognitive? At this stage we are beginning to see that this is the case and that this happens in various ways and over relatively short segments of time and sometimes this can be over more extended segments.

Comprehension and Philosophy in Schools

Philosophy deals with the most fundamental concepts about our existence and what it means to be human in this world. It considers ideas such as: knowledge, truth, meaning, justice, beauty, freedom and consciousness. Our understanding about these ideas influence many aspects of our lives. One of the best ways to involve children in philosophical discussion is to use good children's literature as a vehicle for philosophical discussions in the classroom.

I have included an excerpt from my book, 'Developing Literacy in the Primary Classroom' to show how philosophy, children's literacy and the COR literacy framework can be blended to develop deeper thinking and enquiry learning in the classroom.

"Literature circles and philosophical discussions will position the reader/viewer as a critical analyst who will look for and interpret meanings not just at the surface level but at deeper levels of cognition and metacognition.

Perceptual level: Observing and clarifying: Inferring and clarifying what has been suggested, making a distinction, asking an appropriate question, making an assumption, generalizing, and asking for a reason.

•    What is the author saying?

•    Do you think these points are the most important...?

•    What reasons do you think the author has for saying that?

•    Is the author saying that...?

•    Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't she/she saying ...?

•    What do think the author means by...?

•    Aren't you thinking that...?

•    Could you give me an example from your own experience of...?

Conceptual level: Forming an opinion, clarifying and justifying: Giving a reason, inferring, giving counter examples, and using criteria.

•    In light of what the story was about, do you think that...?

•    Why do you believe that what you said is correct?

•    Can you tell us why you think that?

•    Does anyone else have any questions for …?

•    Do you agree with his/her reasons?

•    Is that evidence good enough?

•    What evidence are you using to make that statement?

•    Is it possible that you and the other person are contradicting each other?

•    Can you try to see the issue from someone else’s point of view?

Metacognitive level: Evaluating individual and group responses: This involves personal reflection and evaluation, and also evaluating the responsiveness of the group.

•    Did we listen to each other well?

•    Did we respect each others’ opinions and ideas?

•    What have we learned from this discussion?

•    Did we use good reasons for what we have said?

•    What has it changed? (Self-correction, concepts, experience, 
attitude).

•    How did you feel about the discussion?

•    Is what you said now consistent with what you said before?"     (Woolley, 2014, p102)

Woolley, G. (2014). Developing literacy in the primary classroom. London: Sage.