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.

                     

                                                       

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.