UCSF Science Education Journal Club

The next Science Education Journal Club will take place next Monday, April 27th from 12pm to 1pm at Mission Bay in Mission Hall room MH 2108 (space is limited, pizza will be provided).

The SEJCs are small, informal discussion around an education topic. It is a joint project of the Office of Career and Professional Development (OCPD) and the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP).

This month's topic: How teaching students about learning strategies can help them improve their performance.

The paper for this Journal Club: Cook, E., Kennedy, E., & Mcguire, S. Y. (2013). Effect of Teaching Metacognitive Learning Strategies on Performance in General Chemistry Courses. Journal of Chemical Education, 90, 961–967.

Why is this topic important?

As you will find out when you start teaching science courses, many new college students struggle in introductory courses because they do not know how to study effectively. The paper we have selected for the Journal Club focuses on a successful and easily implementable intervention to increase first-year undergraduate students’ mastery of learning strategies, which impacts student success in a “gateway” course (a required course that many students fail).

Discussion questions:

1. In their intervention, the authors decided to focus on teaching students “learning strategies that directly use metacognitive skills” with a focus on Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of learning (Figure 1).

a. Thinking back to your own science education in high school, undergraduate and graduate school, identify the Bloom’s levels on which you were tested for each level of education.

b. When tested on the higher order levels (analyzing, evaluating or creating), how were you taught these skills? Were there situations where you were tested on higher order levels of learning without adequate in-class preparation?

2. Because of students’ beliefs about what had helped them succeed as high school students, the authors were very strategic about how and when they presented these tools and strategies (p. 963, p.966).

Which of the successful practices described int he paper would you use to motivate your own students and convince them to try using these strategies?

3. What other strategies could instructors use in class to help students develop these higher order thinking and metacognitive skills? How could some of the metacognitive strategies recommended in this study be integrated the curriculum or monitored throughout the semester as an integral part of the course?

Abstract:

College students often find general chemistry to be a very challenging rite of passage on their way to degrees in various science, technology, and mathematics disciplines. As teachers, we make efforts to simultaneously patch gaps in students’ prior knowledge and instill valuable learning strategies and sound study habits. In this paper, we describe effective metacognitive learning strategies for students in general chemistry courses. Many students experience difficulty because they are focused on memorizing facts and formulas instead of understanding concepts and developing problem-solving skills. However, students can be successful if they are taught how to shift their efforts from low-level to higher-order thinking. We present outcomes from a 50 min lecture on learning strategies presented to a population of nearly 700 science major first-year students after the first examination. The average final grade for the students who attended the lecture was a full letter grade higher than that of those who were absent, while the performance on the first examination was not statistically significantly different for the two groups. Student survey response data indicated that the students who attended the lecture changed their behavior as a result of gaining new information about learning. Statistical analysis of the results was performed using the ANCOVA approach.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Laurence

---

Laurence Clement, PhD

Program Director, Academic Career Development

Office of Career and Professional Development

University of California, San Francisco

1675 Owens St, Ste 310, San Francisco, CA 94143

415-502-3097

career.ucsf.edu