Metacognition Reaction paper 8 Emily Marshman

The Iiskala et al article describes high level collaborative processes as co-construction

of meaningful knowledge. They note that these processes are more likely to occur in situations
where the peers in the group are roughly at the same proficiency level and can carry our similar
actions, share common goals, and work together. This made me wonder if it is appropriate to
group students on different levels of proficiency. This practice was encouraged in my education
classes, and we were even told to group the students ourselves (instead of allowing students to
pick their own groups) so that each group of students would have various levels of students. The
reasoning for this grouping was that high level students could help low level students on the task
at hand. Perhaps in order to promote deeper metacognitive skills, students of the same
proficiency level should work together. Unfortunately, the study by Iiskala did not include low
proficiency children, so it is not known whether or not grouping these children would result in
co-construction of meaningful knowledge. My prediction is that it would not. Also, mixing
proficiency levels might overload the high level students. They may be able to explain cognitive
procedures to the low level students, but then the high level students may miss the chance to
reflect metacognitively throughout the problem solving process.
One of my peers did a similar study of physics TAs pedagogical content knowledge
using the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). He asked individual TAs to mark the answers to the
FCI as a student, choosing the most commonly chosen incorrect answer. Then he asked the TAs
to complete the same task in groups. Within the groups, the TAs became significantly better at
choosing the most commonly chosen incorrect answer. Even though the TAs were from many
different countries, co-construction of meaningful pedagogical content knowledge occurred.
I liked the point in the Efklides article about how metacognitive processes can be
associated with affect. That is, the awareness of a feeling of difficulty becomes a cue that the
response might not be correct, and a persons confidence decreases even if the outcome of
processing is correct. Also, a person can feel highly confident even if the outcome of cognitive
processing is incorrect, just because the solution/response was produced quickly.
We have noted in physics, students who get an exam returned to them do not dwell on
looking at the answers they got wrong to understand them correctly because it pains them to
look at the wrong answer. I believe the same thing happens as students take an exam. I have
done think aloud interviews and I can see that students will get hung up on one problem, spend
many minutes trying to solve it and get nowhere, and eventually take a guess and move on
because they do not want to feel a decrease in confidence. And in fact, some of the answers they
give conflict with prior answers which shows, to me at least, that by being affectively distracted,
they were not able to self-regulate during a test. So it is possible that affect can interfere with
metacognition or even inhibit it in some cases. For upper level students, it is possible that they
are so used to feeling confident in their answers that they want to avoid feeling underconfident
and this inhibits self-regulation.