Asking questions to find out about students’ knowledge about self-teaching

Students as self-teachers Most of the time, students must teach themselves. Most students do not get much individual teacher attention Black (2004) in a UK primary school observed an average of 20 interactions per student over 24 lessons = 0.8 interactions with a student per lesson Black, L. (2004). Language and education, 18, 347 -360

Eliciting students’ instructional metacognitive knowledge So if students must teach themselves, what self-teaching knowledge, or, instructional metacognitive knowledge, do they have? How do we find out?

We ask them questions about their knowledge

Our fundamental question What do you do to help yourself to learn? (followed by various prompts to get students to talk about the fundamental question)

How have we asked this question? In class , whilst students are working at learning Face-to-face (audio record) Written responses (students hand up to researchers)

Has this fundamental question generated useful data that can be analysed? Text-based data Count-based data Ranked data

Text extracts from individual students I don’t know what really helps me to learn…I don’t know how that helps me to learn, it just does. It’s just something I’ve never questioned, it just helps me…it’s just the way I’ve learned to survive while I’m doing these things. But I don’t know how. (B.Ed student)

Summaries of answers from classes of students Year 9 Science students’ responses

Text-based: change over time

Thematic analysis with counts (frequencies) Pre Post Stage of processing E.g % Orientation Finding a way to be interested 3 Selecting Paying attention so it made sense 6 Transformation (simple) Repeating over and over again 45 26 Transformation (complex) Developing acronym for terms 9 Organising Summarise, make diagram, concept map 12 Retrieving and using Rewrote until I knew what it mean 40 29 Monitoring Answering questions, reflecting 18 Total 33 34

Profiling components of students’ knowledge (frequencies)

Dimensional analysis (count-based)

Cluster analysis (ranked data)