Background

        As a first-year college students, one crucial thing they need to know in college is how to learn. Go to class, take notes, study those notes, and prepare for an exam if a teacher gives one. Those steps seem easy to understand, but one is more complicated than the other. Studying notes takes more than having the instructor’s words written down and memorized during the lecture. It would take them to understand their metacognition, actually to learn thoroughly. As a first-year college student fresh out of high school, it is sometimes hard to transition from a mandatory learning style to a free one. It is hard for one to learn by themselves without a premade path. So, how can first-year college students learn better understand and improve their metacognition?

Discussions

         Every first-year college student’s previous learning style has come from high school. The way they study developed and cemented there, but as they go through college and see that their way of learning is flawed, why not try to change it. In chapter 2 of Teach Yourself How to Learn, Saundra McGuire uses a student’s explanation of why they do not heed warnings about college in high school. “People told me that college was going to require a lot more of my time and effort, but I didn’t believe them because I had heard it before,” Says a struggling full scholarship math major at LSU (McGuire 7). What the quote is saying is that for high school students, it is hard to change their way of thinking when told because they have heard the same thing time and time again but never had needed to do so. So, it would help high school students to know the main differences between high school and college beforehand.

        California State University-Chico gives a complete list of the differences between high school and college. They break them down into five sections; rules and responsibilities, classes, instructors, tests, and grades. With Rules and Responsibilities, one would have to follow the rules in high school, but in college, they choose to be responsible. The fact that you have to chose to be responsible can give a first-year a sugar rush, and they do everything they couldn’t in high school, like miss due dates, skip class on purpose, and choose when to study. They would eventually crash at the end, and this would throw off their balance, which is risky in the beginning because no one wants to start on the wrong foot. With classes and instructors, their guiding principle is that it is up to the learner to learn independently rather than get handed one assigned short reading to get done while in class. While learning with professors in college, one is responsible for using metacognition and applying what they learned unguided. Lastly, the guiding principle for tests and grades is that students are given chances to learn and improve in high school, and grades are rewarded on good-faith efforts. In college, students are given few tests that require mastery, and grades are predominantly based on results. However, even with this knowledge, some students still lack in college, so now institutions would have to bring in reinforcement to help; instructors.

        In “Why Good Students Do “Bad” In College: Why We Should Care and What We Should Do,” The Learnwell Projects writes about how teachers could help students become better learners. They speak of a 20/80; 80/20 rule that students go by when they learn. When a student walks into a class, they intend to absorb 80% of the knowledge out of 20% of the information. To help prevent this, The Learnwell Projects suggest instructors come at students in the past, present, and futures steps. Giving them their past would show them how in high school, they stuck with a specific study approach that was never going to help them. Next, giving them their presence is to help change their mindset on their old way of studying and help them try to adopt the 20/80 rule instead of continuing with 80/20. Lastly, when giving them their future, it would be trying to sell them a future on how much more successful they would be if they took on the 20/80 rule. These conversations that teachers should be having with students could have a significant impact because it shows from a student’s perspective that their teacher is trying to help, so they could become successful when learning. 

With knowledge of the differences between high school and college and the help of some teachers, a student would still need to learn how to use their metacognition. Metacognition is the understanding of one’s thought process. When anyone attempts to learn, they always go in with their metacognition, whether weak or strong. The weaker a thought process, the less one learns. Amy Baldwin’s College success is a book that helps first-year college students feel seen and involved, and when they go over their skills and learning method, they encounter the book’s central theme; “real life doesn’t stop when college starts.” In chapter seven of this book, Baldwin uses a quote, “Becoming aware of your thought process and using this awareness deliberately is a sign of mature thinking.” This quote is like the gasoline of discovering one’s thought process because it presses one to rethink how one thinks. The book uses the example that all students have gone through, reading a page in a book and not understanding a word on the page. Some metacognitive approaches to solving that roadblock would be to try to comprehend what that student read. Like look up different words they do not understand in the paragraph, ask others that can help study, or even reading it out loud so they can understand it better (Baldwin 242). Doing these things are all examples of understanding how one learns and what to do if they ever come to a stop when studying.

Even with all the benefits of knowing how one’s metacognition works, some students may feel like they are the outliers that cannot access theirs, or it takes too long to understand it. In reality, the metacognition process does not add much to anyone’s plate because they are already doing it when they study, just not to the fullest extent. The video by Peterson’s provides a metacognition process that has three steps; plan, monitor, and evaluate. The most important part is the planning; it’s how one would set their steps upon how they will learn a particular topic. The monitoring process is to look over how well one is currently learning, one example would be practice tests. The last step is evaluating, in which after one finished a task, they turn it in and get a grade back; they would look back at how they did the first two steps and see where they would need to modify their approach. The whole metacognition process is studying, but it adds tiny things to help boost one’s understanding while studying and how to approach that understanding after getting some results.

Conclussion and Reccomendations

It will not just take a day to perfect when it comes to metacognition. One would have to go through a process and develop a new understanding of themselves. It helps to know from the beginning (high school) how adjusting to the new learning environment feels. A little boost from teachers would also get the job done because it makes students feel more comfortable knowing they are not being punished for not learning the correct way. Once the understands how one thinks, the process of improvement happens.

Citations

McGuire, Sandra Yancy. Teach Yourself How to Learn. Virginia: Stylus, 2018. E-Book

Baldwin, Amy. “College Success.” OpenStax, OpenStax, 27 Mar. 2020, https://openstax.org/books/college-success/pages/1-introduction.

Krista, et al. “Why Good Students Do ‘Bad’ in College: Why We Should Care and What We Should Do – the Learnwell Projects.” The LearnWell Projects – Making Learning More Visible, Manageable, and Effective, 19 Feb. 2018, https://thelearnwellprojects.com/thewell/why-good-students-do-bad-in-college-proven-insights-2/.

“How Is College Different from High School? – Accessibility Resource Center.” – Accessibility Resource Center – CSU, Chico, https://www.csuchico.edu/arc/resources/college-vs-highschool.shtml.

“Metacognition: The Skill That Promotes Advanced Learning.” YouTube, Peterson’s, 28 Apr. 2020, https://youtu.be/elZFL4FLVLE. Accessed 18 Apr. 2022.