By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
“It has been shown that in typical physics classes, students’ beliefs about their own learning deteriorate or at best stay the same. I want to reverse that result,” explained Calvin Kalman, principal researcher and a professor in the Department of Physics at Concordia University, in a press release about the project. “This study shows that if you combine a meta-cognitive activity with an interactive activity, students can better hone their thinking abilities for that course.” In this case students who were part of the experimental group were expected to engage in reflective writing, a meta-cognitive activity, before class in order to express in their own words what various textbook concepts meant, how they connected to concepts in other chapters and how they pertained to personal experiences. A control group of students performed summary writing, simply recapping what the textbook covered. Then when both groups came to class, they did collaborative work with fellow students and instructors in the lab.
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