by Herb Coleman

At the Lilly Conference held in Austin this past January, I attended an interesting session on metacognition and guided reading delivered by Julie Wulfemeyer of Minnesota State University, Mankato. Metacognition (thinking about thinking) is one of the latest pushes to improve student outcomes. What Wulfemeyer revealed was a shocking study that showed talking to students about metacognition without giving them practical examples can actually be damaging to to student outcomes. In the study, one group of students was told about metacognition, another group was give a metacognitive strategy and a third wasn’t told anything. On the post test, the group told about metacognition did worse than the group not told anything. It seems that not telling students about metacognition was better than telling them without strategies.

The strategy that Wulfemeyer employed was guide reading videos (GRV). Since she teaches philosophy and students have to read various types of texts, she developed think out loud videos for each to the types of texts the students would encounter. It is this technique that I applied to my classes this spring.

Every semester by the second or third quiz, I have at least one student who comes to me with the frustration of reading the material but doing poorly on the quizzes. This occurs despite the fact that I provide a podcast review on where they should focus. So, for this semester, in each of my classes, I provided a guided reading video to show them how to apply metacognitive strategies when reading their textbooks. I will be gathering data to see who actually listened to the GRV and to see if there is an improvement in their grades for quizzes or other assignments. This is a simple strategy that can be applied to any texts to help guide students in their studying.