(1207) NEW WAYS OF TEACHING METACOGNITIVE SKILLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: CONVERSTAND, A SOFTWARE FOR A BETTER KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

摘要

Do all students consciously deal with metacognitive processes when learning? How can teachers besure of it?It is believed that successful knowledge acquisition requires the use of metacognitive skills. This is theraison d'etre for the ConverStand software presented here, designed to bring unconsciousmetacognition to a conscious process. This conscious use of metacognitive strategies will makestudents able to develop “more sophisticated and academically oriented” skills. (Veenman et al.,2006, p. 8).Metacognition was first explained in the mid-1970s as the knowledge about and regulation of one'scognitive activities in learning processes, as thinking about one's thinking and regulation of thatthinking (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1978). Nowadays, its importance has been stressed byOz (2014,chap.7, p. 139): “metacognition is an increasingly important cognitive factor in applied linguistics aswell as educational, cognitive, and developmental psychology”.It is in this background that the ConverStand software is born as an idea. Its name is a mixture of twowords: conversation and understand. This software will enhance the development and settlement ofstudents' metacognitive strategies. It will put together verbalized metacognitive knowledge and selfinstructions,this is, cognitive activities which imply metacognition (see Veenman et al., 2006).The software will work as a written conversation between the student and a wise character (anavatar). It uses a very familiar interface for students (like a WhatsappTM conversation). Thisconversation must take place twice. First, and driven by the teacher within the class, before thebeginning of a new lesson in order to assess the students' previous knowledge and objectives toacquire, and second, after the end of that lesson in order to asses the real acquired knowledge. Thelast must occur outside the classroom.We know from the literature (Pintrich & de Groot,1990; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1990;Afflerbach, 2000) that there are many methods to assess metacognition (questionnaires,interviews, thinking-aloud protocols, stimulated recall, and on-line computer-logfile registration); theConverStand software mixes all these methods in a funny and familiar way for students.The backend of the software will work mainly with keywords labelled according to the differentcognitive domains (this is, subjects, and within the subjects, lessons). These keywords will beextracted from the analysis of different corpora, and they will allow the wise character guide theconversation. According to the student's responses, the software will detect certain keywords and willcontinue the conversation in one way or another.At the end of each conversation (this is, at the end of each lesson), students will be able to keep theconversation in a pdf format and send it to their teacher. Thus, teachers will be able to assess thestudent's knowledge about the lesson, and evaluate their teaching practice as well (for instance, if alot of students have problems in the same questions, it may be because something wasn't taughtclearly enough).All in all, the ConverStand software will help us not only to examine whether the development ofmetacognitive skills helps students improve in formal educational settings, but also to analyze whethermetacognitive skills extend student's intelligence.