Welcome to my inquiry blog.
The question that I am researching is:
What are some self-evaluation and/or metacognitive strategies I can teach my students that would help them identify when they need to ask for clarification or help concerning a certain concept before they fall too far behind?
This question came from my own personal experience in the British Columbia public school system. When I seriously started considering what topic I would like to explore, I thought of my personal experiences in elementary and secondary school to see if I could identify a moment or feeling I remembered clearly. I think we must have been talking about evaluation and assessment in other classes because I suddenly remembered often feeling at a loss or confused when it came to taking tests or being evaluated in any manner; there was always something that I did not understand, whether it was a small or large concept but I did not know until that summative assessment moment that I had either never fully understood it or, more frequently, could not apply it in a practical manner. This often occurred in Math, but sometimes there were instances in other subjects as well. With these feelings and experiences in mind, I began considering how I, as a teacher, could help my students avoid feeling this way.
I think my question is important and would be of use to others in the teaching profession because I have found that this feeling of uncertainty occurs very frequently in students. In the more recent past, in my post-secondary undergraduate studies, I have come across peers who, after writing a midterm or final exam, question whether or not they actually learned about a concept that they were tested on. I saw that this lack of self-awareness or self-assessment still plagued students, even though I found much of post-secondary studies to be individually chosen therefore students were mostly thought of to be responsible for their own learning. Even though this could be the case, these students, myself included, were not taught how to know if we really knew what we were learning. There was no course that taught us this so I think it should be a responsibility of the young childhood educators to help students become aware.
With that in mind, using these kinds of strategies would put more of the responsibility on the student as opposed to the teacher to know when to get extra help. Now that I have been in a real classroom and taught a little I understand even more clearly that it is difficult to keep track of which student understands which concept, who needs just a little nudge in the right direction and who needs immediate, extensive help. If students could tell when they needed to ask for help, even if they were not quite sure where exactly they needed help, it would help the teacher a lot because then they would not leave a student behind whole they start a new concept.