World affairs Before and After.
Before and After Overview: Your college experience, for better or worse, will include reading. (LOTS of reading.) A great deal of this reading will involve big, complex ideas with lots of details and a great deal of theory and backstory. Some of this reading (hopefully a very small part) will be over subjects that do not initially interest you, so studying and learning becomes a game of mindset as well as concentration. As adult learners, despite our very best intentions and efforts, that kind of reading, review, and reflection can often become overwhelming at the end of a very busy day of work, kids, and life. This is where metacognition comes in. As discussed in this week’s learning content, metacognition is basically thinking about how we think. Along with that, metacognition helps us to understand the limits of our learning capacity and what strategies work best to boost our brain and study power. In an online learning situation, where it’s likely you will be doing most of your classwork either while juggling job, family, and other responsibilities, or at the very end of the day after you’ve exhausted yourself fulfilling those obligations, it’s even more important to put systems into place to help your brain retain and use information as effectively as possible. For this assignment, you will be exploring metacognition strategies, choosing one to use in a learning activity, and then comparing that to a “typical” learning experience without employing metacogition. Directions: 1) Read this article: Astronomers Detect Signals From First Stars in the Universe. For this first read-through, do not do anything out of the ordinary. Just read it as you normally would read a textbook, article, or website. Please try to read it from start to finish, in one sitting. Feel free to watch the embedded videos and follow the sidebar links after you have completed this activity, but for now just focus on the written article. 2) Spend 5-10 minutes writing a reflection about your first experience reading this article. Answer the following questions during your reflection : • What was your initial impression to the article itself? Were you excited or nonplussed by the topic? What was your inner dialogue as you began to read? • Approximately how long did it take for you to complete the article? • Approximately how many times did you either stop reading to do something else or had to refocus your attention on the text? • How much of the article (you can estimate a percentage or give a general description) do you feel you understood well enough to explain to someone else? • On the whole, do you feel like you retained and understood what you were reading? 3) Review the following metacognition strategies. KWL Charts Concept Mapping Cornell Note Taking (this particular strategy is frequently taught for oral lectures, but it works well for written lectures/reading assignments as well!) 4) Choose ONE of the above strategies from the above list to use during your second re-read of the astronomy article. If you’re using KWL or Cornell, you can download a template from a website or create one on your own. If you choose to use concept mapping, you can either create a concept map from scratch or use a word processing program or mindmapping software to create your map. 5) Reread the astronomy article, this time using the metacognitive strategy you chose. (Please note: if you choose to use the KWL chart, you will need to do some pre-reading thinking about what you already know about the article’s content). 6) After you have read the article a second time using metacognition, please reflect on your experience and answer the same set of questions as you did in Step 2 (this time in the context of reading with metacognition). 7) Finally, write 2-3 paragraphs comparing your first experience with your second. What differences did you notice in terms of information retention, your attitude toward the reading assignment, and your overall comfort level with reading complex texts? Did the metacognition strategy work for you? Please explain why/why not, and what modifications you might make to the process in the future.