Response to Designing Metacognitive Activities by Lin, Xiaodong

The metacognitive activities at school in Lin’s article reflect the needs of the society in twenty-first century: as self problem-solvers, people need the ability to use strategies consciously and to monitor the effectiveness of their strategy use. I first encountered the concept of metacognition in “Teaching Second Language Reading,” a course I took last semester. Metacognition in reading comprehension refers to readers’ application of reading strategies, their awareness of the application, and their modification of the strategies. I did a self-study project on note-taking skills that facilitate reading comprehension. In order to improve my note-taking skills for better reading comprehension, I interviewed my classmates their note-taking skills, implemented some in my reading task, and examined the effectiveness of my new note-taking skills. The process of metacognition monitoring occurred in my self-study of note-taking skills, but metacognition was never made explicitly in the classroom in my previous educational experience for the lack of self-awareness and teachers’ constant encouragement to this. Some technology programs discussed in this article can solve this problem. For example, a computer-simulation program prompts students to explain what they decide to do and why they do this in designing the biology experiments (p. 27). This kind of program helps students develop their strategies. However, even if the computer programs are getting more customized to suit each individual’s needs, it might not be able to evaluate students’ response to the prompts. Students sometimes do not explain the reason of their decision-making clearly, so teachers need to cooperate with the technology programs and intervene accordingly to help students elaborate more on their explanation. Or, this could be a possible direction for the technology program designers to create more personal and interactive programs about metacognition.