What is the Cognitive Dimension?

According to the Strategic Literacy Initiative, the Cognitive Dimension involves developing the internal processes of reading which include collaboration of strategies for arriving at deeper meaning of text ("The Reading Apprenticeship Framework" 8). Please note, the Cognitive Dimension is harder to establish without the Social Dimension and Personal Dimension because a student needs to have a reader identity to participate in a collaborative approach to build comprehension tools that develop mental strategies, monitoring comprehension, applying problem solving, and adjusting strategies for various texts. Sounds overwhelming, right?

Where to Start?

Why do Metacognitive Conversations Help Readers?

Metacognitive conversations will change how the readers identify themselves as readers, how they approach text, and how they engage and use text as evidence to make sense of their reading. A metacognitive conversation is an ongoing discussion in which the students and a faculty member think about and discuss their personal relationships with text in a community of readers, and where their cognitive activities and shared knowledge skill-sets help the reader make sense of the text.

Embedding Metacognitive Conversations into planning and teaching of content you assign is the best place to begin, and how you do it depends on your style, content, and population of students.

How and when did I learn my content had a certain style/text feature?

Let me give you an example, I was using a reference book for teaching my English classes. As any teacher, to be able to share it with my students, I spent some time looking at it and analyzing it all while comparing and contrasting it to other sources. Once I spent this time evaluating the resource, I began to annotate it, reread my annotations, and shared the most valuable information in a PowerPoint. In the first week of class, I remember flagging several organizational tactics the editor made and the most important sections for this class. Then, I decided to do a little informal assessment with a scavenger hunt through the reference book.

What I realized: my students did not understand or recall the set up of the Index, Headings, nor Subheadings! This was huge for me. I spent a summer going through my process to teach it, and I was not giving my students this same opportunity to share their process or confusions. I had to back up and ask metacognitive questions that ended up in the class defining the structure while building a safe environment for asking questions. Meanwhile, an RA workshop provided vocabulary for what I was doing: defining Text Features.

Taking this step back through the metacognitive process helped me remember that most people do not pick up a reference book and immediately understand or remember the organization. My process for picking up this type of tool and teaching from it is, now, automatic because I have lots of experience going through books, in fact I love it, so I built a "tool box" of strategies that help me to understand and make sense of what I am reading and why I am reading it (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, and Murphy 191).

So, once I realized that this PowerPoint I was sharing with my students in week one was not giving students the opportunity to struggle, vocalize, utilize schema for digging into a text, I was able to make changes to the class. Struggling, sharing, and using prior experiences is important for building understanding and critical thinking. Now, my classes have a personal and social conversation about text features with metacognitive questions like the ones below. Are you teaching online? Think about your OER sources or even your Canvas set-up. As instructors, your organization is systematic because of the years of developing an expert (insider as noted in the previous module) process, and students need to be given time and the purpose to make sense of the class's organizational structure. In other words, we need to make the invisible, visible. With a few metacognitive questions, my students are reminded of and/or creating the process for digging into the homework, completing the assignments, questioning and grappling with content, and asking for help.

Please consider the following metacognitive questions to ask yourself or your class:

What skills are needed to engage in this text?
How is the text organized and prioritized? Why would an author or expert in the field present this material in this way?
What structures are inherent in the text to help you make sense of the content? How do these help you?
At what point, did you begin to feel overwhelmed with the content? What do you think made you feel that way? How did you proceed?
When did you begin to feel like an “outsider” to this content?
What schema helped you persevere in working through this text?
What do you understand? What concepts or ideas or passages have become barriers for you? How can we overcome these barriers?
What sections of the reading did you skip? What made you skip this section?
At what point in the text, did you join your previous knowledge with the new knowledge? What helped make this connection?
How could I have introduced this text to you to prepare you for the material?
What did you learn? How does it apply? How did you learn that?
Open ended sentences like: I wonder if ...; This made me think of...; This connects to...; I question…

"What tools will my students need?" by Danielle Ritter (unless otherwise linked), Tacoma Community College is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0