Metacognition in Chemistry Education: Connecting Research and Practice Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 185.101.68.142 on 10/19/18. For personal use only.
Preface Metacognition is a critical part of the learning process for any content area, any academic subject. It is an inseparable part of the cognitive tapestry that is our learning. Further spreading the word about metacognition – how it benefits learning and how it can be fostered in classroom environments – especially in chemistry education, is a primary goal of this Series. Two colleagues, Seth Anthony and Michael Dianvosky, had the original idea for creating this Series. I am grateful to them for beginning this effort. In the pages that follow, readers will, I hope, find new or sharper insights into how metacognition and its tasks can be stitched into the fabric of classroom instruction and curricula. Tyler Miller (Chapter 1) begins the Series with various articulations about metacognition and its features and shares ideas for improving the accuracy of metacognition as well as promoting its sophistication. Sharon Vestal, Matthew Miller, and Larry Browning (Chapter 2) follow with a survey of metacognitive research in other STEM education disciplines. They go on to share tools that can be used across these disciplines to develop metacognition. Next, Megan Littrell-Baez and Donna Caccamise (Chapter 3) emphasize aspects of fundamental literacy and share characteristic features of metacognitive activities that can promote comprehension in chemistry. Mary van Opstal and myself (Chapter 4) then describe how metacognition is an essential part of the scientific process and share strategies and ways it can be engaged and fostered in the instructional laboratory. Resa Kelly and Jinyan Wang (Chapter 5) continue the Series with a detailed view of how metacognition can be used as a research tool for assessing how students understand molecular visualizations. The final chapter (Chapter 6) by Anusha Rao, Terri Tarr, and Pratibha Varma-Nelson shares “strategies to make faculty better teachers and their students better learners” – a fitting conclusion to the Series. The ultimate intent of this Series, to help reach its goal, is to offer some ways to make valid connections between what we do in our classrooms or what we pursue in our education research efforts to better helping students monitor and build their knowledge. This, I posit, remains an ongoing and necessary outcome of our education efforts. We must weave into our teaching that which helps our students.
Patrick L. Daubenmire Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Loyola University Chicago Chicago, Illinois 60660, United States ix
