Speaker
Description
The development of metacognitive skills – the “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking processes” – has been shown to be effective in supporting student learning, but these skills need to be explicitly fostered. To that effect, I assigned a collection of self-reflection prompts to students in introductory physics courses (both calculus- and algebra-based), in the form of asynchronous online discussion activities. The prompts ask students to reflect on their perception of physics and physicists, along with their strategies and motivations for learning physics. Through their responses, students show that they recognize connections between physics and their fields of study, including students in the life sciences. Additionally, the discussion format allows students to meet others who might be having similar difficulties or whose interests are related, allowing students to network, empathize with each other, and ultimately engage with each other as part of a learning community.
