I'm not so sure I entirely agree with the fundamental concept that:
"Students do not spontaneously engage in
metacognitive thinking unless they are explicitly
encouraged to do so through carefully designed
instructional activities (Berardi-Coletta, Buyer,
Dominowski & Rellinger, 1995; Bransford et al.,
1999; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser,
1989; Lin & Lehman, 1999)."
For example, it was my first time using Google sites to design a website and I can arguably say that this program wasn't entirely intuitive. Still I was able to figure out how to do many things on my own and accomplish the task at hand. As I was began to understand more about the flexibility of the design schematics, I entirely re-organized the project--thus as my knowledge grew, I thought about how I was thinking about the task and drastically altered it. While the task of designing your own website is an instructional activity to say the least, I wouldn't say that activity was carefully designed. In other words, given that Google pages no longer existed, the entire class, teacher included, had to learn to use Google sites for the first time together.
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There's a distinction to be made about "discovering knowledge" (i.e., learning on your own as you had to do with google sites) and "being aware of how your learn best". For example, when I try something new like google sites I know about myself that I learn best from using the features that are easy to understand, build with those and then explore more and less intuitive features. Other people want to understand the entire thing first and then apply their knowledge. Being aware of how you learn best and using this awareness to maximize learning requires metacognitives skills.
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