3 Apply the plan-monitor-evaluate model for assessing your learning progress

Have you ever wondered what the most successful students do differently from other students? Students who have developed effective ways of learning have mastered a skill called metacognition. In simple terms, metacognition is understanding your own thinking and learning processes.  In other words, it is “thinking about your thinking”. Metacognitive skills include planning your learning, monitoring whether your current learning strategies are successful, and evaluating results of your learning. Improving your metacognitive skills is associated with increased success in all of your academic life. To learn more about how metacognition applies to student life, watch the video below.

How do you gain the skill of metacognition?  One way to think about developing metacognition is gaining the ability to plan, monitor, and evaluate your learning.

Planning involves two key tasks:  deciding what you need to learn, and then deciding how you are going to learn that material.

Monitoring requires you to ask “how am I doing at learning this?”.  In monitoring, you are constantly tracking what you have learned, what you don’t yet know, and whether your study strategies are helping you to learn effectively.

Evaluation involves reflection on how well you met your Learning Objectives after completing a unit of study, or receiving feedback (such as a test or assignment).

Key Questions to Improve Your Learning

At each stage in the learning  cycle, there are key questions that you will ask yourself to support your learning process. In the chart below, you will identify the key question for each stage in the cycle, along with the other questions you will want to consider. To use these questions in your courses, download a printable worksheet version.

^{[1] [2]}

Reflect

One key metacognitive skill is being able assess what you already know about a course topic, and to identify what you would like to learn through your reading, discusssions, assignments and other class activities.  Complete the exercise below, or download a printable version.