Research School Network: Metacognition in action Secondary case study: an approach for long answer tasks in Science

In recent years, much educational dialogue has been centred around metacognition and its application in curriculum and classrooms from EYFS to further education. And for good reason, its importance cannot be overstated, it empowers teachers to guide students towards becoming self-regulated learners, and has the potential, given the right implementation, to elicit an additional +7 months progress for our students.

As a whole school we are in our second phase of developing metacognitive practice within the school. The initial phase took place in 2018, in the early stages of our development towards become a research-evidence informed school. It coincided with the release of the EEF guidance report on Metacognition & Self-Regulated Learning, which underpinned our work on developing teachers’ knowledge and understand of the important of explicit, subject focused teaching of metacognition (recommendation 1 – EEF Guidance Report).

While guidance reports are wonderful starting points, they do not feature the exact answer you are looking for, in your exact context. A cornerstone of our approach to professional development across the school is ensuring it is subject specific but as we as a science department began to look at the guidance report we had to keep in mind that we were taking principles and applying them in a context from which they did not originate. This is not necessarily a problem, but should not be forgotten when beginning to use evidence in practice.

Science – A case study

At GCSE, tackling longer answer, 6 mark questions in science is a daunting prospect for many students. There is often a lot of written information and a multitude of instructions associated with tackling the task. Therefore, students can often feel ​‘stranded’ when faced with the issue. The typical challenges are:

What is the question asking me to do?
For example, do I need to refer to a data set or graph? Is there some text to analyse? Is everything I need on this page, or do I need to look at a previous page?

How do I answer this type of question?
For example, is the question asking for an explanation, comparison, or description?

What do I know to be able to answer this question? If students have managed to wade through the question itself, understood what it is asking of them, and are ready to approach the answer, what knowledge do I have available to construct a response?

To tackle this issue, we have introduced a thinking/​writing framework to students (we originally saw this being used by Tudor Grange School, Solihull).

This approach relies on teachers modelling the thinking of the expert, alongside drawing expertise from the classroom to co-construct a response.

1. Teacher reads the question aloud to the class and vocalises their thought process, whilst annotating the question
2. This is a dialogic process which involves highlighting areas of the questions which may be tricky, and referring to previous examples which may be relevant to the current question
3. The page is split into two columns: The ​‘thinking side’ and the ​‘writing side’
4. Students bullet point an initial list of possible ideas for the ​‘thinking side’
5. The ​‘thinking side’ is then co-constructed with the class, using targeted questions
6. The teacher models their thinking for the writing process

It is important to ensure that this is not a passive process: all students will be writing things down and contributing. In addition, this is not about copying the writing side. It is a flexible approach, which can involve really high levels of scaffold and support, where necessary, which is faded when appropriate. Furthermore, worked or partially worked examples can be used to provide the necessary accessibility for students, as well as using success criteria or other rubrics to support more independent practice. Modelling and co-construction are the starting points, gradually releasing responsibility until students are working independently, with internalised strategies to approach longer answer questions.

Key actions and considerations for next steps

Following this initial trial of the strategy, there are clear indications that this could be a promising approach to addressing an evergreen issue in students approaches to extended responses in science. However, to scale this up further we must first address the following areas for improvement:

- In order to develop consistency and to share good practice we have used peer observations of the strategy. From this we think there is still work to be done to develop consistency across the department, using a shared language around the expectations for teacher and student activity during the thinking and writing stages.
- Pupil completion rates on these longer questions has increased. We would now like to look at introducing the approach in KS3 to foster early development of metacognitive approaches to long response tasks in science.

Louise Lewis is an Evidence Lead in Education for Huntington Research School and Deputy Head of Science at a secondary school in the East Riding of Yorkshire.