Improving metacognition through explicit instruction of learning strategies

A relatively incontrovertible aim of education is to enable students to become independent in their learning, equipping them with the skills to make strategic and reflective choices in their learning so that they become lifelong learners. What is more controversial is exactly how a school goes about achieving these aims. Since the publication of Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindsets (Dweck, 2000), there has been a great deal of interest in mindset interventions. However, a recent study by the EEF (Foliano et al., 2019) has shown little impact of mindset interventions, and some authors have suggested that a focus on improving students’ metacognition may be more successful (Sherrington, 2019). Our approach Following a similar approach to that taken by Durrington School (Allison, 2018), a Year 9 biology class was explicitly taught the six strategies for effective learning from the Learning Scientists (Weinstein et al., 2018): retrieval practice, interleaving, concrete examples, dual