One Quick Win: Encourage Student Metacognition with Weekly Reflection Journals in Your Course

In simple terms, metacognition is the practice of thinking about one’s own thinking. Metacognition can significantly contribute to overall student success, since planning, monitoring, and assessing one’s understanding and performance helps students learn. Metacognitive reflection exercises – which can encourage students to reflect on what they have learned and how it connects to what they already know, what is confusing to them, and what questions they have – also afford instructors insight into student thinking.

While these types of conversations sometimes occur organically during synchronous sessions, effective metacognition for all students requires intentional and structured activities. This is particularly true for online asynchronous courses, where students may lack spontaneous opportunities to reflect. In these settings, purposeful assignments and reflection questions can foster metacognitive reflection experiences for students that are beneficial to their learning.

^{Purposeful assignments and reflection questions can foster metacognitive reflection experiences for students.}

One effective tool for encouraging metacognition in online courses is a Weekly Reflection Journal. This activity is designed to enhance students’ metacognitive skills by providing an opportunity for them to reflect on their learning experiences, connect new concepts to prior knowledge and experience, and formulate any questions or concerns they may have. This practice helps turn surface learning into deep learning, cementing their understanding of course material.

Weekly Reflection Journals are successful when they are aligned to course goals. One way to achieve this is to remind students of the weekly learning objectives for the course, and have students reflect on them directly. For example, a Weekly Reflection Journal might prompt students, “As a reminder, here are the weekly learning objectives. Reflect on these learning objectives in your response. Begin your reflection by answering the question, ‘What did you learn this week?’” It could also be as simple as, “What did you learn this week?” or “What did you learn this week? How does it connect to your experiences and what you already know? What questions do you have?”

Journal assignments encourage students to actively reflect on their learning and foster student-to-instructor interaction. Unlike a discussion board or classroom setting, students have privacy to write candid responses, which gives instructors valuable insight into student thinking. This allows instructors to intervene on any misconceptions or misunderstandings. They can also follow up with additional strategies for students to accomplish coursework and achieve their individual learning goals. If the instructor sees themes across student responses, they can post an announcement or video to the whole class with clarification, ensuring that all students benefit from the feedback.

As an instructional designer, what excites me the most about metacognition and the Weekly Reflection Journal is that there are endless opportunities for what students could possibly write about. Unlike traditional assignments that might focus on finding the “right” answer, when utilized effectively, metacognitive exercises invite a range of responses. What one student already knows or is connecting their learning to may differ from another student’s, depending on the student’s previous experience or background. What an instructor thinks students might be learning one week might be different than how students understand their own learning that week.