BUS610: Business Intelligence and Analytics

This is the metacognitive funnel. It refers to the types or levels of  metacognitive inquiry that students use to move from general questions to metacognitive discovery and conversation.

One of the routines that faculty on campus have raved about is the metacognitive reading log (also known as two-column log, double entry log, T-chart). These logs can be used with any text (such as the sample below).

In looking at a short text:

But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.

To do those things well you'll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

What happens with this graphic organizer? Students are directed back into their texts to look for meaning and evidence. They cite pages or paragraphs. Students gain a lot more insight into their texts. She was able to gauge this from their submitted logs. In addition, what the students think and how they connect ideas to what they already understand (their schema) matters. This engages learners.

This chart has many purposes and benefits. For Reading Apprenticeship® classroom, we like to use this log as a way to get students to look for and pull evidence from the text. In addition, the log also allows faculty to see how the text engages the students and promotes inquiry around the text.

The goal of using these two column logs is to help students think and write about their reading process with their textbook chapters and academic work. When students become aware of their thinking as readers, they are empowered to take control of how well they learn. The students work on the logs independently, then come together to share in pairs and/or in table groups and ultimately to report their findings to the class. 

Faculty should model this activity and they should definitely scaffold the routine as the students may not know what to do. Some of the templates that we have for sharing including the metacognitive prompts to help the students get started in their thinking about their texts.

Some examples of these starters are:

• While I was reading…”
  
  • I felt confused when….
  • I was distracted by….
  • I started to think about….
  • I got stuck when …
  • The time went by quickly because …
  • A word/some words I did not know…

• I stopped because…
• I lost track of everything except…
• I figured out that…
• I first thought that…but then realized that…
• I finally understood…
• I remembered that earlier in the book…
• This contributes to what I know by…

We want to develop strong readers and thinkers in our disciplinary fields. Using metacognitive reading logs is another way to help students do the thinking and processing work with their texts. Furthermore as a routine in a flipped classroom, the students are then able to spend their time collaborating and applying their knowledge when they enter your classroom.

Source: https://rtc.instructure.com/courses/1056743/pages/evidence-logs-slash-metacognitive-logs
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