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Are They Ready Yet? Developmental Issues
can trust their teachers. Dismissing or ridiculing beliefs or ideas that students hold dear
probably does not engender the necessary trust.
Perhaps we should model good thinking in front of our students and require them to
think in front of us. We should show them the process of our thinking, not just the prod-
ucts of our thinking, to counter the naïve belief that authorities “just know” and that
conclusions must come easily or not at all. While there is little research support for this
assertion (yet), I believe students need to hear us thinking out loud and the focus of our
assignments and assessment should be on the processes of their thinking rather than on
the products of their thinking. We should design assignments that allow us to see their
thinking, and we should share stories with our students about our own struggles in learn-
ing and understanding. If we want students really to understand our discipline as well as
grow in the sophistication of their epistemology, it seems to follow that we should help
students understand (and critique) how psychologists create knowledge, not just what
knowledge psychologists have created.
Metacognition
A focus on metacognition (thinking about thinking) may be an important part of an effec-
tive thinking-based pedagogy. Helping students develop better metacognitive strategies
has been posited as a key approach for increasing students’ critical thinking skills and
teaching for transfer across contexts (Halpern, 1998). Metacognitive awareness has also
been suggested as an important way to understand personal epistemology—as knowing
about knowing (Hofer, 2004b). Critical thinking itself has been defined as “evaluative
metacognition” (Edman, 2000), that is, thinking about one’s thinking to make that think-
ing better. Perhaps one of our primary curriculum goals should be to help students to
consider how they select and monitor their cognitive strategies; to consider what they
know and how they know it; and to grapple with the broader issues of how anyone knows,
what knowing means, and what knowledge is within different contexts.
To accomplish this outcome, Halpern (1998) suggests we should foreground the think-
ing process. We should regularly ask students, “How do you know that?” when they answer
questions in class, and “How did so-and-so know that?” when we present theories or con-
clusions of research. Students can be asked to prioritize information from most to least
important in answering a question; to organize the information in several different ways;
to list several possible solutions to a problem and define ways to evaluate the solutions; to
explore implications and assumptions of questions, methods, and conclusions. Students
could also be asked to evaluate their problem-solving processes (Halpern, 1998): How
much time is this problem worth? What do we know about this problem already? What is
the goal in working on this problem? How will we know when we have solved this prob-
lem or come to a conclusion? Helping students to think about their thinking, and then
guiding them in their evaluation of that thinking, are keys to helping students grow in
their epistemological sophistication and desire to think better. Students can think a full
step beyond their typical thinking strategy with support and encouragement and the more
sophisticated their thinking becomes, the farther they can go with the thinking scaffolding
that good teaching can provide (King & Kitchener, 2004).