Teaching The Metacognitive Aspects Of Qar

By Author: Stephen Covey
Total Articles: 74
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Effective strategy instruction, such as with QAR, requires teachers to demonstrate the metacognitive actions required to effectively implement the strategy through modeling the process for their students. These steps include a description of the strategy, or declarative understanding; how to use the strategy, or procedural understanding; and when and why to use the strategy, or conditional understanding (Hartman, 2001, p. 161).

The think-aloud (Wade, 1990), also known as mental modeling, is an effective mode of instruction for improving student comprehension of text (Kucan & Beck, 1997). The think-aloud strategy was modeled across all the professional development sessions and was expected as part of teachers' lesson Omega Seamaster Replica Watches planning. Therefore, when teachers did a think-aloud they demonstrated how they were, themselves, metacognitive in their use of QAR. They describe the strategy, they model and use the strategy, and they describe situations under which it is appropriate to implement the strategy.

This inquiry used qualitative research techniques ...
... to analyze the way in which teachers reflected on and planned instruction to demonstrate their conditional, contextual, and procedural knowledge of QAR. The data sources included lesson plans as well as open-ended questions given during the professional development sessions.
The 120 explicit instruction plans created by the participants were used to evaluate the planned use of QAR within teachers' content areas. The lesson plans included a focus, instruction notes, modeling, guided practice, independent practice, and data collection. A lesson plan was not expected to equal one day of teaching; but to represent the teaching of the QAR strategy within the content being presented. The lesson plans used the content as a vehicle for the teacher to demonstrate the thinking necessary for implementation of an aspect of QAR with opportunities for guided and independent practice. Thus, lessons often took more than one class period or day of instruction.

At the end of each professional development session, participants were asked a common question designed to assess their understanding of QAR and students' strategic thinking. The request to define QAR and describe how students will benefit from instruction in it led to responses that described the participants' thinking regarding the framework.

The data were analyzed as a single case. Data analysis was a recursive process in which the data were reviewed to determine the major themes and developmental patterns in the written responses and lesson plans. The themes that were uncovered in the analysis included the following:
Teachers' understandings of QAR (developed from the teachers' responses to the open-ended questions)
Teachers' metacognitive thinking about QAR (developed from the teachers' lesson plans)

The themes were analyzed with regard Omega Replica Watches to the teachers' procedural, conditional, and declarative understandings of QAR. Declarative knowledge may be represented by a teacher quoting a definition. Procedural knowledge was broken into two categories; procedural general (in which the steps in the strategy are listed) and procedural task-specific (when a teacher describes the specific steps in the lesson/article/task). Conditional knowledge was broken into two categories as well: conditional benefits (the teacher states the benefit of using QAR); and conditional contextual (the teacher explains why a particular strategy was chosen in a specific instance).

Twenty-two secondary teachers from 11 different schools across a large state in the midwestern United States participated in the initiative and contributed to the three cases presented in the sections that follow (Table 1).