Metacognition Review 3


Knowledge of Cognition [Person,Task]

1. What skills as a writer did you feel you possessed before you embarked on the Were You Born on the Wrong Continent assignment? What kinds of writing did you feel you had not mastered?

2. When you first learned of/read the Were You Born on the Wrong Continent assignment, what did you perceive as the most difficult aspect of the task ahead of you? What special skills did you imagine might be required to complete the paper successfully? What one word best described your attitude towards the assignment before starting [Challenging, Interesting, Exciting, Boring, Meh, Dutiful, Painful, Exasperation, Nausea-Inducing, Some other word]

Planning

3. How did you approach identifying which particular points of comparison you were going to choose? Was there any reading (outside of Geoghegan) that helped you come to that conclusion?

4. How did you approach identifying the evidence you were going to use to illustrate your points of comparison? Did you take any particular steps to identifying information that might be informative for this task?

5. Did you embark on a structural approach before you started to actually write the paper or did you expect to discover the structural aspect of the paper as you wrote it?

6. Did you construct a tentative thesis in your head before you started writing the paper? Did you adhere to this thesis as you wrote the paper or did you have to amend it? Or did you try to discover your points of comparison as you wrote (like in perhaps a free-writing approach)?

Monitoring

7. Did you take a methodical approach to the assignment with specific time scheduled to work on the assignment or did you try to complete the assignment in time to meet the deadline?

8. Did you put forth your best effort in gleaning information that might have been useful in illustrating your particular points of comparison? What might you have improved upon?

9. Did you put forth your best effort in gleaning information that might have been useful in evaluating the information that you collected? Did you encounter any interpretations of any of your points of comparison that made your your analysis subtler or deepened your understanding of the comparison you had made?

Regulation/Control

10. Did you decide to do any additional research as a result of your editing and proofreading of your rough draft?

11. Did you attempt to amend your thesis after you had completed your draft of the paper?

12. Did you re-evaluate any of the evidence you had presented in the first draft and decided it needed to be strengthened?

Evaluation

13. How did you assess the overall quality of your paper?

14. Were there things that you thought you did particularly well? Did you pleasantly surprise yourself with any of the writing that you produced?

15. Were there things that you thought you didn't do particularly well? Did you disappoint yourself with any of the writing that you produced?

16. Did you find any of the information that you wrote about interesting, edifying, or life-changing? Did you talk about the topic of the book with anyone outside of class?