CinemaTICE

The 21st Educational System’s Framework

Partnership for 21st Century Skills has proposed the 21st century learning framework shown in

figure 1.

Fig 1: The 21st Century Student Outcomes and Support Systems

If  we  categorize  the  Thai  Basic  Education  Core  Curriculum  2008  implemented   by  the Ministry  of  Education  to  be  used  with  primary  and  secondary  school  students  according  to  the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework, the results are as follows:

Table 1: The Ministry of Education’s 21st Century Curriculum According to Partnership for 21st

Century Framework

Even though this curriculum seems to meet the criteria of the Partnership for 21st century framework,  what educators should give more attention to is the practicality  of the implementation  of this curriculum in the school. That is, after such an excellent planning, those who are involved should keep a close eye on the real result so that they could revise any ineffective measures. Jay McTighe and Elliott Seif [2011] asked two interesting questions:

1.      How can we effectively integrate a satisfying result for the 21st  century with the existing jam-packed curriculum?

2.      Which kind of education guidelines or school structures would or would not support the development of the satisfying results for the 21st century?

So, it is very essential that every educator work together to find the answers that would help create and improve education system and the learning process that is up-to-date. This will help create learners  who will become  valuable  resources  in the society.  Besides  the revision  of the curriculum, which is a core structure of educational  system, the instilling in the learners the skills and characters that  will  help  them  learn  autonomously  is also  another  important  factor  that  educators  should  pay attention to. So the metacognition theory that both learners and educators can apply to encourage autonomous learning is proposed.

Metacognitive Strategies

Metacognition is one of the sciences that scholars have taken into interest since the end of the 20st   century.  It  is  a  theory  that  integrates  various  sciences  together,  i.e.,  linguistics,  neurology, psychology,  cognitive psychology,  artificial intelligence,  cognition, and contemplation.  Its purpose is to give answers to questions  like: “How do humans store the knowledge  in their brains?;” “How do humans understand language?;” “How do humans understand what they see?;” what psychological processes involve in the interpretation,  the cognition, the problem-solving  and the strategizing, which are high-level mental processes that involve the control or the managing of the lower-level mental.

Before the 21st century, metacognition is not widely known in the field of education because it lacks clear explanation  of the theory and indicators  of metacognitive  competences.  There is also no serious and organized mutual understanding among scholars about this theory.

Metacognition   science  is  a  concept  about  human  cognition;  an  invisible  process  which happens so fast that it is thought to happen automatically without going under thinking process. So, in the  past,  the  educators  had  tried  to  study  consequences  resulted  from  this  unaware-of-the-process cognition, the understanding level, problems that occurred, and their solutions etc.

In 1974,  long  before  Flavell’s  explanation  [1976 : 232]  of the  theory  becomes  what  most scholars refer to, Leclercq & Poumay [2004 : 3], with reference to Carver, divided the assessment  of learners’ ability into two dimensions: Psychometric and edumetric. This made the educators start to see the way to develop metacognitive competences.

Flavell [1976 : 232] explains that metacognition is a person’s mental ability to be aware of his thinking process, things that resulted from his thinking process, and other things that might affect his thinking process, such as the characteristic of the data, that is useful for his knowledge acquisition. Metacognition   composes   of  several  processes   but  the  main  processes   are:  the  controlling,   the proceeding  to the goal, and the assessment,  with the awareness  of factors  that affects  the cognitive process to achieve objectives of specific activities.

Lafortune  and  St  Pierre  [1996]  suggests  the  way  to  apply  metacognition  science  in  the classrooms by dividing it into three aspects: metacognitive  knowledge, mental activities’ management and recognizability  of mental activities. They explain that people who have metacognitive  experience are the ones who are able to assess the situation of the tasks they are assigned to do, who are able to say whether the tasks are easy or difficult to understand, who are able to remember or find their ways to achieve the goals they have set. These people are considered to have metacognitive experience, that is, to have  the  ability  of thinking’s  reflexion  while  they  are  in the  middle  of the  acquisition  training activities and mental activities’ management.

There are three types of metacognitive knowledge: the self-knowledge such as knowing one’s own  weak  and  strong  points;  the  knowledge  about  the  tasks ;  and  the  knowledge  about  various strategies and about when to use which strategy to get the most out of the situation. Mental activities’ management is the ability to effectively choose and apply various strategies that are appropriate to the person’s context in doing different tasks, starting from activities planning, activities supervision and problem solving. Lafortune and St Pierre explain that the planning strategy occurs after learners have studied all the information.  Task supervision  strategy occurs while learners are examining  what they have done to assess the working progress, the effectiveness of different strategies, and the satisfaction of the results.  The problem  solving  occurs  after the task supervision  to decide  whether  to continue using  the  current  strategy  or  to  stop  using  it,  or  to  change  to  another  strategy  after  knowing  the advantages and the disadvantages of the previous strategy. In the end, the recognizability of mental activities is very beneficial for the enhancement of metacognitive knowledge and for the development of thinking skills.

Hence, in each learning context, learners often acquire two roles at the same time: the task participant using cognitive strategies and the activity creator using metacognitive strategies (planning, assessing, and problem solving). Moreover, besides the different bodies of knowledge, teachers should at the same time give importance  to the strategies to motivate their learners. Lafortune and St Pierre divide   affectivity   into   five   characteristics:   attitude,   emotion,   motivation,   attribution   and   self- confidence. In order to develop learners’ metacognitive competences, teachers should create tasks that encourage learners to freely use their own thinking process. For example, teachers can encourage group discussion  or  encourage  learners  to  think  of  the  condition  of  the  tasks  they  are  doing  (i.e.,  the knowledge and ability involve in the activities), or encourage learners to examine the context of those tasks. Moreover, to promote autonomous learning, teachers should encourage communications  among learners so that they have an opportunity to exchange their ideas and to come up with new bodies of knowledge that can replace old learning style of memorizing everything the teachers say. Teachers can also come up with recreation activities that help create learners’ motivation to learn. For the assessment of  learners’  achievement,  teachers  can  use  coevaluation  strategy  by  assessing  both  learners  and teachers at the same time or use autoevaluation strategy with the more experienced learners.

Teachers may divide the development of metacognitive competences assessment into two aspects— activity process and level of understanding. By using open-ended questions, teachers may be able to inspire learners to think logically, so that they are able to examine and evaluate what they have learned and done. Below are the examples of metacognitive competences assessment.

Table 2: Metacognitive Competences Assessment

To respond to the development  of Information and Communication  Technology (ICT) in the 21st century, the application of social network like Facebook in the classroom is one of the modern and useful tools that will help motivate learners to participate in the class, especially Asian learners who are reluctant to speak out because they are afraid of embarrassing themselves.

Social network

Social network is the grouping of Internet users who have the same interest together. To use social network in the classroom can motivate learners to exchange their ideas with their teachers and classmates even though this exchange only occur in a virtual classroom where the teacher is not in their presence.  It encourages  learners  to speak  out, to improve  their critical  thinking  skills,  and to work together to create new bodies of knowledge instead of depending on teachers only.

At the present, the scholars are interested in using social network, especially Facebook. They focus on the analysis of learners’ motivation and the benefits teachers and learners will get from this innovation  [B. Marchal ; 2009, M. D. Roblyer, M. McDaniel,  M. Webb, J. Herman and J. V. Witty; 2010, N. Dogruer,  I. Menevis  and R. Eyyam ; 2011, A. Nadkarni  & S. G. Hofmann ; 2012]. In his article,  « Le  microblogue  ou  miniblogue,  outil  d’interaction  quasi  simultanée  entre  apprenant  et tuteur » [2009],  B. Marchal,  who is one of the earlier  educators  who study  the use of Web  2.0 or Facebook in Thai classroom, confirms the benefits of social network. He states that since, whether in a real  or virtual  classroom,  there  is always  an  interaction  between  teachers  and  learners  and  among learners themselves; social network is a very beneficial tool that offers immense resources and leads to the foundation of collective intelligence through each learner personal contribution.1

The  first  reason  for  this  is  the  time  constraint.  In  the  present  world  of  ICT,  millions  of information  are  available  for  learners  to  gain  access  to  and  they  need  to  be  able  to  choose  them appropriately  and  fast.  Moreover,  the fact  that  learners  are able  to convey  their  thoughts  in a few sentences through their mobile phones or notebooks is considered the true reflection from them. Also, learners these days read less and less. So for them to search for the information they want from Web 2.0, which is considered convenient and is the biggest resources, is the way to practice their reading strategies  and  skills.  They  learn  to  see  and  understand   the  big  picture  and  then  narrow  their understanding down to specific information that they are looking for.

The application of social network in the classroom encourages autonomous learning. Learners are assigned to do continuous activities that teachers have already planned in advance. These activities come  with  different  conditions  and  limitations  to make  learners  practice  how  to plan,  gather  their thoughts, and solve the problems.  Besides, in stead of the old style of learning through textbooks  or teaching  materials,  working  on Web 2.0 creates new, colorful  and creative  learning  atmosphere  and helps  encourage  learners  to  express  their  opinion.  And  since  Web  2.0  is  considered  a networking activity, teachers can also persuade learners to find additional information from different websites and to consult with their classmates to work together in order to achieve their goals of learning.

1 Translation from French.

Conclusion

Overall, to practice metacognitive competence skills makes learners learn logically and systematically,  thus encourage  learners’  autonomy.  So social network  is considered  one of the tools that help learners  improve  this important  learning  skill.  However,  this 21st  century  technology  also plays two opposing roles that educators should be aware of. That is, while social network is a useful tool  to  encourage  interactions  between  teachers  and  learners  outside  the  classroom,  it  can  also

discourage   face-to-face   interactions   in   the   real   classroom.   Therefore,   the   encouragement   of autonomous learning among Asian learners cannot stop at the use of ICT only. Educators still need to work together to come up with the real way to motivate learners to express their opinion. This is to help create autonomous learning environment where teachers are merely moderator and not sole knowledge transmitters.