Yes! One of the strengths of this classroom techniques is that because the student’s experience and learning is the center of the activity, it can be used in courses in any subject or field. The literature on teaching and learning is rich with examples of how metacognitive skills can be built in courses from varied subjects such as biology (Tanner 2012), philosophy (Concepción 2004),  and many more (e.g. psychology, literature and geography in Chick et al 2009).

See the Metacognitive Self-Reflection Annotated Bibliography for the above resources and others.

If your aim is to cultivate a metacognitive environment or to build these skills in students who may not have much previous experience with them, short, recurring activities may actually be more effective than less frequent, more time consuming ones (like a retrospective reflection essay at the end of a unit or semester).

You may want to try modeling metacognitive self-reflection by explaining how you came to understand a particular concept or method, or even explaining why you choose to teach information or methods in particular ways.

Many of CIEL’s Classroom Assessment Techniques (or CATs, number 7 on this list of 10 metacognitive teaching strategies) take only a couple minutes, but can build an environment encouraging metacognitive thinking. Just a sample:

• Train or scaffold metacognitive skills throughout semester
• Make reflection more ‘authentic’ or during the process, in the context of what they’re learning
• Model metacognitive thinking
• Try making it more responsive or social
• Make reflection anonymous, removing pressure to impress or meet expectations
• Accept non-writing forms of reflection
• Make time for reflection in the classroom instead of making it another ‘homework’ task that students feel the need to check off their “to do” list

One option is to not assess or grade reflection exercises. There are many classroom techniques (see CATs in the question above about limited class time) that take just a few minutes and could be based on credit/no credit or not recorded at all.

If you do decide to grade a diary, a retrospective reflection at the end of of a larger project or an essay, communicate the metrics ahead of time. For example:

• Will you be marking them credit/no credit for simply having handed something in?
• Will you assess how deeply they reflect?
• Will you assess change over time?

You may also want to provide a simple rubric so students will know how their self-reflection exercises will be assessed. Here’s an example of a very simple rubric for a diary of entries written throughout the semester of a research practicum course, but submitted at the end:

For more ideas about responding to and assessing student metacognitive self-reflections, please see the page “Planning and Assessing Metacognitive Self-reflection in Courses”