Perspective Chapter: Developing Academic Writers – Examples of Scaffolding Learning and Metacognitive Teaching Strategies to Foster Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving

1. Introduction

Critical thinking is an important cognitive ability that students are expected to develop during their years of study at a university. Studies into and practices in the sphere of higher education teaching and learning encourage the inclusion of critical thinking development as part of the planning for university courses and student learning support activities. University mission statements in South Africa explicitly articulate that the development of critical thinking is a key objective of university studies and that it forms part of what constitutes student graduateness.

In this paper, this concept of critical thinking will be explored in the context of undergraduate student learning; firstly, in terms of a discussion of how the term ‘critical thinking’ can be understood and, secondly, in relation to how critical thinking can be developed in the teaching and learning process. The paper is interspersed with vignettes, which depict notable challenges with academic writing that students seek support with. All the vignettes are based on actual experiences of writing tutoring that have occurred in academic literacy courses and writing centres, which have been recorded by the author as practice or session notes. Each vignette is followed by an analysis of a specific writing challenge and how the tutor or consultant set out to support the student’s critical thinking through the use of thinking or writing strategies that can assist a student with decision-making and problem-solving in ways that can develop his/her academic writing proficiency over time. The process of following this manner of engaging with the development of critical thinking in education practice situations is considered to encourage the development of students’ self-efficacy and autonomous learning capabilities and, gradually, to help shape their identities as university scholars.

2. Conceptions of ‘critical thinking’ and its development in the teaching and learning process

Critical thinking as a skill or competence is not an end in itself but serves a higher purpose in the life of a university student. It is an ability that higher education institutions value as an indication of students’ graduateness, readiness, and capability to conduct themselves as critical citizens who are able to contribute to the intellectual projects necessary to solve the real-world problems that can develop nations. Critical thinking proficiency contributes to students’ developing identities as academic scholars and professionals. It plays a role in developing their abilities to become autonomous, self-directed learners, and it can encourage their development of self-efficacy.

It cannot be assumed, however, that students can attain the goals of autonomy and scholarly identity without purposeful guidance through their teaching and learning journeys at university. Hence, what is meant by critical thinking and how it can be developed are important considerations in planned approaches to developing students’ critical thinking abilities. “The new skills focus for university teaching grants a central role to critical thinking in new study plans; however, using these skills well requires a certain degree of conscientiousness and its regulation” [1].

According to Rivas et al. [1], there is no firm consensus of the meaning of the concept ‘critical thinking’ due to the complex nature of how critical thinking can be demonstrated and characterised. There is, however, a possibility for a working definition of the concept based on what authors wish to emphasise in their deliberations about this concept, and Saiz and Rivas [2] define critical thinking as “a knowledge-seeking process via reasoning skills to solve problems and make decisions which allows us to more effectively achieve our desired results.” They also make the point that, currently, the basis for the present field of critical thinking is in argumentation, although critical thinking includes not only reasoning skills but also the ability to make inferences and judgements. Critical thinking also enables decision-making and the ability to solve problems.

Another meaning of the concept is that it is integrally part of a worldview, which Jason describes as tools for surviving and living well. His broad definition of critical thinking encapsulates the following:

Seel [4], however, offers one of the most succinct definitions of the concept by identifying that the “cognitive skills of analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation, evaluation, and of monitoring and correcting one’s own reasoning are at the heart of critical thinking.”

Another useful and elaborated definition is offered by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education, in its Glossary of Curriculum Terminology, in which it is stated that critical thinking is:

It is evident from the above definitions that there is considerable overlap in describing what constitutes critical thinking and what the process of developing critical thinking can include. Newman et al. [6] framed critical thinking as a process with the following five stages:

1. problem identification (skill: elementary clarification);

2. problem definition (skill: in-depth clarification);

3. problem exploration (skill: inference);

4. problem evaluation/applicability (skill: judgement); and

5. problem integration (skill: strategy formation).

Based on these stages, according to Teng and Yue [7], critical thinking skills encompass the following five factors: making correct inferences, recognising assumptions, deducing information, drawing conclusions, and interpreting and evaluating arguments.

However, to what end is critical thinking important as a key competence or critical skill in the life of a university student? To answer this question, it becomes necessary to connect the development of this critical skill by means of the teaching and learning process and how the application of critical thinking could be carried out in a conscientious manner.

3. The importance of critical thinking development according to South African universities

Critical thinking as an essential skill to be developed during university studies is emphasised by a number of higher education institutions in South Africa. Their views find expression in the mission and value statements these institutions make known to the public. As an example, Table 1 below contains articulations, by a few higher education institutions in South Africa, of the important role of critical thinking development in the education of university students in preparing them to become critical scholars and citizens in society. Similar expressions by other higher education institutions of the necessity to develop students as critical thinkers and citizens through their learning programmes and their co- and extra-curricular programmes can be found in their mission and value statements, teaching and learning strategic plans, and similar official and vision-linked documents that are periodically prepared by higher education institutions for systemic and institutional planning and reporting purposes. University departments, by inference, carry the collective responsibility that this critical skill receives attention in the planning and execution of learning programmes and student support initiatives.

4. Student academic support, scaffolding learning and teaching towards metacognition

It is widely accepted among educational developers in the field of higher education teaching and learning (such as writing centre consultants, faculty academic advisors, and academic literacies lecturers and tutors) that students are not embodied in a decontextualised teaching and learning environment. Instead, students enter the university environment with their own sets of unique experiences and skills. These skills and experiences have been shaped by their social and educational histories and the daily realities that they have to negotiate, while university students may or may not be closely connected to what they have to do to succeed at their studies in university. Many students in South Africa hail from less than favourable home learning environments, where overcrowded living conditions, a lack of constructive social relations, and the dismissal of a culture of reading and learning are the norms of home life. Students’ struggles to navigate the home milieu while living their lives as university students often lead to students becoming academically ‘at risk’ of failing their study programmes.

To ensure that students have access to student support services that can help them to adapt to the rigours of university life, universities have student support programmes in place where students can seek support with various aspects of student life that they find challenging to manage on their own. Student support services cover student support with financial, psycho-social, and academic difficulties. In formal university courses, student academic support occurs in the form of academic tutoring that is scheduled as additional classes tied to a particular learning module or subject taken in a course. In undergraduate degree programmes, students have to complete academic literacy learning modules in their first year of a three-year degree programme or a more intensive suite of academic literacy modules in the first year of a four-year, extended studies degree programme. All universities in South Africa also have, at least, one multi-disciplinary writing centre that offers student academic support in any area that can help them to develop their academic literacies in any of the communicative competencies, namely, (1) academic reading; (2) academic writing; (3) oral presentations; (4) digital literacy; and (5) information literacy. Academic support programmes take the view that academic literacies are developed over time as part of a learning process that unfolds parallel to completing tasks tied to the disciplinary subject content students are exposed to in their respective courses in a three- or four-year undergraduate degree programme.

Both in the context of academic literacy courses and writing centres, the process of developing critical thinking is considered of greater importance than merely knowing what critical thinking is and how to identify students’ critical thinking abilities. Moreover, the importance of initiating the developmental learning process for students based on what they present as their present skill level is a norm in practice. Offering guidance to students on the basis of what they reveal about their current knowledge and then systematically scaffolding their learning about critical thinking by using a metacognitive approach to learning is the method underpinning many of these interactions taking place in individualised instruction sessions and small group consultations typical of writing centre and academic literacy course teaching.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to specify how one teaches metacognition, but there is evidence that it is possible to teach towards metacognition and that such an approach to teaching is beneficial for students. Rivas et al. [11] are of the opinion that metacognition “plays a crucial role in developing critical thinking and consists of a person being aware of their own thinking processes in order to improve them for better knowledge acquisition.” As a research area, metacognition has contributed generously to new conceptions of teaching and learning in the way it draws attention to student awareness or consciousness and the regulation which they exercise over their own learning [12].

5. Theory of metacognition as a teaching and learning approach

Initially developed by John Flavell in the 1970s, Metacognition is concerned with knowledge about knowledge itself, or, even more accurately, in relation to the formation of the word, thinking about thinking. It presupposes that a higher or more complex layer of thinking is needed to interrogate and make sense of thinking patterns and can be described as the cultivation of a method of thinking that can enable an individual to more skilfully direct, monitor, regulate, organise, and plan task activities in a helpful way. Metacognition helps form autonomous students, increasing consciousness about their own cognitive processes and their self-regulation so that they can regulate their own learning and transfer it to any area of their lives. In other words, it refers to a conscious process involving high-level thinking that allows us to look into and reflect upon how we learn and to control our own strategies and learning processes [13, 14].

On the one hand, thus, metacognition clarifies “the knowledge which one has about his own cognitive processes, products and any other matter related with them” [15]. On the other hand, it also refers “to the active supervision and consequent regulation and organisation of these processes in relation with the objects or the cognitive data upon which they act” [16]. By focusing on helping students ‘learn how to learn’ and think about how they think, we must use adequate cognitive learning strategies that are orientated towards self-learning, developing metacognitive strategies, and critical thinking. The theory makes provision for a knowledge, skills, and experiences dimension that can be of a declarative, procedural, or conditional nature, as well as an executive regulation component that includes monitoring and control strategies (for example, see Ref. [17]).

Brief descriptions of the components that can be individually activated in developing students’ critical thinking development, using metacognition as a theoretical construct, follow below (for more in-depth discussion, see Ref. [18]):

• Declarative knowledge includes information about prior learning experiences and the current knowledge and skills students think they have.

• Procedural knowledge is concerned with eliciting information about how students approach a task and whether their knowledge of the procedure is adequate for the task at hand.

• Conditional (or strategic) knowledge is focused on what a student needs to learn about or information that needs to be searched for and acquired in order to satisfy the requirements of the task and that can enable a student to have sufficient information or data to make sense of in response to an assigned task. A student is required to be able to determine when, where, and why certain strategies are selected and resources employed to execute a task.

• Metacognitive strategies can be deliberately used by students to control cognition and process activities. These strategies include ways of becoming orientated to a task; planning the execution of a task; cognitive processing of task-related content; monitoring attainment of knowledge, process, and progress related to a task; and evaluation of progress and quality that are, more often than not, initially only task-related. They enable students to monitor time and effort on task on an ongoing basis and to evaluate progress until a task has been completed.

• Such strategies also require that students develop metacognitive awareness of how to work within set timeframes, locate and analyse data, and increasingly exert control over their own learning and progress. Over time, the ability to exercise control on a task-by-task basis can start to represent a ‘way of doing’ that can become scholarly practice for students that is goal-directed, purposeful and applicable to all tasks and not only the immediate task at hand.

6. Methodological considerations

Careful observations of student behaviour in a place of pedagogical practice where students seek academic advice about writing challenges commonly experienced by student writers enabled the educational developer cum researcher to identify trends and patterns as they emerge in practice through recurring experiences of tutoring writing around a repetitive theme or writing challenge experienced by student writers. For this reason, the ethnographic style of research that involves observing research participants in a naturalised setting and includes participant-observer behaviours, carefully recorded field or practice notes and associated fieldwork documentation, and/or research interview data were used to provide the methodological focus for the collection, selection, and analysis of data for this study [19, 20].

The data used to inform the insights obtained in this chapter were collected over a period of more than ten years, based on reports about writing tutoring sessions and session-specific field notes recorded on an ongoing basis as part of session reflections. Student names used to refer to research participants are pseudonyms, and, as has been mentioned earlier, the student writers mentioned by name in this paper are representational of a type of student and student writing problem that has been composited from the ethnographic research data. No human participants were thus harmed or identified by name during the course of conducting the research. Participants’ rights to confidentiality were respected in the treatment of the data, as only trends in student academic writing challenges are reported on in the paper [21, 22].

7. Teaching towards metacognition through scaffolding learning in consultation with student writers

This section of the paper sets out to describe, analyse, and provide insight into how teaching and learning support for different types of academic writing challenges experienced by students can be provided by writing developers. The writing challenges identified and described are based on commonly occurring reasons for students seeking tutoring that can help them deal with their academic writing tasks and specific tasks for which groups of students were either a group of students in an Academic Literacies course or were referred to a writing centre for writing tutoring. Examples based on pervasive writing difficulties encountered by undergraduate students are presented in the form of vignettes or mini-narratives. Each example highlights a specific writing challenge for which a student has sought tutoring assistance.

Each example discussed below highlights a type of writing challenge many undergraduate students have to overcome. Details for each vignette are drawn from the author’s practice notes of working in writing centres and academic literacy courses in South African higher education institutions. However, in each example or vignette, the story that is related is narrowed down to the experience of an individual student or student group, for the purpose of analysis and commentary about scaffolding learning and applying a metacognitive approach to teaching and learning when assisting a student writer in practice.

There is a tendency in higher education teaching and learning practice for lecturers to impart an oversimplified understanding of what type of support or tutoring assistance students should request in order to successfully learn and improve their academic writing proficiency. Students are often referred to writing centres with the simple instruction from the referring lecturer that the student should get his/her language use and grammar checked in order for an essay or report that they are writing to make sense and be ‘more academic.’ Similarly, it has not been uncommon to encounter students with the unrealistic expectation that one visit to a writing centre will help them be better writers able to produce the much-needed improved draft of writing that will be rewarded with an excellent grade.

One of the most important roles of a writing consultant or educational developer, thus, is to support the development of the student’s cognitive framework, emotional rationality, metalanguage, and metacognitive abilities. The support provided by these professionals aims to help students learn how they may become more adept at academic writing. By imparting knowledge about academic writing genres, as well as writing and rhetorical strategies, writing consultants endeavour to help students develop scholarly writing knowledge and habits that can instil the necessary motivation, self-efficacy, and confidence to become self-directed learners with the desired scholarly attributes to verbalise what they find challenging. Over time, and with the training to realise that better writers and better writing result from practice, genre awareness, and better writing habits, students are led to exhibit behaviours that signal they have a clearer understanding of what is needed to improve their academic communication skills and, by extension, to succeed in their studies at university in the long term.

As explained by Harris et al. [23], metacognition is the most influential theoretical framework because it emphasises the idea that “writing is a recursive, strategic, and multidimensional process central to (1) planning what to say and how to say it, (2) translating ideas into written text, and (3) revising what has been written.” For example, by means of eliciting declarative knowledge from students, a writing consultant can ascertain whether students are aware of their strengths and weaknesses with regard to a task, as well as other affective dimensions such as self-efficacy and motivation to undertake higher-order thinking on a task. Thus, it is important for writing consultants to consider whether students understand their levels of proficiency with respect to various forms of writing as well as various compositional processes (such as planning or revising their writing), their attitudes towards writing, as well as their self-efficacy beliefs and motivation with regard to academic writing.

Another useful aspect of metacognition is to work with students’ procedural knowledge, which, according to Raphael [24], “includes information about how to successfully apply the various actions or strategies comprising declarative knowledge, that is, the repertoire of behaviour available from which the learner selects the ones best able to help reach a particular goal.” Examples of procedural knowledge within the context of writing include an understanding of general strategies for planning, text production, and revision. This could include advanced planning activities such as creating an outline of a report or essay or using specific strategies to build authorial knowledge of particular writing genres, such as gathering information about ‘argumentative essay writing’, in order to learn how to develop an argument in academic essay writing. It could also include learning that lower-order writing skills such as spelling, grammatically correct language use, sentence construction, and correct punctuation play an important role in writing development and performance, but that these aspects are better attended to as part of a later stage of writing, where revision and proofreading of a completed draft paper containing the student writer’s fully developed ideas on a topic is possible.

The vignettes that follow set out to expound on how teaching towards metacognition in the context of academic writing development can be used as a teaching and learning approach when working with student writers. Each student’s ‘writing problem’ is analysed in relation to a writing task, as well as the tutoring approach used to scaffold the student writer’s learning and to teach towards metacognition. The support provided by the writing consultant is considered to offer the student the ability to gradually develop transferable composition skills that can lead a student to become a better writer cognisant of the demands of different academic writing genres and tasks.

8. Conclusion

In summary, theoretical and empirical research conducted during the past three decades has provided many important insights regarding the metacognitive aspects of writing, as well as the metacognitive differences between more and less skilled writers. As a writing consultant and academic literacy practitioner, this author has observed that skilled writers understand and are familiar with diverse genre conventions. They are also able to draw upon a wide range of topical knowledge gained either through experience or research. Throughout the writing process, skilled writers are more inclined to begin with a plan of what they want to write about and are able to be reflective in their writing on any topic. They also tend to demonstrate a sensitivity to the needs and perspectives of their audience, the overarching goals and purposes of their writing, and the thematic cohesion and organisation of their ideas that they need to create in their writing. When student writers find it difficult to display what skilled writers are able to demonstrate through their writing, writing consultants can use those as cues for scaffolding student writers’ developing knowledge about academic writing by using a metacognitive approach to teaching writing.

Scaffolding students’ learning and student writers’ burgeoning skills in academic writing by applying a metacognitive approach to support students’ developing student identities and cognitive framing for conducting scholarly activities is an effective means whereby student writers can be taught to think about how they think of and for academic communication purposes. Critical thinking is regarded as a key skill university graduates should be able to demonstrate in public and professional discourse, as discussed in an earlier section of this paper. Insights into how students’ academic writing and general learning difficulties can be overcome through guided learning methods that prize scaffolded learning and teaching towards metacognition are necessary. They can enable a process of envisioning how a metacognitive approach to supporting university student writers to develop their communicative competence can be used as a suitable theoretical perspective to provide a logical structure for tutor-student talk in writing consultations and academic writing tutoring sessions. Using scaffolding learning of academic writing and a metacognitive approach for developing student writing abilities in a supportive process of planned writing consultation sessions is an effective method for helping students develop their critical thinking skills. It is also beneficial for developing their self-confidence and self-efficacy with regard to academic writing, making it possible, over time, for students to practice the knowledge dimensions and control strategies of metacognition to develop the metacognitive awareness necessary for high-level thinking and problem-solving expected from university graduates.

Acknowledgments

The author appreciates the contributions by student writers of the University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Rhodes University in South Africa for sharing their difficulties with academic writing in the interest of academic support and research.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.