How disciplinary detail obscures the metacognitive potential of curriculums

Abstract

This paper analyses five junior secondary curriculums for their emphases on metacognition. Metacognition is an emergent skill that prepares students for their inscrutable futures, where they will need to apply their knowledge strategically to complex contexts, guided by self-knowledge. Its development requires experiential pedagogies that introduce problematic knowledge, and it is difficult to measure. English, humanities, mathematics and science curriculums for students aged between 11–16 years were coded using a qualitative, deductive approach. Semantic information was ascribed to three epistemic and seven cognitive or metacognitive themes, and code totals compared for their relative emphases. All five curriculums provided pathways that could support metacognitive development, but only two, the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC), explicitly recommended strategies likely to provoke the dispositions of teachers towards engaging students in complex, problematic tasks. Code totals revealed curriculum tightness. Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) courses provided the greatest number of codes, but the Common Core State Standards (CC) and the Australian Curriculum (version 9) (ACv9), were similarly detailed, with up to three times as many cognitive and metacognitive references as the NZC and MYP. Although all the curriculums claimed to develop thinking skills, the three that used mandatory external assessment or benchmarking tests (CAIE, ACv9 and CC) did not offer mechanisms likely to build teacher capacity to engage their students in tasks that had intrinsic educational benefit.