My second article was published today with Springer Publications in Educational Technology Research and Development's with co-author's Helena Seli and Jane Rosenthal.
This article is based on a quasi-experimental comparative study of
polling systems using multiple measures and multiple groups that I
conducted as a doctoral student with USC Rossier School of Education's.
The study examined how response systems influence metacognition.
Currently I am the principal investigator on a study based on my
dissertation work with co-researchers Jane Rosenthal and Christopher
Forest from the Keck School of Medicine.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
Six Tips for Publishing in Research Journals for the Novice
So You Need to Publish: Six Tips for Publishing in Research Journals
I knew I needed to publish, but I didn’t how to
approach the process. It was up to me to move forward. I had questions. Some questions
emerged as I went through the process of trying to publish. How do you publish
in a research journal? Where do you begin? What should you look for? How do you
do it? How do you figure out if you want your academic reputation connected
with a research journal?
As a newbie to the
academic research front, having completed my doctorate and seeking to publish
in peer review journals, I’ve had some successes and made some mistakes. I
wasn’t sure how to decide which journal to submit my work for publication. At
first I had little advice to go on and I wasn’t sure where to start. Along the
way, in some instances I had little guidance about how to do this, and in other
cases I’ve either successfully sought out advice or a kind-hearted academic
supplied information he or she noticed I was lacking. How I appreciate these
people! This was in addition to much searching on the internet, reading, and
reviewing. Sometime the people you’d expect to prepare and advise you sometimes
are too busy, fall short, think you know, or don’t have the time, or there a
plethora of other reasons. The following are the tips from what I learned and
that I received that helped me.
1) Look
at the journals that you utilized for your literature reviews. Which journals
did authors publish in that you hold in high regard? Do internet searches. Input
key words that reflect your investigations, your dissertation work, or the
paper you’re writing. Use scholarly search engines. Compile a list of these
journals.
2) Look
up the journals and find the criteria for submission. Look for a page that provides
information for Authors, Editors, and Reviewers. Each journal sets forth
criteria for format requirements that can easily be located under author information.
You will find information that about the scope of the journal, and the
publishing process including how to prepare your paper, how to submit your
paper, and checking the status of your submission.
3) You
may want to check on the academic credibility and integrity of the journal. Who
publishes in the journal? What are they publishing? Does the journal republish
articles from their journal or other journals? A quick check on Google or Bing
can provide you with some insight. If there are questionable posts about the
journal, this is an indicator. Some journals solicit, in a predatory fashion,
post-docs or faculty for editorial board positions, which may first seem
enticing, until you do a little checking. *Be aware of predatory (a helpful resource - Retraction Watch).
4) “Try, try, try again.” …and other sayings my
mom repeated to me from her army of unending words such as, “The art of writing
is rewriting.” We may not want to hear advice
along these lines. These are old adages, but some advice is timeless. The
reality - if you want to publish, you may need to try different journals, but
make sure you use a fresh approach with each new paper submission. If you don’t
change it up, you enter the world of questionable ethics in your approach to
research publications, and if you submit the same paper to more than one
journal you risk damaging your academic reputation. Keep your standards high,
both for the journals you choose to publish in and for yourself as a
researcher.
5) A
practical tip: Know your strengths and weaknesses. If you have, dare I say
grammar or language issues, consider a hiring an editor, or adding an amazing
additional author who is artful in word choice and proficient in the language
in which you publish. Furthermore, be encouraged - if you were able to defend
your dissertation, you are able to organize the information to present your
results according to the journal criteria. Search the journal’s website. Read
articles published in the journal and find a couple that you can use as an exemplar. Consider key factors to identify reasons that your article may not be accepted for publication.
6) Let
say you have successfully submitted your first paper, and, oh glory, the first
time, the first journal, and they’ve accepted the paper (with major revisions),
but you’re not phased. You address all the feedback and your paper is
published. Success! Then, feeling more confident, you submit the paper to the
same journal within a years’ time…and you receive the paper back in 2 days, NOT
ACCEPTED. What went wrong? The first was well-received and you know the second
one has more depth; the world needs to know! It doesn’t make sense, or does it?
You may have guessed this happened to me! At a national researcher’s conference
(I had a paper accepted) a session was
provided with journal editors. There were several that didn’t seem to have
anyone to talk to. I felt badly for them, and, more importantly, I wanted to
get some information. It turns out (keep
in mind this is general advice) that editors don’t want to see anything
from you again for a year, and when you do submit something, submit a paper
with fresh, new research and new ideas. Yes, this means that, to borrow from Shari
Lewis Lamb Chop’ famous theme song, “This is the [degree] that doesn’t end/It
goes on and on my friend/Some people started [pursuing] it, not knowing what it
was, and they continue [researching] forever just because….This is the [degree]
that doesn’t end….”
This is not meant to be
a comprehensive list. I am certain that I have yet to experience all the
possible challenges with publishing – I hope I don’t have to! I hope you find
these six tips useful, helpful, and/or affirming. Happy publishing! Let me know
how it goes.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
How did the idea of metacognition come about?
Most simply put, metacognition is one's thought about his or her thoughts (Mayer, 2008).
John Flavell of Stanford University work on metacognition was influenced by Piaget. He writes, "I believe we are "at risk" (almost in the medical sense) for egocentric thinking all of our lives, just as we are for certain logical errors." (Flavell, 1992, p. 108) - (from Flavell's textbook on cognitive development). We can arrive at our own points of view directly, but we arrive at other's points of view indirectly. This means that we must put much effort and understanding in order to arrive at an accurate representation of another's point of view.
Flavell is credited with the founding work that launched metacognition into the educational arena. He identified and described the influence of metacognition in the learning process (Flavell, 1979). Now metacognition is considered a fundamental part of a 21st century education, because students who are more metacognitively aware tend to have higher performance outcomes (Binkley, et al., 2012), and metacognitive strategies can be learned (Flavell, 1979, 1992).
For those interested, more about metacognition....
There is an underlying Piagetian and perspective taking influence in this construct. Metacognition develops with age and can be influenced or taught more or less. According to Flavell, young school age children are unlikely to rehearse names in order to memorize while older children tend to rehearse. Young school age children can be taught to rehearse, and when this strategy was employed, significant changes in ability to recall improved. When given the choice to rehearse or not to, the children who have been taught this skill tend not to choose to use it. These findings are the reason Flavell discontinued an investigation of private speech and embarked on a study of memory strategies which in turn lead to ideas about learning and memory efforts and how learners employ strategies in these endeavors. Metacognition is clearly related to Piaget's work in that the egocentrisim found in young children limits their ability to view their own thought process as an object of thought - still too tied into Self at this stage. Second, formal operational thinking is clearly tied to metacognitive processes, because this thinking involves considering cognitive concepts of proposition, hypotheses, and imagined possibilities.
Flavell defines metacognition" as knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena" (Flavell, 1992, p. 113) and more specifically, "the part of [a learners' ] acquired world knowledge that has to do with cognitive matters...the knowledge and beliefs...accumulated through experience and stored in long-term memory that concern the human mind and its doings. Some of this stored knowledge seems more declarative ("knowing that") than procedural "knowledge how" p.115). According to Flavell there are three sub-areas of metacognitive knowledge - person, tasks, and strategies. The first concerns one's beliefs and knowledge regarding how human beings process information, including universal differences and similarities. Second, task knowledge is about the strategies one chooses to handle a certain task and knowledge about the difficulty or ease of the task. Last, strategy knowledge pertains to one's understanding about which strategies are best suited for a particular task. All in all, metacognitive knowledge is the interaction of two or all three of these categories. Flavell's conceptualization evolved through a sort of path beginning with an examination of private speech, then memory strategies, on to metamemory, and finally to metacognition.
References
Binkley, M., Erstad, O., Herman, J., Raizen, S., Ripley, M., Miller-Ricci, M., & Rumble, M. (2012). Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills. In P. Griffin, B. McFaw & E. Care (Eds.), Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills (pp. 17-66). New York: Springer.
Flavell, J. H. (1992). Perspectives on perspective taking. In H. Beilin and P. B. Pufall (Eds) Piaget's theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 107-139). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
Mayer, R. E. (2008). Learning and Instruction. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
John Flavell of Stanford University work on metacognition was influenced by Piaget. He writes, "I believe we are "at risk" (almost in the medical sense) for egocentric thinking all of our lives, just as we are for certain logical errors." (Flavell, 1992, p. 108) - (from Flavell's textbook on cognitive development). We can arrive at our own points of view directly, but we arrive at other's points of view indirectly. This means that we must put much effort and understanding in order to arrive at an accurate representation of another's point of view.
Flavell is credited with the founding work that launched metacognition into the educational arena. He identified and described the influence of metacognition in the learning process (Flavell, 1979). Now metacognition is considered a fundamental part of a 21st century education, because students who are more metacognitively aware tend to have higher performance outcomes (Binkley, et al., 2012), and metacognitive strategies can be learned (Flavell, 1979, 1992).
For those interested, more about metacognition....
There is an underlying Piagetian and perspective taking influence in this construct. Metacognition develops with age and can be influenced or taught more or less. According to Flavell, young school age children are unlikely to rehearse names in order to memorize while older children tend to rehearse. Young school age children can be taught to rehearse, and when this strategy was employed, significant changes in ability to recall improved. When given the choice to rehearse or not to, the children who have been taught this skill tend not to choose to use it. These findings are the reason Flavell discontinued an investigation of private speech and embarked on a study of memory strategies which in turn lead to ideas about learning and memory efforts and how learners employ strategies in these endeavors. Metacognition is clearly related to Piaget's work in that the egocentrisim found in young children limits their ability to view their own thought process as an object of thought - still too tied into Self at this stage. Second, formal operational thinking is clearly tied to metacognitive processes, because this thinking involves considering cognitive concepts of proposition, hypotheses, and imagined possibilities.
Flavell defines metacognition" as knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena" (Flavell, 1992, p. 113) and more specifically, "the part of [a learners' ] acquired world knowledge that has to do with cognitive matters...the knowledge and beliefs...accumulated through experience and stored in long-term memory that concern the human mind and its doings. Some of this stored knowledge seems more declarative ("knowing that") than procedural "knowledge how" p.115). According to Flavell there are three sub-areas of metacognitive knowledge - person, tasks, and strategies. The first concerns one's beliefs and knowledge regarding how human beings process information, including universal differences and similarities. Second, task knowledge is about the strategies one chooses to handle a certain task and knowledge about the difficulty or ease of the task. Last, strategy knowledge pertains to one's understanding about which strategies are best suited for a particular task. All in all, metacognitive knowledge is the interaction of two or all three of these categories. Flavell's conceptualization evolved through a sort of path beginning with an examination of private speech, then memory strategies, on to metamemory, and finally to metacognition.
References
Binkley, M., Erstad, O., Herman, J., Raizen, S., Ripley, M., Miller-Ricci, M., & Rumble, M. (2012). Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills. In P. Griffin, B. McFaw & E. Care (Eds.), Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills (pp. 17-66). New York: Springer.
Flavell J.
(1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new era of
cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34, 906-911.
Flavell, J. H. (1992). Perspectives on perspective taking. In H. Beilin and P. B. Pufall (Eds) Piaget's theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 107-139). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
Mayer, R. E. (2008). Learning and Instruction. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
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