Name
Focus on"Metacognitive Awareness" to Foster Self-directed Learning
Date & Time
Monday, June 15, 2020, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
John Pelley Ranna Nash
Description

Self-directed learning became a core concept in the future of medical education with the 2015 revision of the LCME accreditation standards.  The new Standard 6.3 expects schools to provide self-directed learning experiences that help medical students to develop life-long learning skills.  This caught most institutions off-guard because innovations up to that point in time involved active-learning, teacher-directed activities, e.g. Team-Based Learning, audience response systems, etc.  These teaching innovations were feasible due to available technology and did not require additional teachers to implement them.  However, the innovations now called for are less tangible because they shift the attention away from the teacher-directed aspect of the teaching/learning dualism to the student-directed learning aspect.  This is much less familiar to teachers and even to learning specialists because it involves theory that is not currently part of the medical education paradigm.  It is widely believed that"If they got into medical school, they must know how to learn!"  We need to discuss how to introduce a new unifying paradigm that applies concepts in metacognition to create an internal locus of control that will be observed as self-directed learning behavior.  Our future in health sciences education will be more reliable if our students have a metacognitive awareness that guides their behavior in self-directed learning.