In the academic support field, we experience pushback. Sometimes underperforming students push back on the idea that they would benefit from academic support. Sometimes administrators push back on expenditures for much-needed hiring. And sometimes faculty push back on methods with which they are unfamiliar.
On this last point, in talking with ASP colleagues nationally, I have noticed a phenomenon that I call the “Metacognition Misperception Effect.” This can roll out one of two ways.
I experienced the first way not too long ago. A very ASP-supportive colleague walked into my office and indicated that he had experienced a higher than usual number of students attending office hours. Of these, he noted that more students than usual were confused about doctrine that they just learned in class. My colleague, being a conscientious educator, was concerned: Did he miss something in class? Is the whole class confused on this? Is this class particularly weak? The point is, he viewed this situation as a problem.
The second way this phenomenon rolls out is the true pushback model and occurs with faculty who do not support ASP. Here, the doctrinal professor experiences the same office hours quandary as noted above but then confronts the dean with “Why is academic support confusing my students?” This actor claims that each student in the room left with a crystal-clear understanding of the doctrine, but the academic support faculty confused them. Every last one of them.
How do we deal with this?
As a preliminary matter, as ASP faculty, we must make sure that we in fact are not the source of confusion. Collaborating with faculty on practice essays and other active learning methods used in the ASP classroom is crucial to ensure proper coverage and doctrinal accuracy.
But that is not the phenomenon I am describing. With the Metacognition Misperception Effect, the doctrinal professor interprets an uptick in questions as a problem. The students should have left class with a full understanding and yet here they are, confused.
What must be understood is that that confusion, or at least recognizing and dealing with it, is a good thing. In the traditional law school environment, students walk out of class assuming they know the doctrine perfectly well, never interrogate that assumption, and realize only when grades arrive that their understanding was flawed. This is why hard-working students appear in our office early next semester saying “Professor, I knew your class backward and forwards. This grade must be wrong.”
The problem is that the student only knew 75% of the course backward and forwards and was blissfully unaware of the other 25%. The reason why they were unaware of these “unknown unknowns,” as I call them, is because they did not skeptically scrutinize their knowledge and objectively press themselves on whether they really did know the material.
That kind of scrutinization is the concept of metacognition which, particularly when tied to self-regulated learning, improves academic performance. When effective learners discover their misunderstanding through metacognition, they remedy that misunderstanding with the positive self-regulated learning step of help-seeking. Thus, some of the uptick in office visitors expressing misunderstanding is the product of metacognition/ self-regulated learning instruction and not mass confusion. Far from being a harbinger of bad things to come, it is an academic behavior that prevents suboptimal performance.
There is nothing anyone can do about the bad actor who blames student misunderstanding on academic support.1 The belief that all students leave the classroom with Kagan-esque understanding of doctrine demonstrates the actor’s ill motives. However, a dean genuinely interested in fostering academic support will appreciate that the office visits demonstrate metacognition and self-regulated learning and will react accordingly.
But it is important that we assist our ASP-supportive faculty colleagues in appreciating the Metacognition Misperception Effect. While upticks in office visits and widespread misunderstanding could possibly signal the existence of a problem, it could also be that students are acting on recently-learned skills of metacognition and self-regulated learning.
In other words, the academic support is working.
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1. My strong sense is that this attitude towards ASP is waning. As more pedagogically progressive scholars join the academy, and perhaps also due to the Carnegie report and academic support successes, legal education seems more open-minded to methods that would have received more pushback in the past.
(Louis Schulze, FIU Law)
