A Study On The Cultivation Strategy Of Students' Metacognitive Ability In Geography Practice

With the development of society and educational reform, people have more desire for knowledge. Therefore, it is urgent and important to teach students how to study. In order to be able to study, students need to be trained and cultivated systematically and in an all-round way. Metacognition was firstly put forward by American psychologist J. H. Flavell. But researches on metacognition started late in China, let alone the relevant research in geographical teaching, which has only been carried out in recent years.Metacognition training sets a high standard for students’initiative. And it is a research of strategy based on students’initiative by combining with the features of practical activities in geography, aiming at cultivating the ability of metacognition among students in these activities. That is actually what the teaching of geography should be. Curriculum Standard of Teaching of Geography puts forward the basic concept that teaching of geography should pay much attention to probing into geographical problems by advocating students to learn automatically, cooperatively and explosively in a series of practical activities. What is also stressed in the Curriculum Standard is that students should be encouraged to find out geographical problems both in learning and life, put forward possible plans to probe into such problems, cooperated with others, carry out investigations or research and bring out solutions to these problems. At the same time, proper approaches should be used. Though cultivating the metacognition ability is not specifically stated in the Standard, the basic concept of this theory can be found in all requirements listed in the book.This article, based on the Curriculum Standard is a project on cultivating metacognition ability among students in geographical activities on the basis of pedagogy and psychology. That metacognition strategies are made use of is reflected both in the features and process of geographical practice. As a result, this article attempts to compare features of geographical practice with those of metacognition to find the common things and put forward four principles and eight ways of cultivating the metacognition ability. These seven ways are clearly illustrated and demonstrated in three cases of geographical practice. At the end of this article, the author reflects on the result of this research and promotes it. It is sincerely hoped that this research is helpful to further relevant research.