Articulating your ideas in the first column of your Idea Notebook is an important part of keeping an Idea Notebook.  However, your Idea Notebook also emphasizes the thinking embodied in your ideas.   This midterm assessment of your Idea Notebook asks you to turn your attention, therefore, to the Metacognitive entries‹the column two writing‹in your Notebook.

 

TASK I:  Creating a Taxonomy

 

A taxonomy is a ³systematic distinguishing, ordering, and naming of type groups within a subject field.²  In other words, it is categories of like elements within a specific area of study.   For the first part of this assessment, you are to create a taxonomy for the kinds of metacognitive moves you described in the second column of your Idea Notebook.   Read over the second column entries you have written.  Then begin to put these descriptors into groups.  Finally, create a name or heading for each group.  When you have completed this work, present your taxonomy in a chart listing the category headings with the terms or descriptors you used in a column underneath the heading.

 

TASK II:   Analysis

 

Once you have recast your second column entries into your taxonomy, turn from your Idea Notebook and analyze your taxonomy: 

• What kinds of thinking were you doing in the Idea Notebook? 
• What types of thinking did you engage in most frequently?  What types did you do the least?
• What patterns emerge in your thinking habits in your Idea Notebook?
• What kinds of thinking moves seem absent or missing from your Idea Notebook?
• Finally, how did the kind of thinking you engaged in, shape the ideas you presented in your first column entries and how you developed them?

 

TASK III:   Critical Thinking

 

Review the description of critical thinking that I present in the Preface of the LS 1 reader (xii).

• What features of critical thinking appear in your Idea Notebook taxonomy?  Which are absent?
• What is your assessment of the level and character of the critical thinking in your Idea Notebook?
• What conscious changes might you take in your next set of Idea Notebook entries to strengthen the critical thinking in your writings?