An Important Finding About Metacognition
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #40
Hello! I’ve mentioned before how monitoring is an important aspect of the metacognitive process. It’s also not something that students always do spontaneously. As I explained in this post, they often need a nudge to do so, and even when they do focus on their own learning, they may hold misconceptions about how learning works.
Prompting metacognitive monitoring can really help, therefore, as can gradually building an understanding of learning as a process.
However, there’s more.
Surprisingly, monitoring our own metacognition doesn’t just make us more aware of learning processes. It can also boost remembering.
This is well explained in the following 2020 research paper:
Tekin & Roediger (2020). Reactivity of Judgments of Learning in a Levels-of-Processing Paradigm
It focuses on two concepts in particular that might not be entirely familiar, so let me briefly explain them:
Judgments of learning (JOLs)—when learners are asked to judge how well they have learned something after a practice task. For example, if you teach a topic to a class and then ask them, ‘Do you understand?’, they are making a judgement of learning. In experiments, participants are typically asked to pick a number that indicates how sure they are that they will recognise a fact/correctly respond to a task in future.
Levels of processing—how meaningfully a learner thinks about something. The idea is that the more a learner thinks about the meaning of a word or phrase, the more likely they are to remember it in future. For example, we will remember a single word better when we focus on its meaning compared to focusing on its sound' .
Overall, the paper shows that when learners were prompted to make a JOL about whether they would remember words in future, they were more likely to do so. This was especially the case at shallower levels of processing.
Rather like retrieval practice, the finding suggests that metacognitive monitoring isn’t just a test of what you know. It actually modifies memory.
While this area of evidence is still growing, it certainly indicates that it would be worthwhile for students to focus more on their own learning. When asking themselves questions like, “Will I remember this next time I see it?” or “How can I avoid forgetting this?”, the process of monitoring their progress and their learning could have a direct effect.
Tekin and Roediger (2020)’s paper also suggested that the effect was especially powerful with less meaningful tasks. This is perhaps not surprising; items that are more likely to be forgotten gained more of a boost. We could therefore speculate that monitoring might be especially valuable for classroom tasks where details are easily forgotten.
There have been a couple of other papers that show metacognition directly affecting memory, but it should be noted that it’s still a fairly new area of research. All the same, metacognitive monitoring is an important process in its own right, promoting learners to build their learning strategies. A direct boost to memory just makes it even more of a win-win.
This Saturday (6th May 2023) I’ll be speaking at researchED Haninge. My topic: Tackling Misconceptions About How to Study. I believe that some of the talks will be recorded, and you can also follow their Twitter profile for updates about this event and all the speakers.
Oh, and here’s the link again to our PSHE event on 11th May: Personal, Social and Health Education Network: Working Together to Improve Health & Wellbeing.
Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
Jonathan
Last week: A Deep Dive Into the Spacing Effect
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk