Is Metacognition Too Complex for Teachers?
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #109
Hello! Welcome back to these memory and metacognition updates. I took a break over April to allow for some annual leave and some book writing. I hope you got a break at some stage. I’ll now be publishing updates every Monday right up to the early summer.
This week, I want to consider something I heard in a recent discussion with fellow education enthusiasts. It was this: the idea that two areas of cognitive science that teachers really struggle to understand are metacognition and interleaving.
I would agree that interleaving is tricky. If you are still struggling to get your head around it, I tried to clarify and ‘demystify’ it in a previous update:
Interleaving Demystified
Hello! I’ve mentioned interleaving a few times lately, and I thought I was well overdue a deeper discussion of this. After all, it was my PhD topic! It is also:
But is it really the case, I wondered, that metacognition is so hard to understand?
I get that the terminology sounds rather intimidating and technical when people first come across it. But I think that the essence of the idea is both straightforward and pretty easy to start applying.
I am (as you might have guessed) not a fan of the idea that research is too hard for teachers, or that it needs to be dumbed down or oversimplified.
Instead, I’d like to see ideas shared that are accurate and evidence based, but also specific and clear enough that teachers can start using them straight away. That is, pretty much, what I set out to do in these updates (which, by the way, have now been running for three years! 🎂)
Basic concepts
With this idea in mind, here are some of the really basic ideas about metacognition. You could see this as the concept in a nutshell:
Cognition is about how we think and learn. Metacognition involves thinking about cognition. That is, it’s the process of thinking about thinking, learning, or other cognitive processes.
In education specifically, it involves what students know about the procedures and strategies in your subject, and what they know about themselves as learners. This is called metacognitive knowledge (Pintrich, 2002).
Metacognitive knowledge is often flawed; people have a mixture of accurate and inaccurate beliefs about learning and memory, or about themselves as learners.
Learners could think about tasks/problem solving as they happen, keeping an eye on progress and understanding, but because attention is limited, they often don’t. They often fail to reflect afterwards, too. Thinking about progress as you learn is called metacognitive monitoring.
Because memory is counterintuitive, or because they lack knowledge of appropriate strategies, learners often make flawed decisions about how to study. Taking action to support your learning, for example by choosing a particular study strategy or deciding to take a break, is called metacognitive control.
That’s about it!
Of course, each of these things leads to its own questions and to a body of research evidence. Why do people have flawed beliefs about memory, for example? What are the most effective study strategies? How can we prompt learners to monitor their learning more effectively? Still—these questions all fall within the main areas in the bullet points above.
The specifics can certainly get complex when we start to look at issues in realistic contexts, and bring in other issues such as motivation. Broadly, though, metacognition is not a vague or ill-defined idea.
It’s also amenable to intervention; educators can support and improve their students’ metacognitive knowledge, monitoring or control in a range of ways.
Get started
I’ll finish by sharing the following two earlier posts, both of which were very popular. Each one includes some of those strategies that I mentioned. They aim to help support metacognition (this is especially obvious in part 2, below).
I hope you give them a try – and perhaps see that it needn’t be difficult!
So, what do you think – is metacognition too complicated? Is it just made complex by over-explaining? 😅 Or is it the case that the way it is used is sometimes vague, inconsistent, or just unhelpful? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Hope you have a great week,
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.