Metacognition Focus
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #19
Hello! I hope you are doing well.
This is a time when a lot of courses are starting to look ahead to exams or assessments. As such, perhaps it's time to move on from my recent updates about teaching and learning strategies and focus more on metacognition. That is, to focus more on our learners' thinking and strategies.
As I said in this blog post, I think it can be helpful to divide metacognition into three main phases:
Before/planning learning.
During/monitoring learning.
After/reflecting on learning.
We could add fourth category relating to students' independent study skills. I intend to cover all four of these things over the next few weeks.
(If you can't wait to get to the bit about study skills, perhaps consider last week's update about making reading and highlighting more effective! You should be able to access all previous updates via the 'Posts' tab).
First, though, I wanted to share and discuss a study that provides a useful link between memory issues – specifically the spacing effect – and learner metacognition.
Recommended study
The study is by Lisa Son, and came out in 2010. It asks the question – do learners make good choices about how to schedule their practice, and if not, would it improve matters if this was forced upon them?
You can find it here: Son (2010).
Son explains how despite the clear benefits, many students tend to avoid spacing because it feels more effortful. However, a complicating factor is that an 'expanding schedule' (intensive study at first and then getting gradually more spaced out over time) can sometimes be as good as or better than spacing.
An interesting aspect is that the researcher used two groups of participants: adults and children.
Here's a brief summary of the method and findings:
Participants were shown synonym pairs. After first viewing it, they could choose to do one of three things with each word pair: repeat immediately, repeat after a delay, or stop.
Participants were also asked to judge their own learning of each item, and then did a final test.
For adults, spaced items were better learned overall, but importantly, this was especially the case if they learners chose to space their practice (rather than having this imposed by the programme that displayed the words). This suggests that adult learners are making reasonably good choices about which items to delay.
For child participants, spacing led to much better performance regardless of whether children chose to space out their practice or not.
Overall, these findings suggest that telling learners to space their study more won’t do any harm, and it can be beneficial. However, it will be more beneficial when learners are not already making good study choices... and this is more likely to be the case with younger learners.
The study also provided some support for the idea of ‘expanding’ schedules, i.e. consolidating material relatively soon when learners still feel uncertain, and then leaving it longer before practising once again. This fits with a rapid consolidation in the classroom e.g. at the end of a task, after which further practice should probably be delayed.
However, it would be good to have more evidence on how these kinds of schedules work across longer timescales, and with a range of types of course material. This study was lab-based and used synonym pairs, so might generalise more to some school situations than to others.
I hope you find that interesting – it's certainly an area that I will return to in future newsletters, and I will share some more recent findings.
Upcoming talk
One other thing before I sign off – I'll be speaking at the researchED event in Aberdeen on Sat 19th November. The title of my talk is "Metacognitive illusions: when learners misunderstand learning." I hope to see some of you there!
And for those of you who live further afield, I'll be sharing dates of some online professional learning sessions soon.
All the best – Happy Hallowe'en! 🎃
Jonathan
Last week: Better studying from notes
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe to Memory & Metacognition Updates below, so that you don't miss anything!