Hello! How is the term/semester going? To me, it's hard to believe that we are already in November. I have so much still to do this year! 😅
Talking of which (as I mentioned last time), I'll be giving a talk at researchED Aberdeen in the near future. To find that and other upcoming researchED events internationally (including England, Chile, Canada, Sweden), click here.
I mentioned last time that metacognition can be considered in terms of what learners think about before, during and after a study task, as well as their study skills. I'm going to explain these things one at a time, beginning with this week. Today's focus is on the 'before', including planning.
Planning
By planning, I mean everything that the student does or thinks about as they prepare to undertake a learning task. For example:
Deciding what strategy to use for a math problem,
Planning an essay,
Thinking through their gameplan before a sports match.
Metacognition means thinking about thinking, and therefore everything that they do to mentally prepare or make decisions before engaging in a learning/study task is metacognitive!
Issues
As with so much in this field, there is a broad issue around how accurate and effective learners' metacognition is.
Students may plan, but is their plan any good? They may choose a strategy, but is it the best one? Often, the answers to these questions is 'no'.
One specific example of flawed metacognition is the planning fallacy.
You are probably aware of students leaving homework and assignments to the last minute. It's not just laziness – many genuinely underestimate how long things will take. And then they get stressed!
The planning fallacy describes the tendency to underestimate the time and complexity of a task, even if the necessary information is available. It is very well explained in the following article:
Planning fallacy - The Decision Lab — thedecisionlab.com Planning Fallacy is the tendency to be too optimistic about one's estimates. As a result, the time needed to get something done is underestimated.
As the article says, part of the problem is relying on intuition -Â again, being let down by intuition that is a common problem across study behaviours!
We can warn students directly about the planning fallacy, but this probably won't be enough. We also need to supply factual information, and help them to break their plans down into steps.
To support this, educators can consider setting staged deadlines rather than one big deadline for a longer project. Think of it as a form of scaffolding.
Other strategies to support planning and preparation for a task include:
Allowing more silent planning time. This also provides opportunities for retrieval of prior knowledge.
Helping learners to think about and set goals. Learners often don’t set goals, and when they do, their goals may be flawed.
Guiding students to predict how a task will go. For example, they might look at a text or problem, and discuss it before they begin work.
Structuring/scaffolding more complex tasks, e.g. extended writing. These tasks are very demanding on a student’s working memory.
Using (meta)cognitive language in class. Talk about learning, and use the terminology that teachers and researchers use.
Emphasising the goals of learning, and raising the issue that mastering new knowledge and skills is more important than completing a set of tasks.
That's all for now. Next week, I will focus on the area that is probably what most teachers think about when you say 'metacognition' – the monitoring and control processes that happen while students are busy working on a task.
All the best,
Jonathan
Last week:Â Metacognition Focus
Website:Â www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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